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Fear of overbooking during job interview season. How is cancelling an interview to take another interview viewed?
I know someone who is finishing a postdoc in mathematics and is in the thick of the tenure-track job search.  He had something like 15 interviews at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) last week.  At the moment he has four invitations for on-campus interviews.  Of these, exactly one is one of his very top choices.  He sent me a list of seven institutions at which he had JMM interviews, has not yet received campus interviews, but would prefer them to some of the places for which he has received but not yet accepted interviews.  He is getting worried that he could book too many interviews at these less desirable places and then be boxed out of later interviews to come.  By the way, I think he is excellent and unusually broadly appealing, and I absolutely expect him to get more on-campus interviews than he now has.  I don't think I have heard of people who have actually booked so many interviews that they have no slots left, and I am tempted to tell him not to worry so much about that -- the calendar is full of days -- but I suppose it could happen in his case.  What do you think he should do, e.g. how should he respond to two on-campus invitations that are less desirable than many of the JMMs he's waiting on?
Here is what I said so far:
1) Contact all seven desirable places, let them know the situation, and see if he can shake loose interviews from them or at least information about timing of the interviews.
2) Countenance the possibility of cancelling a job interview if he really does get booked solid.
I am not really sure about 2).  Clearly you should cancel all interviews once you've accepted a job, and cancelling interviews when you already have an offer in hand makes just as much sense.  I'm not sure about the ethics of cancelling an interview to take another interview instead.  Is this commonly done?  Would it annoy people or look shady to some?  If this is going to be viewed as dishonorable behavior even by some, I think he would really like to know that: he is as "fully honorable" as anyone I've known.

"Would it annoy people or look shady to some?"  No.  He should not ask for expenses to be reimbursed if he does this, though.

This reminds me of the modern thing I've seen, of high school seniors going nuts, applying to a dozen different colleges.  I was taught to apply to one stretch school, one safety school, and one solid choice. // What do you think is driving this carpet-interviewing?  Is there some anxiety behind it, perhaps?  Would some reassurance from you help with that?

Option (2) does not look shady at all to me. It's not like agreeing to come to an on-campus interview is any sort of commitment from either side yet.

@aparente: "What do you think is driving this carpet-interviewing?" I think it is being driven by the exigencies of the academic job market, and the postdoc is not acting any differently than anyone else.  I find the analogy to college application pretty curious, and I'm not sure what you mean by "carpet-interviewing".  May I ask if you know the typical approximate number of academic jobs a math postdoc applies for?

Most math post-doc I know would apply for all available position that fits their field and curriculum... The job market is so tight you do not have the luxury to be selective before applying...

@BlaisB: Yes, that's what I was getting at.  So the answer to my question is "On the order of one hundred jobs."  That's how many I applied to 11 years ago to get five on-campus interviews, of which I took three (I had a job in hand...).

@Pete I was just corroborating your statement with which I was in full agreement.

So your question is how to do the juggling gracefully? // But I wonder if there is any way to do a little pruning.

I would just advise that given an opportunity to interview, your friend/colleague/whatever try to choose the earliest possible date. Then as interviews cascade there is less of a chance of running into conflict. 2) I recently complained about having to interview and travel a lot etc. to a senior colleague of mine, who chuckled and said "Yeah...that's what you get for trying to get a job...". There are worse problems to have. 3) I have heard of a math postdoc going on 8+ interviews and getting no job. No reason to cancel things without a job in the pocket.

@MorganRodgers - Sorry, that wasn't about job applications, that was about applying to college as a high school senior.  I was drawing an analogy. // I like your rule.  That sounds like a sensible approach.

I know the hiring process in Math is a little unique. My answer is based on the assumption that an "interview" means a 1.5-2 day campus visit and that interview season is 10 weeks. Further, I assume that when contacted about interviews a candidate is typically given 3 choices of dates and that departments are interviewing about 5 candidates.
As long as you avoid campus visits on Wednesdays, you can fit two visits in a week. This means there are about 20 interview slots in a season. As the number of interviews approaches 10, the likelihood that the 3 options offered for one of these interviews will clash with previously accepted interviews. To calculate an exact probability you need to know the rate of Wednesday campus visits. At 15 it is very likely for a clash and at 20 you would have to get very lucky.
I think in this particular case the post doc is looking at 11 interviews at most and has already gotten a few rejections so likely fewer. This means that the post doc might need to tell a school that none of the dates work, but would still be able to offer 10 alternatives dates within the prime season as well as early and late visits. On the hiring committees I am familiar with providing a wide range of alternatives would not indicate disinterest. The likelihood of the availability of one of these dates depends on how busy the department is, but I would be surprised if none of them worked. If in fact there is a clash, and the school is highly desirable, then the post doc would need to cancel (or reschedule) a previously scheduled interview. Again, contacting a school to reschedule an interview is not a sign of disinterest, but rather a reality of job searches.
The real problem is not scheduling, but the ability to do a large number of interviews. The number of "slots" can be drastically reduced if the post doc has teaching requirements. Similarly, having a campus visit on Monday and Tuesday, traveling to a new city on Wednesday, and having another campus visit on Thursday and Friday is tiring. Doing that for weeks on end is the craziness of the job search. I know lots of people who have managed 10 interviews in a season with a 1 class teaching load. I don't recall anyone getting to 15.

I'm not sure about the ethics of cancelling an interview to take another interview instead.

As I said above, I would suggest rescheduling prior to cancelling. If there really is a clash, cancelling is the only thing you can do. Cancelling the less desirable interview (after factoring in likelihood of getting a job), is the only sane thing to do. Some search committee members will complain, but no one will hold it against the post doc for long.

The overall interview season might be 10 weeks, but no single school's is, in my experience.  Once a school has determined their finalists, they will want to interview them all in the shortest possible length of time, so that they can get an offer to the top candidate as quickly as possible.  10 weeks is much too long for that.  In many cases 3 weeks is too long.  So if you aren't available during a particular school's 2-3 week window, you may not be able to interview at all.

I agree with @NateEldredge: for a lot of the schools in question, the interview season is contained in January 1 through February 15, and there is concentration towards the middle of this time interval.

He is getting worried that he could book too many interviews at these less desirable places and then be boxed out of later interviews to come.

My doctor's office reserves some slots for "same day appointments."  Perhaps your friend could leave two slots unbooked, so as to have a place to absorb a late-arriving invitation.
How about scheduling at least half of the less desirable visits towards the tail end of the season?
If a conflict arises between an already committed trip to a "less desirable" place and one to a plum institution, then I would suggest letting the less desirable place know that a conflict has arisen and asking if it would be possible to reschedule to a later date.  It that less desirable place has not found the right candidate yet, it will be glad to have your friend visit after the big wave is over.
Perhaps the bulk of the less desirable interviews could be set up for a Skype interview -- at least at the preliminary level.  Your friend could say he is trying to keep down his carbon footprint.


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How should an educational institute woo good faculty?
What steps must an educational institution wanting to recruit good faculty take? There is a cycle in the academia:

Good doctorates from top universities invariably join other top universities as faculty members.
Good students aspire to study in top universities under excellent faculty members.

Suppose a new educational institution or department springs up and desires to set up a top-quality group, how does it break into this cycle? I suppose this could take some years, but is money-power the only thing that could be wielded by the institute to achieve its end?

Money
First, there's very little way - I think - for a university to improve its standing across the board. Institutional reputation on the level of say, an Ivy League school, where everyone assumes each department must be excellent because they're at Ivy is a tall order, and one that I suspect is impossible.
But in a particular field (or a particular School)? Money. And the willingness to take risks. A few ways to help:

Find a few key faculty members. Established researchers with very solid reputations, and see if you can poach them. This might not just be a question of "how big of a check do we need to write"? There are other factors. A considerable bump in prestige. Quality of living perks. The chance to shape a promising new department in ways that you rarely get in established departments - a chance to be the formative voice in something.
Be looking for promising potential new hires. Maybe they're coming out of the universities you hired these key faculty members from. Maybe they're coming from top schools generally. A generous start-up package, extra lab space and internal funding, a generous tenure process - these are things that might lure top candidates away from a harder path at a more prestigious institution. It represents a risk for both parties - you might get a dud researcher with a good degree, and they might get a department languishing in obscurity. But if it works, it works very well for both.
Buy something big. Are there no Expensive Piece of Equipment equipped centers in the region? Become the people who have one.

In some countries, faculty members are public servants, since the state cannot give them more money, others ways have to be found to make positions attractive!

