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Why is it important to specify your source of funding in published papers and posters?
I was reading a paper online, and in a footnote, it read:

The author is supported by NSF grant DMS-0649473 and by a Simons Investigator Award.

Then it hit me, this information is completely useless to me as a reader. Why would I care what kind of funding the author have? The author for this instance has had every single kind of funding you can imagine, and at no time in my life was I ever interested in knowing any of it. This must be useful information for someone else.
But this is not the only place I see funding information being mentioned. In research posters, you tend to see a list of funding sources being mentioned at the top or the bottom of the poster, like brand names with their own little logos and everything. Again, they are completely meaningless to me. Sometimes I would recognise one of the sources of funding, but there usually isn’t a clear-cut relationship between the fund and the project, especially since a lot of them are government grants.
Can someone explain to me what would motivate one to mention his or her source of funding (or going even further by thanking the fund, award or grant)?

Surely they're saying thanks because they wouldn't have been able to do the research without having the money. Or am I missing something obvious here?

@astronat Then maybe they should thank their university stipend.

It is often required by the granting agency, for (I think) fairly obvious reasons.

@DavidKetcheson I've only been told to do it, but no one ever told me why. Didn't know it was a requirement.

For many reasons. E.g. to inform readers about possible biases.

@mystupid_acct Very interesting...never thought about this from that angle

@ProcrastinationSage I have seen STFC PhD studentships acknowledged in papers before.

@astronat Yes, but at this point I think it is mostly done out of habit, rather than some genuine expression of gratitude, therefore to me it is meaningless. It is like saying, I appreciate the generosity of my company for giving me a paycheck every Friday (otherwise certainly I would have starved out in the street and perished). Just a weird thing to say, IMHO.

The National Science Foundation in the U.S. requires such a statement. Done. At the same time, it also requires a statement that none of the opinions expressed in the papers reflect the viewpoints of the NSF. I imagine that the NSF (for example) has to promote their "brand" in order to get continuing funding from Congress (apparently ever more politicized, though maybe it was always so). Certainly we can imagine that the riffs that will "make the sale" to Congress in the U.S. are rather distant from scientific arguments, etc.

Even if the granting agency didn't require it, you may put it on as a subtle way of saying "Look!  I got a grant from them and you didn't!"

Several reasons.

Conflicts of Interest.  If you're doing climate change research that's funded by The Society of People Who Think Global Warming is Poppycock, you need to mention this. Organizations with a clear interest in a specific outcome are much more likely to produce research that affirms their desired outcome than they do those that refute it, regardless of the actual truth of the matter.  Researchers may perform ethically compromised science