Extra funding for PhD students and postdocs. The state gives "free" funding to universities (=outside grants), it is conceivable that, to be attractive, a university decides to give this funding to a freshly arrived faculty member.
Less lectures/responsibilities. This is more touchy, but again, we can imagine that a new faculty member will have less lecture hours for a few years.
Hiring in the same field. When you arrive in a lab where your field is not represented, it can be depressing. If your field become a priority, then the position become attractive (better to be with "friends" in a challenger university than alone in a top one).
Preservation from bureaucracy. In some countries (France for instance), the administrative burden is heavy and a lot of faculty members are ready to sign up in any place that guarantees "zero" administrative tasks.

The most effective way to shoot up the rankings is to focus on a few areas, make a number of high-profile hires in those areas, and aggressively publicize the institute and recruit students. This is exactly what places like IST Vienna and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are trying to do, and is also what various departments have done in the past to boost their profile.
And yes, this takes a lot of money power.

@Sylvian raised many good intangible benefits, and I just wanted to add another one: Lab relocation. Labs take a while to set up, and training new techs takes a lot of time and effort, which translates into lost productivity. Offer to sponsor bringing over everyone from the old lab, including techs and large equipment, to speed up time to productivity.

Good point. This happened once to my friend who moved from one US university to UT Austin.

Oftentimes PhD graduates from top schools join very low-ranked schools because their spouse or partner have tenure there or work in that region. Find a way to accommodate both of them and you have a winner.

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Mentor added his name and alphabetized the author list, putting me last
I was recruited by a university to work on a research project as a research fellow and have dedicated over 8 months to it. I have maintained a schedule of fortnightly presentations with another senior research fellow and professor to update them with the progress of the research. After I shared the first draft of the paper with them, the senior fellow rewrote the introduction and added his and professor's name to the author list. He alphabetized the list by our last names, stating that's the convention they are beginning to follow, which effectively puts my name as the very last. I have done all the research and I feel shortchanged. I did not like the fact that this was not even discussed with me before changing and the senior fellow will be presenting my paper, I was informed. Again, I am upset about this.
Yet, I have been in the system for 8 months, 4 more months to go before my contract is over with the institute. It matters a lot to me that my name appear first in the list of authors as I am planning to do my PhD soon and having a list of publications with my lead authorship will help me get work with the university of my choice.
What should I do? Should I let this go and not be bothered or should I discuss my concerns with the professor? The senior fellow and professor are very good friends and have been working together for over 6 years and I do not want them to gang up against me as I am new to the field.

What discipline?

I know of an IEEE Fellow who does exactly what you said.  His surname starts with B.  So he has many 'first' authored papers.

I think the key question is whether alphabetic author ordering is the standard convention in your field (in which case the seniors helped you learn the rules and conventions) or whether it is just something they like to do for their papers (which makes this a lot more tricky for you).

Immediately change your name from Allison Zymurgy to Allison Aardvark.

In fields that do not use the alphabetic order - such as biomedical sciences - the last position often indicates the most senior PI. So either your employers / applications committee will understand that the order is alphabetical, or assume that you were the PI, which is fine as well :)

In some countries it is the standard way. By the way, the last authors one is always spotted. Taking into account that the last one is usually the head of the lab, I guess the situation is easily recognised by colleagues and peers. If I would presented a paper like your, and being familiar to the field, I would conclude, with some guessing, that you were the main contributor. CV details will help further clarify that, as commented above.

@Alchimista Unless OP is already well-known in the field, how are readers supposed to assign any meaning to the alphabetical order? While the unknown other person doing most of the work (when the only other people are known to add themselves to every paper) is one option, another could be that the unknown person is some kind of research assistant who helped out a bit.

Depending on the rules within the community, you may want to add a footnote or a link explaining that you're listing authors in alphabetical order in the paper. I've seen quite often authors refer to this link (http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/CultureStatement04.pdf) for math papers.

@A.I.Breveleri Aad probably thought his name was enough. Until Aabout came to the ATLAS Collaboration.

@Llewellyn of course I can't draw something definitive from an alphabetical list. But in reality if a know x, y, and z, then I know what each did. Say W is unknown, then s/he did the most. Subtle cases may exist, like the presence of more than one student in the list. I also prefer listing in a more analytical way, at least for the ego of the young. I wanted to say that this practice won't damage the career.

@Alchimista How would you know what each contributor did just by knowing them? An individual wont always contribute the same amount to each paper they're an author on (their main project vs. helping someone else). How would you know that W isn't an intern? And besides, unless your field is extremely small, it's impossible to know everyone well enough to estimate their contribution.

@JSLavertu in practice it works like I am saying. Medicine and CERN are surely different. But there is not even such a discussion for paper with more than 4 5 authors. What one is looking for is who did the job and who is the boss. Other things I guess look important only to people not really in any fields.

@Alchimista I don't know what field you're in, but in mine it's not really possible to evaluate someone's contribution without the author ordering or a explicit mention. You could technically look at each author's publication history to get an idea of their expertise and estimate a contribution based on that, but considering the work required, I don't see any selection commitee doing so.

@JSLavertu but who is really looking for the difference between 2nd 3rd 4th author and so on? I really don't understand what you want to force here. Again, an order by contribution is what I prefer more. Or better, I did it years ago being a successful PhD student. An alphabetical order is not really detrimental.

@Alchimista The issue isn't 2nd, 3rd, and so on. It's first authorship. Some programs explicitely require a certain number of 1st author publications to graduate. For such a program, alphabetical order can quite literally ruin someone's career prospects.

I feel the answers to this question are mostly sort of weirdly missing the point. They're addressing "is it good for authors to be listed alphabetically in general?" That's a matter of opinion (at least, so far no answer is based on data), but obviously it depends on whether that's the norm within the field. This question seems to imply that it isn't the norm in the OP's field. This makes it a rather different question. It really seems to be about improper behaviour on the part of the OP's supervisor, and I'm surprised the answers are not focusing on helping the OP to deal with that.

I would point out the paper in question is "my" paper and I would do so in CV, presentation, hearings. When asked for paper in which I am first author, I would submit or present my work, citing with no rant the "convention" of the group. This is the most practical advice I can offer. This said, I would be disappointed as well if the alphabetical order would put in place right when my first paper got ready.

Speaking from a field where author lists are always alphabetical: This will do you good in the long run! If you follow this convention, you will never have to argue over authorship order - take a look at the amount of questions on this site dealing with exactly this question, and be thrilled that you have the option to simply exclude that from your life.
Since I am in such a field, I also know what people do on their CV: they explain what they did for the study. You can write that you did the experiment, the analysis and wrote the first draft of the paper. This will be more informative for a hiring committee than any amount or author-list ordering principle you can come up with.

Doing so would be good for the field in general, but it's very likely to harm the OP's career. If their field doesn't order authors alphabetically/require first-author papers, their CV will take a massive hit. Making conventions more fair is definitively laudable, but its a bit unreasonable to ask OP to sacrifice their future for it... It's a bit of a catch-22.

@JSLavertu Makes no sense. Why would that prof have removed himself from the nice spot at the end of the list, if it wasn't the norm for the given journal, or the university had put up some new rule that forced him?

@Karl (Assuming OPs field orders names accordingly) the best spot is the first, not the last. If OPs name is last, their (apparent) contribution is minimized and will thus harm their CV. The professor's motives don't matter as far as OPs future career is concerned: they might be well intentioned, but unless the whole field switches at once, OP is penalized through no fault of their own.

@JSLavertu for senior people, the best spot is definitely the last, especially if students or more junior researchers are involved.

What @ZeroTheHero says. In such systems, the first spot is the person who did the actual work. The last spot is the person who provided guidance and direction. If an established professor appeared first in the author list, this would not be good at all. It would look very strange indeed. Did the professor himself actually stand at the lab bench day in, day out? Tape electrodes to subjects' skulls? Not good optics at all. (I am not discussing review papers and similar special circumstances. Which underlines why we can't really answer the question without more info.)

@ZeroTheHero I'm aware of that. Maybe the prof is at a point in their career where they no longer need to improve their CV and instead want to change the field's conventions. As I said, the prof's motivations (logical or not) don't matter as far as OPs career is concerned. (All assuming OP isn't in a field that organizes names alphabetically)

My name starts with W. I have been at the end of alphabetical lists all my life. At some point it will dawn on you that you could game this system, it is possible to change your name, but you choose not to. There are also some advantages. You get longer to prepare for live presentations. It is also sometimes possible to insist on reverse alphabetical listing to balance the systemic discrimination. If you are sparing and you use that phrasing finishing with that word in the right company, you have a political-correctness tactical nuclear weapon. But I like astronat's handling. It's tactful.

Indeed, I wish our area had the same convention rather than spending time to set the order.

Whether it will "do you good in the long run" depends to a measurable extent on the first letter of your surname. This has been studied and shown to have a significant effect on attaining tenure. There are also other measurable unintended effects of the system, including strongly discouraging people with names late in the alphabet from entering into collaborations with more than 2 other authors. See https://web.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/JEP2006.pdf

It should also go without saying that if alphabetic ordering is not the norm in the OP's field, then not putting the OP's name first will definitely significantly disadvantage them in both the short and the long term, since it's their first paper.

In the first instance, I recommend talking to the professor and respectfully asking the reason why they changed the author ordering. However, unfortunately it is completely conventional in some fields to always list authors alphabetically, meaning that if your name is at the end of the alphabet you're unlikely to ever have a first author paper (note that if it is conventional in your field, the professors you apply to do your PhD with will also know this and hence not be surprised or worried by your lack of first authorship).
You can mitigate this somewhat when you list your publications in your CV. Consider writing a small description or footnote after the paper, saying that it was signed alphabetically and giving a brief explanation of your contribution. For example:

Publications
"Your paper title here", A. Aardvark, B. Bear, Y. Yourlastname1, Journal of Things, 2020.

1 Paper signed alphabetically. My contribution was completing X experiments, Y analysis and writing the first draft of the manuscript.

I would drop the word "unfortunately"; if alphabetical ordering is the convention, nobody makes any assumptions about your contribution to the paper based on your position in the list.

@chepner I suppose you could say "unfortunately" if it was a paper in an adjacent field where the OP's usual field is non-alphabetical.

Exactly; as a cosmologist I myself straddle this awkward boundary. Astronomers generally sign papers according to contribution, whereas our more theoretical colleagues (i.e. hep-th) tend to do it alphabetically. One's CV can look strange if you've collaborated with people from both sides of the fence.

@astronat and others, like you my spouse's research interests span fields with alphabetic and by-contribution authorship conventions. She (and others) have addressed the confused optics of this on their CV by underlining the lead author in each publication listed. (Bold seems to be semi-conventional for just making your own name visible in the list, so use -- and explain -- something else.)

@chepner Let's drop the "political correctness" here. It is unfortunate when the co-authors, most of the times your research advisors, do almost nothing yet shamelessly demand a spot in the authors list (and this is prevalent in academia) even if you did 100% of the work alone and funnily they will be the same defending the rationale behind alphabetical ordering, but won't acknowledge that they defend it only because it doesn't expose that their contribution is near to zero. It is also unfortunate when you want to work in industrial R&D and people there never see you as first author.

I had a similar experience a very long time ago: I was working with what would be my Ph.D. advisor's group and this work and I did a  long and involved calculation which was the major part of a paper. After I handed in the results and helped write up the paper I found out that my name was nowhere in the paper, and only got a thanks in the aknowledgement. I first went and found a new advisor on a different field. Next, I emailed the journal saying exactly the truth: that this was my work. I was next summoned by the head of the department, who on the one hand rightly chastized me for not coming to him first, but then held a hearing  commitee with 3 faculty members, to whom the former professor admitted that his contribution was basically 0 and my work was ingenious. The commitee forced them to put my name on the paper. It was the last author, but I had what I needed and had happily moved to an advisor more in tune with my ethics.

Non really pertinent but plus one for the happy end :)

It is very pertinent: The point is that because  of this behavior, right or wrong, relations are quite likely broken and as a result continuing to work with that group is likely to give rise to more issues. So, when the next paper comes along, do you wish to possibly go through the same issues with possibly the name put last or ommitted altogether?  SO have a plan B before severing ties. In fact if ties look irreparably destroyed, get a new plan A.

Being ignored as an author has little to do with the authors list. Say, if the OP group adopts the alphabetical order for real and for all papers, there is little to be offended of.

As others have noted there are some fields (and subfields) where alphabetical ordering is the standard and everyone understands, expects, and respects that. A paper with a different ordering will stand out in some way.
But the solution in such a situation is to provide a short section in the paper itself, detailing the main contributions of each author. For the PI, it might just be providing the lab and guiding the research. For yourself it might say that you were the main driver of the research.
Such a section can come early in the paper or at the very end.
And, since you seem to imply that this professor, at least, is moving to an "alphabetical order" standard, it might be to head off such disputes in the future. But it would be hard for an individual, even a powerful one, to do this on their own. Usually it is the consensus of the majority of researchers in a field. Pure Math and Theoretical CS seem to have such a standard.
Some lab sciences do not. Especially those in which a paper could possibly have hundreds of "co-authors".

Let me add a bit about fairness. Yes, you can ask the professor for the reasoning, but it might be a mistake to try to argue the case, because of the power imbalance if nothing else.
But, if there are unequal contributions that can be clearly identified, then fairness suggests that they be recognized somehow, even if not in author order. Hence, the suggestion of a contributions section.
But it is a bit subtle. Sometimes people contribute to a bit of research in different enough, but essential, ways so that any notion of "priority" is meaningless. Other times it is clear. In mathematics, for example, it can be devilishly difficult to work out priority when people are contributing insights into a problem. A person who spends little time on a problem might just provide the key insight that makes the solution possible.
In some fields there is a clear "driver" of the intellectual content of a piece of research and other contribute, perhaps with a lot of time and effort, but the ideas and insights come from on person or a small group. There it is a bit clearer how priority is assigned and it should be recognized.
In your particular case, you may be able to argue for that recognition in a way that everyone is comfortable with.

I've never seen such a statement early in the paper. It has always been at the end for the journals I've submitted to.

@WetlabStudent I've seen it in a footnote on the first page sometimes. More broadly, it's worth pointing out that such a section or footnote will not be visible on a list of publications and won't be accounted for in any bibliometrics - if alphabetical ordering is not the norm in the OP's field then such a section wouldn't really be a good compromise - they should just be listed first.

Ask the group if you can be the "corresponding author"
In most disciplines, the corresponding author is either the lead author who did most of the writing/work or the PI on the project. They handle the submission and are in direct contact with the journal. If you are marked as the corresponding author on the publication, it will be assumed that you were a major contributor to the work, even if your position in the author list is close to the back. This convention generally holds more across fields than author order - for example some applied math journals have alphabetical author lists, but they still mark a corresponding author.
Note at the end of the paper you can put a section called "Author contributions" where you summarise what everyone did. Many journals require such a statement. For journals that don't require such a statement, I have never had a journal ask I remove it [mostly general science, applied math, biology, and environmental science journals].
On a CV you can put an asterisk in front of all papers where you are the lead/corresponding author. And explain this at the top of your publication list.

100% agree.
This should be marked in the paper with a footnote or a remark next to your affiliation (or by the fact that only your email address is present)

This is also pretty field dependent I think. I've heard there are some fields where the "corresponding author" is understood to be the one who made the biggest contribution, but there are others where it means nothing more than the person who uploaded the paper to the journal's submission system.

@Nathaniel very rarely would a minor author be the one to upload the paper and handle all correspondence with the journal's submission system (I've never seen this before in my entire career across 5 universities and 3 disciplines, one of which goes by alphabetical order). This is even true in fields where the corresponding author is not guaranteed to be the head of the lab or the person who did the most work. In such fields its merely a piece of evidence that will be suggestive that you were a major contributor to the work, if anyone ever questions it.

Fair enough. I just think that being able to provide suggestive evidence if someone asks isn't really what the OP should be aiming for. If the OP's field doesn't list authors alphabetically then the OP should be first author, and it's absolutely improper for their senior colleague to change that. Being corresponding author just won't have the same impact on a CV that being first author would. (On the other hand, if authors are usually listed alphabetically in the OP's field then your suggestion is a very reasonable one - we unfortunately don't know that.)

@Nathaniel agreed. This is mainly if the field is alphabetical or the PI has refused to switch the author order back and other amicable actions have failed.

In some areas of pure math I heard the reasoning that the person who contributed the least mathematically should at least handle the bureaucracy and hence be corresponding author. So, at least in pure math, nothing about the contribution can be deduced from the author ordering or from who is the corresponding author.

This is very field dependent, and also can depend a lot on sub-fields within a field. I don't know what your (sub)field is, but since you say the justification is that "that's the convention they are beginning to follow", I am guessing it is not universal in your sub-field.
If that is the case then you are right to be upset. This will harm you as a young researcher, while only marginally benefitting the more senior people who have been shuffled to the front. You are also right to be upset that this was not discussed with you.
In this situation, I would send a reply to both the senior fellow and the professor, stating politely but very clearly that this wasn't discussed with you, and that you are not happy with it, giving exactly the reasons you gave in your SE post. It's quite likely that they haven't really thought about it from your point of view, and the professor may or may not be unaware that it hasn't been discussed with you. In that case I would expect that such a mail would result in a swift change.
It's important to be polite, so as not to be seen as being difficult about it, but this is a situation where you do have every right to make your view known. If the  authors aren't usually listed alphabetically in your field then you absolutely should be the first author.

I'm a bit less sure about this point, so I didn't include it in my answer, but I think generally the fields where authors are listed alphabetically are ones where the barrier to being an author is very high. In maths, for example, it would not be acceptable to add a professor's name to a paper if they didn't actively contribute to the main ideas of the work. In fields where authors can make only minor contributions the order of authors tends to be used to indicate this - if they were listed alphabetically nobody would know who actually did the work.

Please check if the journal actually has a detailing section of the contributions  (i think in nature or science this was in the end of the paper)
Check the Rules of the Journal, could be that they ask for alphabetical order

Name change (Yes seriously)
My immediate thought was a name-change. I see that this has already been suggested (perhaps jokingly) in a comment  @A. I. Breveleri

Personal anecdote
Some years ago I changed my surname (by deed poll - I live in Britain). My original surname was "Smith". I wasn't ashamed of this but got fed up with people complaining they couldn't find me in company lists. I changed my name to something distinctive that I liked - I wasn't worried about alphabetical order. It is remarkable how people react differently to you when they hear a cool sounding surname! People even perceive me as more intelligent now! (Hint: Look up nominative determinism - it doesn't just work on oneself).
Because my surname is unusual now - I share it with a famous film actor - people remember me.

But it's too late for this paper!
Your name seems to indicate that you are female. Just tell them that you are engaged to be married and that you want to change your name ahead of time in order to have consistency with your future publications. Get a friend to pose as John Aardvark. Aardvark is perhaps a little extreme and people will cotton on, however there are plenty of "A" names out there. Personally I would go for it - academics will love or hate you for it but you can bet they will remember you!
If making the change immediately would arouse suspicions, you could change your name after publication and see it as a future investment. If you have the necessary aplomb though, there isn't much they can do.
Long term
Having a memorable (not to say exceptional and cool-sounding name) will be a good career move on its own merit. Having a cool name that is also early in the alphabet will double your credibility - it will be the first thing that people see. So would having a name starting with "Z" by the way. You might like to consider this - it would arouse less suspicion. The effectiveness of always being at the and of a list relates to the well-established Serial Position Effect.

Incidentally, I'll bet that, with the new alphabetic trend, and the acceptability of pseudonyms in academic publications, people will all start doing this and eventually papers will be written by authors all beginning with "A". It's called the law of unintended consequences.

Changing your name is completely overkill for this situation. If OPs field is alphabetically sorted, changing their name will accomplish nothing. If it is, the issue is with the supervisor, not with OPs name.

I disagree that it will accomplish nothing. If you read the question carefully, the OP's major concern is about appearing first in the list of authors. In this situation, changing one's name prior to submission of a paper will change the order in which authors are credited.  No amount of complaining or  pleading will get anyone to change the "industry standard" for the benefit of one person.

P.S.  Of course the whole thing is a dirty trick. I had something similar happen to me once - I actually suggested the topic of some software and did all the work, merely presenting the finished result to my then manager.  It became a product and the manager's name appeared in huge letters, my name was in small print.  It teed me off at the time but had no long-term affect on my career.

Unless OP specifies their field, we have no way of knowing if it's the industry standard or not. It will accomplish nothing in the sense that being first in a field that sorts names alphabetically is irrelevant. OP would gain nothing by changing their name. Changing your name has two main advantages: Less confusion (as in your case), and bypassing the professor's intent to disregard a non-alphabetical standard.

"bypassing the professor's intent " Exactly. If the professor then changes the rules about who comes first once more, it shows his hypocrisy. Either way it is likely to P him off and cause bad feeling. But then the OP is already feeling bad. However, I am naturally a risk-taker. This approach will not suit everyone.  That's why I suggested writing it off to experience and strategically changing name afterwards.  Or, of course just accept the situation and rely on gaining a reputation for good research under one's own name  regardless of its alphabetic placement.

We'll have to agree to disagree. IMO, the prof's behavior is the problem. The solution is to adress the behavior directly, not to game around it with drastic decisions like changing your name (all assuming OP is in a non-alphabetical field).

No problem. I agree to disagree. :-)

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authors: Vladimir F Героям слава


text:
How do I make a parenthetical citation for a speech?
I'm writing a position paper and wanted to quote part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. What do I cite: the speech, or the website I got it from? What should I put in the parenthesis after the indented quote? Right now I have (Paragraph 8) but that's hardly adequate.

That website has lots of ads, no contact details except an anonymous email address, and no "About" page.
You should find a better website or preferably a book that contains the speech, and cite that. Biographies of King might include it. Then you can give the page number(s) as usual.
If you can't find a book, this website would be OK, as it is from a famous news organization: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3170387.stm

You have two problems, first, how to reference the speech as a whole; second, the provide a pinpoint reference (if possible) to the words you want to quote.
The first problem is easily solved. You should reference the source on which you relied for the information. In this case, that's the American Rhetoric website, with a more direct link to the actual speech. How exactly you should write the reference will depend upon the kind of referencing and citation style that you have decided to use, or the style that is required by a publisher (if you are publishing your work).
As to the problem of producing a pinpoint reference, I think that the best yo can do is exactly what you have proposed; namely, refer to paragraph 8 of the speech. Obviously, the division of the speech into paragraphs is dependent upon the decisions made by whoever did the transcription, but if you refer to the webpage then the reference should be interpreted by an intelligent reader as being a reference to paragraph 8 on that page.

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text:
Make the readers [supervisor] understand the effort I put on data construction in an academically sound way
In my Master thesis I use an alternative database, namely histdata.com which provides free tick by tick data (kinda rough data that need a lot of coding to be transformed but free). To the best of my knowledge this is the first time somebody has ever employed data from this database on a official paper. Usually tick data are purchased from independent providers for thousands of dollars/euros. Should I explicitly mention the fact that I used a free database data and my efforts to transform the data in a working form? Essentially I saved my self from a potentially heavy cost through some free data and heavy coding.

It would seem pretty clear that you have to cite the source of your data. How you transformed it might or might not be relevant, depending on whether it is a creative part of your methods, or just a routine chore.

Of course I am going to mention the data source, like [data are taken from _.com and span form _ to _]. I am just trying to find a way to explicitly say that is a new databse beyong the consensus and significant work has been applied to derive the final functional form of the data. @NateEldredge

You are running into the age-old problem that, in research, you are reporting on results, not effort. Your paper (or thesis) is not a time sheet that needs to accurately reflect how much time went into which activity, but it should discuss your approach, results, and conclusions.
Hence, making your supervisor understand the effort [you] put on data construction is not a sound goal for a formal paper. I am not saying that your supervisor should not know how you spend your time, but this is an item for face-to-face discussion, not your thesis. Describe the data source, describe its properties (and, as a sidenote, I would not focus on the "it's free" aspect, but comment more on the quality of the data set), and describe the necessary transformations if they are interesting (instead of straight-forward but tedious, which most transformations seem to be).

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text:
Assessment of an IT-related extended abstract
For an assignment at our university it was our task to program a prototyp and document it in an extended abstract.
Intro text: The Idea is to create a system, which allows data exchange (contacts, Images, videos) via Bluetooth based on a QR Code and/or NFC triggered action. Code Exchange would not be necessary.
Due to the last sentence we assumed that we did not have to publish the source code.
We put much work in to our prototype and the abstract and did not receive the grade we were wishing for. The feedback: "Abstract documents the app only and no source code was provided."
We do not care very much for the grade itself, but what makes this really unfair is that another group with a similar assignment received a better grade despite their abstract not citing any scientific papers.
Therefore we have the following questions:
How would you interpret "code exchange not necessary"?
Is it customary/obligatory to publish the source code for prototypes in academic papers/abstracts?
Are scientific paper references not a requirement for an extended abstract and by some degree an indicator of the quality of the paper?
How would you assess the abstract in terms of project execution, accurracy, tracability?
Thank you for any input.
Edit: Removed links due to the actual documents not being relevant.

Evaluating your extended abstract is really out of scope for this site, not to mention impossible for anyone who is not your instructor.  The specific requirements of your assignment are entirely at the discretion of your instructor; on the other hand, your instructor should have made those requirements clear from the start.

Is it customary/obligatory to publish the source code for prototypes in academic papers/abstracts?

No. Most academic articles (in IT) do not include the code. Some rarely do have a link to a link where the code and source materials can be downloaded.

Are scientific paper references not a requirement for an extended abstract and by some degree an indicator of the quality of the paper?

It depends on the reviewer. Some would look at the number of studies referenced to make sure that sufficient background research and literature was conducted (been through that one). Some may look closely at the quality of the references (although I haven't experienced this sort myself). Some only expect the relevant concepts too be attributed, even if only 3 or 4 items are referenced.

How would you assess the abstract in terms of project execution, accurracy, tracability?

If the underlying novelty is focused so as to improve performance of an existing system, then a simple line about the increase in performance metric/accuracy with respect to the state id thee art will do. Statisticians are not to find of bare accuracy. There are many other measures for This, but a simple mean+_std. dev. ought to be a better alternative.
If the novelty lies in the application itself and not any performance measure, then this'd line would not be necessary. I'm not sure how the traceability aspect would come in an abstract.

How would you interpret "code exchange not necessary"?

Sorry, but that's a question for your instructor.


text:
Is it ethical to submit the final version of a paper after acceptance when coauthor refuses to agree to submission?
Here is my case:
I wrote a paper and invited a post-doc to help me edit it. As the post-doc is much better than me, the post-doc changed a lot of content (nearly all, but without changing any idea). According to this contribution, the post-doc stands as second author. The post-doc agreed on the paper, then we submitted and the paper was accepted. After that, the post-doc claimed to be the main contributor, threatened to withdraw the paper (personal-conflict) and really did so. But the editor of the journal refused the withdraw request and asked me for final version. Even so, the second author kept on claiming that I don't have the right to submit the final version. In this case, is it ethical to continue the publication process?

What field are you working in?

@Ambicion computers science

At the point when the post-doc agreed, have you made any changes afterwards? Generally, it is unprofessional behavior to flip-flop on such opinions. It is generally a good idea to agree on the "deal" before you start working. As usual in life.

@Ambicion No, we didn't change anything. The whole issue is unrelated to the content, but a personal conflict between the post-doc and another coauthor afterwards. I'm out of this and the post-doc tried to use this paper to pressure on the other coauthor. I just tried to make everything under ethic and have publications.

@Magicsowon My adviser supports me on this issue. But the post-doc has left university and my adviser can do nothing with it.

Do you have anything to document that the post-doc approved of the initial submission, with you as first author? My opinion, though others may disagree, is that you have an ethical obligation as a first author to offer authorship to people who deserve it - you cannot submit the final paper with this person as an author if they do not agree, but they have no recourse but to remove themselves from the author list if they don't want to participate further. They cannot simply block publication because they don't feel like it, unless they have specific concerns to be resolved.

@BryanKrause Yes we do have the document.

@JoJo The approach I would want to take in your situation would be to A) Try to obtain, or at least have evidence of you trying to obtain, a list of specific complaints that this person has with publishing the paper. If this list is unreasonable (that is, not based on any facts or scientific reasoning) or the person refuses to provide such a list, then B) have this person removed as an author before publication, on the grounds that they are unwilling to participate in the final review of the paper. It would be best to have your advisor and the editor's support on both counts.

@JoJo For example, the editor may be able to address the second author and say that they see no further issues with the manuscript and if that author wishes to withdraw their name from the paper they may do that, but otherwise the editor would like to publish as-is. Given a choice between losing a publication and losing the fight, your co-author may concede.

I checked the authorship guidelines of the two most important computer science societies, IEEE and ACM. IEEE's guidelines have a clear answer to the question, although I wish it was a different one, given the unfair situation the post-doc has put you into:

"Each individual named  as an author must approve the final version of the article as  accepted for publication, including the references." (Source: Sect. 6, "Author Responsibilities")

In the case of ACM, I didn't find a direct answer. The closest statement I found was the following:

"Once a submission has been accepted, [...] ACM expects authors to speak with one voice even if there are multiple authors." (Source: "Processing of accepted works")

(Not a particularly helpful statement anyways: there are certainly situations where an individual author would behave ethically by not speaking for all authors, like whistleblowing).
In any case, you should look up the authorship guidelines of the journal where your paper was accepted - they might have yet another relevant policy for your case.

The journal is under IEEE. In this case, the paper will be stuck...The paper withdrawal request is denied and publishing it will be refused by the 2nd author.

@JoJo In that case the only way to fix this is to clear things up with your co-author. Good luck!

@ian_itor I don't think it will work as I am already very angry about this. As an innocent person and the largest victim, I don't want to lower my standard to satisfy this co-author any more. I tried, but didn't work. It acts like a trap.


text:
How to refer to a Method that is to be re-implemented in my thesis?
I am writing my thesis (computer sience) and wonder how to refer to an algorithm which i reimplement as a part of the thesis.
There is a paper describing the original algorithm and I am only implementing this algorithm in my thesis.
I considered to refer to it as 'baseline' or 'reference algorithm' but 'baseline do have a different meaning in data mining and in my opinion (as a not native english person 'reference algorithm'
sounds like the algorithm completely differ from mine. The algorithm itself is not named and the paper is having a name that is too long (i.e for the TOC)

Welcome to Academia SE. Can you please [edit] the question to clarify what you already considered and in particular why obvious choices like the name do not work for you?

First, give the algorithm (since it is your thesis, I assume that you have enough space). Then, name the algorithm. If it is named already, better to use that name. Else, caption the algorithm

Algorithm 5: Managing big data with minimum spanning trees

Then, in the text, you can refer to this algorithm as

We have implemented Algorithm 5, and we compare the results with our
  algorithm.

Also, the reason theorems and algorithms come to have names in the first place is because people write about the algorithms that someone else invented and refer to them as “______’s algorithm.” So feel free to call it ____’s algorithm in your text. Notice that if there are several authors, hyphenating the names or using the authors’ initials is common

Here are some other options:

"original algorithm" (yours is the "new algorithm")
"traditional
algorithm"
"Smith's algorithm" (Substitute the name of the researcher
who first published the algorithm for "Smith".)

But "reference algorithm" seems OK to me too.

Ah ok.. I thought there are special notations for this...


text:
What might be some reasons to ask to stop reviewing an article by the editor?
Recently I have been asked by a journal to review an article as a referee. I did it within 3 days, and the very next day another mail came asking me to review another article. I was reviewing it when, aft after 2 days, the editor sent me an email saying I don't need to review it anymore. What might be the reasons behind this?

See tag info for https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/review-articles - is this what you meant to tag?

Related: Is it appropriate for a journal to cancel an accepted review request before the deadline? It's not a duplicate, but the answers to that question do mention some possible reasons.

You accepted a poor answer: there is virtually no chance multiple reviews are completed within two days. Besides, even if it did happen, a good man editors will simply let the review process take its course because an extra review is never a bad thing.

Another explanation: The editor forgot that they had already asked you for a review a short while ago. Realizing this and not wanting to burden you twice in a short time, they paddled back.

There are many possible reasons. Perhaps the author(s) withdrew it. Perhaps the editor made a decision somehow, though given the time, probably a reject.
Of course, you can ask the editor, and you may or may not get a real reason.

Another review was submitted that left the editor in no doubt that the paper should be rejected (typically for reasons where there is no room for a different opinion, e.g. incontrovertible evidence of plagiarism, duplicate submission, a fatal flaw in the problem definition, etc).

The most likely explanation: The editor invited too many reviewers, with the expectation that most of them would decline.  Other reviewers submitted their review before you, so your review was no longer needed.
It is like an overbooked flight.

I'm wondering: Asking several reviewers is certainly common, but wouldn't you usually wait for the first invited reviewers to accept/reject the request before asking further?

@henning--reinstateMonica That is at the editor's or journal's discretion.

The editor hastily selected reviewers, and after the fact encountered information or 'came to a realization' that having you review the article would constitute a conflict of interest. This may be real or perceived. I believe, however, this would be a less likely scenario than those suggested in the other answers above.


text:
Meaningful research in PhD with no publications
I have been doing my PhD in Computer Science for one year and a half now (Europe-based) and I feel my research is not going much far.
I choose to do this after my master studies because I actually like to do it: I like reading about new solutions, new problems and try to solve them myself. I also really liked taking university courses.
Lately, I started to notice more and more how many of my peers managed to publish in some conferences, while I still have nothing close to submission. Also, I had a talk with my supervisor few months ago, where he hinted that my approach to the PhD was not going to be productive, and that a change was needed. He mentioned the need for more independence on my side, when finding and developing research ideas.
To make it (hopefully) more explicit, it may be that I like doing research for my own fulfillment and curiosity, but I cannot spot questions or problems that needs to be addressed or can have a chance during the review process. I don't know how to explain the current situation in another way. In the meantime I also got a bit discouraged, and asked myself if, career-wise, it is worth to pursue a path where I am happy with my day-to-day activities, but ultimately don't get any "public" acknowledgement. I think I learned a lot in this year (also, my level was maybe not so high as my peers'), so I am not unsatisfied with myself, but the issue here is that progress is measured on papers and not self-achievements. Working hard is also okay for me, so I would say motivation is not the issue here.
Should I consider quitting my PhD, or moving to a lower-rank institute? I'm fine with my work at the moment, but I'm worried it may not get better -- and I don't like the idea of finding myself at the fourth+ year of PhD, still with no publication. I don't think I want to keep on with research afterwards, and I fear those years will not be meaningful career-wise.

Gaining independence is a thing you learn over time. To expect it from a student is a bit much. Some can achieve it, but not everyone. Don't be discouraged. Get better advice.

If you like reading about new solutions, you could try to publish a review paper that you can reuse for the literature part of your thesis. This usually gives a lot of citations as it is very welcome in the community and most people do NOT really like to study other peoples approaches too much...

As the past 1.5 years have not contributed to your research output (though probably to your own knowledge and experience), I think it is not too dangerous to suggest that a change in PhD position - if leading to a more stimulating environment - is not going to cost you any time. Of course you would have to find one first...

Some of the answers suggest getting better help from your advisor, or changing your advisor.  The following may be entirely irrelevant, but since your account name is a common woman's name in English-speaking countries, it occurs to me that there is a common, but certainly not universal pattern in some academic disciplines of senior faculty failing to give as much supportive guidance to women graduate students or junior faculty as to men due to unconscious or even conscious biases.  If that might be relevant, it could be another reason to seek advice from a broader range of people.

I'm in another discipline, so I don't know whether this applies to CS: In my early research, my approach was very different from other researchers'.  I found that it was difficult to get my work published unless I could put it in a context that showed how it was relevant to existing published research.  So I worked hard to find issues to write about that, though not intrinsically interesting to me, had a published literature, and that were such that I could show how the work that did interest me would be relevant to those issues. I succeeded, but had to search for ways to provide that context.

Publishing review papers can be quite tricky if you are inexperienced, just to warn people who are considering investing time into doing this.

It sounds like you need to change to another supervisor pretty quickly.

Your situation hints at a mismatch between your supervisor's supervision style (which is fairly hands-off) and the style you would need to be productive (which requires more guidance and input in the beginning, with the goal of ultimately having you become more independent).
My recommendation is: Find a co-advisor with a more hands-on supervision style. That could be somebody in your group who is fairly productive (most likely a postdoc, assistant professor or young associate professor), with a visible publication track record. Most people who are that way have more problems to work on that they can solve on their own. You should have your main advisor on board with this, which might be easy to achieve, since advisors have an active interest in seeing their students graduate.

Agree. The advisor isn't really doing the job if they aren't being responsive to the needs of their students.

That's a good guess actually. I find myself working better in teams (or at least, having a bit of a clearer plan), but I am not getting this from my supervisor -- in his words, to avoid micromanaging. That's also a good suggestion, although may be a bit hard to put in practice, as our group is very new and thus very small. Maybe I can consider looking into other groups if our research areas are compatible

Indeed, the co-advisor doesn't have to be from your group, that's just a natural first place to look. Two alternative ideas: 1. Ask your advisor if he knows somebody that might be suitable for this part, 2. Attend one or two conferences in your field and get in touch with relevant attendees (in corona times, online conferences provide special networking opportunities for that).

I agree, you see this a lot. The supervisor fails to put the student into a productive environment from which he can develop his own ideas and become more independent. Then he waits 1.5 years and pretends the problem is with the student. For a PhD it is necessary to work independently and be rather exceptional, but the most important factor to start with is to get into the right environment, which unfortunately is not that frequent and also it is hard for master students to spot the good places as everyone presents themselves as being just great, which is definitely not the case.

That's also a good idea! Thanks a lot for the input. There is an upcoming conference and I think I will take this opportunity to do some networking. The only thing I'm worried about is mentioning this to my supervisor. As the funding for my position comes from him, I'm not sure he would welcome an external person, as this most probably implies adding more authors to a possible paper (of course, it would be enough for me to publish! :) no problem with that, and if they actually help!)

OK, fingers crossed for your conference then! To ease your worries: while the situation with your "hands-off" advisor is rather typical, I think most advisors wouldn't mind one additional person on the paper if they made substantial contributions.

I don't want to step on the excellent answer of lighthouse keeper but an additional idea would be to join or form a discussion group in which a few students, perhaps in a similar situation as yourself, get together to discuss issues and search for open questions. Read a few papers (jointly) and discuss them. What is left unsaid in the papers.
The synergy of a group, if like-minded, can be helpful.
And a group can transform into a collaboration group over time. This can be valuable in its own right.

I like reading about new solutions, new problems and try to solve them myself.

Do you find any flaws in the solutions that you read about? Any space for improvement? Could a different approach be taken?
Are the problems you read about framed appropriately? Maybe they are too theoretical, and making more realistic assumptions would yield different results? Maybe the problems are defined in a too specific manner? Could they be generalized for some benefit?
Start thinking critically and soon you will find plenty of ideas which are publish-worthy.
You can start by nit-picking, finding even small issues in the published works, looking for a hole. Then, you can try a higher level approach, like asking yourself questions why nobody has tried to do something in a specific way, or why some problem has not been tackled in a rigorous manner.
Do not treat published material as some form of revealed truth. You need to believe in yourself. Believe that you can do just as good as your peers (not the other students, but the other researchers which publish), or even better. Basically think of yourself as a researcher, not much as a student. Doing PhD is a (hopefully paid) job, not a school!

On your point about how to spot "research questions": spotting unsolved problems is a challenge in itself because usually one approaches a subject from the student point of view. Practical advice: read papers and pay attention to the conclusions. Often there are paragraphs along the lines of "will be explored in future work" or "remains to be shown". This is where your open questions are. Contact the authors and find out what they are up to.

Should I consider quitting my PhD, or moving to a lower-rank institute?

Why is your situation frustrating to you? Overall, reading between the lines, I see a discouragement at a growing awareness of your limitations versus what you believe about the expectations being put on you.
My foremost recommendation is this: You should have a discussion with your current advisor.
Your intent should be to determine whether the expectations that you are starting to believe about your lack of performance (no publications) and lack of independence (as per your advisor) are real or simply mis-perceptions. A concrete example is to ask your advisor: Should I really have published by now? A broader example is to ask your advisor what specific actions you can do to demonstrate that you are taking on a greater level of independence.
I imagine that, accepting that you must hold this discussion is not easy. The consequences of avoiding it can however be damaging, for example by causing continued stress worrying about what you think your advisor is thinking or worse, discovering that your advisor has essentially given up on you showing sincere interest in learning by pro-activity participating in the advisor-to-student experience. Advisors are not ignorant about the shortfalls of their advisees, nor are they necessarily ignorant of their responsibility to find ways to help when asked.
I would have one specific answer to the second, broader question about possible ways to show your independence. Step forward at the discussion with your advisor with your plan to prepare a PROPOSAL for your research to defend to a dissertation committee by a specific, hard-set deadline. A proposal is NOT a defense of work done. It is a defense of work to be done. It states why the work is important in context of current issues. It states your hypotheses or problems. It defines how and why you will go about doing the work needed to valid the hypotheses or solve the problems.
This type of approach is one that is common in some PhD institutes. Instead of asking for a qualifying exam on didactic courses to be granted permission to continue with a PhD, the department requires that students prepare and defend a dissertation proposal. They require this even before a student is to have submitted any publications. Indeed, in some cases, they set hard deadlines for this step, with the consequence that the student who does not do it is not allowed to continue further.
This action could be one way for you to start to show independence (something that your advisor has already said seems to be lacking). This approach is likely also to result in greater "public acknowledgement", even if only at a local (university) scale to start. Finally, this approach is likely to focus your attention better to prepare a publication on your research topic, indeed even help streamline the writing and acceptance process because you have done the background work for the introduction.
Taking this step will also help you to discover other issues that may be behind your frustration. For example, do you have appropriate levels of self-disciplin, skills, and tools to self-administer the timelines that are required to meet concrete milestones for your dissertation? If not, start spending more time to learn how to set concrete, realistic, and relevant milestones; start finding the tools that you need to do the administration on your own (e.g. calendars and task-manager apps and citation management apps); and start setting concrete milestones to complete at hard-set deadlines. I might suggest here that you "work the puzzle backwards". When you do want to graduate? When must you submit your dissertation? When must you give your oral presentation? When must you submit the final draft to your advisor? When must you stop doing research and start writing? And so on.
Continuing on the above, the remaining question to ask is whether you have a true, deep-seated motivation to even want carry out your current research. Does your motivation to do a PhD come simply from a nebulous desire to explore things further, or does it come specifically from a burning curiosity about or desire to fix a specific problem in a specific context of a specific research field. As you move from the being in the former situation (nebulous curiosity) to the latter situation (actions driven by the need to meet specific desires), your frustrations will change from "I don't even really know why I am here" to "This is not going to be as easy as I thought (but I will get it done)".

Thank you for your input :) in my situation, I see this not working as it doesn't make sense to step out to commit to a dissertation deadline without even a single paper, and not even material for a submission. I find that I would have no reason nor ground to back up this statements, and ultimately it would just make me more nervous -- I have an internal deadline with myself, which is in about three years from now, to present my dissertation. And I really want to move from the former to the latter situation, as you mentioned. Being unable to frame things properly is also an issue.

@Emma A dissertation PROPOSAL is not a dissertation DEFENSE. I have clarified in the explanation. Consider also correcting for your misunderstanding.

While this answer may appear a bit hard -it is quite important to evaluate carefully whether a PhD program "fits". These are reasonable questions to ask.

@javadba I've noted something equivalent in a revision. Thank you.

Good advice, but careful - Perhaps any good answer to this question (†) will be problematically limiting (or absurdly long)?  The answer given (a proposal defense deadline) is very good in many ways but problematically limiting - its only one way, and committing to that one way closes off other paths/options.  May well be worth it. (My answer focuses on a different path/strategy.)

You should probably quit. Unlike master/bachelors, getting a PhD is all about doing research and publishing the results. In the formal sense, research implies working on novel problems, at the edge of human understanding. Hence, publishable research has to be novel, in the sense that no one has done it before, and significant, in the sense it answers questions other people actually care about.
You should be exposed to a bunch of others research during your PhD, by reading research articles or attending talks (which seem to be important in Comp-Sci). If you watch, you'll notice that almost all research talks end with an 'ideas for further research' or 'limitations to the research'. Doing something that extends previous research, or overcomes the limitations of published research will get the job done.
When I asked about what I wanted to research, I gabbled out some plausible sounding stuff. Years later, I learned that academic research is hard, and that you have to work hard at a very small part of a problem to be able to make meaningful progress.
Dangerously, you may pick a small problem no one cares about. I seem to recall books/articles/blogs in compsci about how to pick a good problem. (Professors who ask about your 'research topic' are wankers--a researchable problem is a very small sub-area within a topic area).
Doing independent research requires preparation, and plenty of professors are happy to have someone just doing scut-work. What you have to realize is that scut-work is training to be able to do it on your own, and what you need to be thinking about is why a professor is telling you to do those things.
As for why you aren't/weren't told these things: research is a craft, and academia (surreally) remains much like a medieval craft guild. There is also the awkward fact that many PhD students are second generation academics, with one or more parents capable of advising them on the 'mysteries' of the guild. Some of the rest have been initiated into the norms through a variety of means.

Emma, the paragraphs after the first paragraph contain advice for OP if you don't want to take the advice in the first paragraph.

This is not necessarily the correct answer but  -given the high opportunity cost of pursuing a PhD - it is worth keeping in mind. A combination of giving it another chance a -la' @LighthouseKeeper and an open mind along these lines may be useful over the next year to 18 months.

Most of this answer makes a lot of sense, but the first sentence is unnecessarily harsh and not backed up by anything in the answer.

(This is more an idea about a different approach than an answer.  I'm curious to see what folks currently active in academia (ideally in comp sci) think about it. Meant to complement the other strong answers.)
Seek collaboration.
You have strengths and weaknesses.  Make a list of them.  I'm guessing you're great at execution, and unusually analytical, based on what you wrote.  This is a VERY important skill set, and likely worthy of publication credit as a product intellectual achievement1.  People who are great at coming up with good ideas are often bad at execution, and have more good ideas than they're able to make use of.  Find out about potential collaborators' strengths and weaknesses including your advisor's. (You CAN ask!)  Mars noted your likely gender; likely you have superior people skills.  Sharing your list would help your advisor help you, or he's lousy.  Odds are good you know colleagues with great ideas willing to collaborate.  Also, in CS, PhD students are often paid, so find out what sort of timeline he things is acceptable. So consider having a broader conversation with your advisor to, among other things see what he thinks about complementary skills.  Maybe he and/or the department or school hew to the publish or perish maxim.
1:The #1 author criterion: "Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work" per ICMJE anyway (Medical). More ideas

Interesting stat: "While single author publications comprised over 80% of all papers published prior to 1950, only 7.4% papers published in 2018 were authored by one researcher." ..."there is an increased fraction of students who co-author publications with their advisors"


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Is a higher amount of literature cited in an essay generally seen as better?
I'm a postgraduate M.Sc. student at a university studying math. Currently I need to write some essay/assignment (about 10 pages) for a seminar where we revisit already published work and describe it in more detail.
By asking other students about their essay I noticed a great difference in the amount of cited literature. While I use over 30 different resources, most of my fellow students only cite a handful of resources besides their main resource.
Now, it is clear that the quality of literature might vary, and that 30 redundant resources and/or unreviewed resources can be considered as 'bad' resources and sloppy research. But that's not exactly what I mean.
In fact, half of my literature comes from an extensive research on the problem's history and related work (and almost all the literature had been published and reviewed in some way or the other). The other half mainly consists of my 'main' resource for the seminar and some books explaining some higher Matrix calculus and other basics (like the volume of a d-Sphere) which I used to explain the 'main' resource in detail.

My questions are:

Is the amount of literature even noticed by teachers? Do they care as much as I think or do they generally just peek into the literature section and see if it makes sense?

Some of the literature I use has been cited in my original 'main' resource. Is it common practice to just cite them again (which leads to drastically more literature)? Or do I only refer to my main resource even if the statement comes from some other paper?

Does it make a good impression to have a long literature section (with useful and non redundant literature)?

While I love knowledge about the history and related work to a problem it is also much easier than explaining the core of the problem. Do teachers find this stuff interesting at all? I believe teachers are normally very familiar with the problem. My concern is that they are only interested in theory and proofs and might find literature reviews boring. (I did explain the core of the problem as it is important, but I would have done it in more detail if I had spared about a page of history and review.)

The quick answer is yes. Pertinent literature is meant to support your position and build your story. The amount of literature cited usually reflects how deeply and how comprehensively a topic was examined. However, I should say that the literature cited must be highly relevant to be considered as a valid one. It will not be a good practice to pad the cited works to simply give an impression of in-depth research. Experienced readers of academic work will be able to tell if the amount of literature cited actually helps your cause.

You will, as you say, need to omit redundant sources and severely limit or omit unreviewed sources.  With those caveats, more is generally better as more research suggests more learning.  Yes, professors notice.
However, your paper must include your own thoughts and analysis.  A cut-and-paste paper, where every sentence includes a citation, is not plagiarism, but it's not scholarly work, either.  I'd assign such a paper an unsatisfactory grade.  Use your sources to establish the background of the problem or topic.  Then say what you have analyzed about the problem.  So to address your question, you must address the core problem, whatever it is.  You can't skip it with a lengthy lit. review.
In general, you must cite, and read the original sources.  So, if B cites A, and you want to cite A, you must read A. Your professors are likely familiar with the literature and may ask you about the papers you have cited.

I love it when seminar talks give you a good sense of the line of reasoning in the literature that led to the question at hand, and when their research appears to be in conversation with other work. Though I've seen plenty that don't really do this much (and just give the standard broad intro that doesn't do more than say what all the things they are going to talk about are). Papers tend to have less variation.
Given that, I would say if you put the specific topic of your essay strategically into the conversation of the literature, your essay will be nicer to read.
Though remember that in writing, if you can say what you want to say using fewer words, you should. If the citations or the exploration of history is off-topic or otherwise doesn't serve your purpose, reconsider them.


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Should you list undergraduate work on your CV?
Given that undergraduate projects and publications can be of a lesser quality than later works, some may be discouraged from adding them to their CV. On the other hand, perhaps a CV should simply be a raw record of your work, good, bad, and middling.

I've seen CVs (of mathematicians) with designed subsections for publications as undergraduate work at the end of usual journal article sections. I don't know what others think of this style, but it left no negative impression on me. At least to me, it doesn't carry any negative connotation. But you might want to seek specific advice from your advisor because most likely s/he knows the culture, customs, and your work waaay better than any of us here.

I've also seen CVs with a separate section for undergraduate work, but I've always thought the intent was "Hey look! I published even as an undergrad!" and not "I also have these substandard papers, but I was only an undergrad, so you can ignore them."

I'm just tagging along with someone else's research. — If you don't make a substantial intellectual contribution, then you shouldn't be an author. Your CV shouldn't include anything where you were "just tagging along".

Your publications are your publications, and unless they have been retracted, you should list them all on your CV. It is up to the reader how to interpret your undergraduate work, and you have minimal control of that in the rather raw format of a CV, whether or not you list them. But consider: if you do list them, then your degree history makes it clear they are from undergrad and to be judged accordingly. If you do not list them, however, then the reader may easily come across them anyway online and be left to wonder what awful shame you are attempting to hide.

I'm not sure if your degree history always makes it clear which publications are from undergrad unless whoever reading your CV bothers to dig deeper information from other sources. For example, how can you tell which were from undergraduate on this CV http://math.mit.edu/~fox/cvfox102313.pdf ? There are some papers published in 2008 and 2009 which were not undergraduate work. And there are some other papers in the same years that are undergraduate work. How would you know which belongs to which category if it were not for the "Undergraduate research" section?

I think this argues for not separating the work. How much work in grad school counts for a paper revised after one graduates? Why is an early PhD student all that different than a strong senior? I stand by my assertion: your publications are your publications, and it is better to let the reader judge their value.

Well, I'm not particularly for or against separating publications. I'm simply curious how you can be sure that "your degree history makes it clear they are from undergrad," which is in your answer. By the way, I agree that your publications are your publications, and it is better to let the reader judge their value. But I also think that it's not a bad idea to make it easier for the reader to judge, e.g., separating refereed journal papers from non-refereed ones, or separating journal articles from conference papers. It may not be so strange to deal with undergrad work like this.

@YuichiroFujiwara Suppose the OP received BS in 2008, I would think his publications in or before 2008 would be his undergrad research. The paper published in 2009 is probably hard to determine because there a gap between submission and publishing. He may need to explain it in his CV.

@scaaahu In the particular case of the CV I gave a link to, he got his BS in 2006. There is one paper published in 2009, two in 2008, four in 2007 under the undergraduate research section. Of course there are some more before 2007. So your guess would be way off in this case. This is partly because it takes longer to publish in math, and also because this case is an outlier of sort, though. I don't doubt your method works much better for a typical case in your field.

@YuichiroFujiwara Can the affiliation in the paper help to determine it? I have no intention to argue here. I think the OP should list all pubs no matter what. How to list them will require some efforts to make it clear, that's all.

@scaaahu Yes, there are ways to fairly accurately identify undergraduate work, e.g., submission dates, co-authors, affiliations, and the like. That's why I said "...unless whoever reading your CV bothers to dig deeper information from other sources." Also, I perfectly agree that you should not hide your publications. I'm sorry if my wording was confusing or otherwise poorly phrased. What I'm saying is literally what I wrote in the first comment. And I'm definitely not being against your comment or jakebeal's. I agree with you two, maybe except the part it's clear which is undergraduate work.

As jakebeal said, you don't really have a choice.  A CV is supposed to contain a complete list of your publications, end of story.
But I don't think you need worry.  Nobody expects your first papers to represent the best work of your career.  If you are early in your career (e.g. undergrad or grad student), it is much better to have some papers on your CV, whatever their quality, instead of none.  And if you are later in your career, nobody will pay much attention to your earliest work.  You might be judged based on your best papers, or your latest papers, or your total number of papers, but not on your first papers.
As to your enumerated concerns:
(A) There's nothing wrong with that.  If you do any amount of collaboration in your career (and you should), you will be a coauthor on papers where the main idea came from someone else.  That's fine, as long as there are also some where the main ideas are yours.  (If you have great ideas, wouldn't you want other talented  people to be willing to help bring them to completion?  So you should be willing to do likewise, within reason.)
(B) Nobody writes exclusively great papers; every CV has papers that are not so good.  Good papers get noticed, not-so-good papers (unless they are plagiarized or egregiously substandard) just get ignored.  Mediocre papers don't directly hurt you, they simply don't help you.  So don't worry about having written papers that aren't great.
(C) As above, the start of your publication history is not something that people care about, so there's no particular advantage in going to great lengths to ensure that your first (acknowledged) publication is super awesome.  If you write that super awesome paper eventually, it will overshadow the others, and if you don't, at least you'll still have something to show.
Note also that a common convention on a CV is to list papers in reverse chronological order: newest papers first, and earliest papers at the end, where nobody is likely to pay them much attention.


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When scheduling talks in a conference session, what is the etiquette, if any, regarding placement of multiple talks from the same research group?
I am the lead co-organizer of a symposium at a technical conference later this year.  The abstract submissions are now closed, and I'm working on slotting the talks into sessions.  With the number of abstracts we have in hand, I'm planning to spread them across three sequential sessions in a single chronological track. In the event it matters, the symposium scope is intentionally very broad, so the speakers in any given session may (justifiably) have little interest in attending the other sessions before/after the one in which they're scheduled.
There are a handful of research groups that have each submitted two abstracts to the symposium, with different presenting authors. All of the abstracts are in-scope and distinct from one another, so I plan to accept them all.
What is the etiquette regarding scheduling of such talks, submitted by the same research group but with different presenting authors?
Should I specifically aim to schedule them close to one another in the agenda? Should I intentionally interpose talks from other groups? Or, does it not really matter?
From the perspective of the presenting research group, it would seem most convenient logistically for the talks to be grouped together in sequence. That way, the whole group would have the option of attending just the relevant small chunk of the session, with the rest of the morning/afternoon more free to attend other talks.
From the perspective of a symposium organizer, though, it would make more sense to separate the pairs of talks, in an effort to make it more convenient for the speakers to just stay in our session track, rather than bouncing back and forth between our session and others.
It's also entirely possible I'm just overthinking the matter.

I don't get this. If you have three parallel sessions, you should be able to group the talks thematically, and you obviously put every talk in the sessions it fits best into. No?

@Karl That's exactly what I've got lined up currently: three sessions, divided thematically.  There are instances where more than one abstract from the same research group falls into the same theme/session.

And you don't know wether to put two talks from the same group into the same session, or one into the morning, and one in the afternoon session?

When you say "separated" and "grouped together", are you referring to time or space?

@Wildcard Good point: the sessions will be strictly sequential in time, and thus 'separated' and 'grouped' represent positions in time within the schedule. See edits.

@Karl Essentially, yes. I'm not sure whether to favor maintaining a subdivision of topics on a session-by-session basis, even if means multiple speakers from the same group will speak close to each other in time; or, if placing speakers from the same group in different sessions is important enough a consideration to accept the significant blending of disparate subtopics that would be required. My inclination is to the former.

This seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with etiquette.

@DavidRicherby Perhaps not, but running afoul of some aspect of etiquette of which I had been unaware was my main concern when originally asking the question. I could see it being regarded as a pure question of, e.g.,  logistics by some.

@hBy2Py OK, that's an understandable concern. And you didn't ask if it would be ethical. ;-)

I second aeismail's general advice:

You have to plan the symposium from the audience’s perspective, not the individual research group’s.

However, I derive a somewhat different conclusion from it.
First, order/group the presentations based upon their content, irrespective of who contributed them or who will present, e.g.:

Order talks in such a way that concepts are covered first, more concrete examples later.
Group talks by the presented area of application.
Possibly (if it is well accepted in the field that difficulties of works vary and more complex does not necessarily mean "better") order talks by increasing complexity.
etc.

Only then, if there is still some question about ordering or grouping, you may want to look at who are the contributors1. In that case, I'd prefer grouping works whose authors are connected, as that might allow to

shorten parts of the introduction (the personal introduction if it's the same author, the introduction of the context of application for talks related to the same project)
lessen the burden on the audience to wrap their minds around totally different contexts of application (all of which may be alien to the audience, despite being familiar with the discussed conceptual questions on a more abstract level)
get used to one style of presentation (at least if it's the same presenter)
reduce some confusion among listeners who may try to associate the talks with some external factors in their minds and might then wonder why they remember only (w.l.o.g.) four groups/presenters/projects for five talks. Seeing the two talks by the same presenter in direct succession makes it more obvious what is going on and may thus render it easier to form a mental image of the session structure.

1: I am having a hard time picturing a scenario where being from the same research group (in the sense of a research group as a team working together at one (w.l.o.g.) university with one professor as the lead) could be relevant in any way. Two contributions by either the same presenter (a very special case of "from the same research group") or from the same project/grant (which can, however, involve entirely different research groups from different institutions and parts of the world) seem like a more relevant case in the context of this question.

You have to plan the symposium from the audience’s perspective, not the individual research group’s.
Presenting multiple talks from the same group back-to-back or even within the same session can become tedious, even if the work is nominally “distinct.” If I were planning multiple sessions, I would avoid putting abstracts from the same group in the same session, but instead spread the pairs out evenly among the three sessions (if possible).
If your sessions are thematic, I’d still try to separate the talks within the session, so that the talks are not back-to-back, but perhaps “bookending” the session or nearly so.

That said, it may also be useful to group the sessions by subtopic, making things easier for other attendees who might only be interested in part of the symposium. That might make it more likely that a single group's talks end up in the same session, which I'd probably consider more useful than the mild tedium of possibly similar work being next to each other. It also might make it easier for the second speaker to assume things from the first rather than repeating them.

And from the individual research group's perspective, why travel to a conference to present to each other in a session? It will maximize the feedback and exposure and cross-pollination they can get if they are spread across the sessions.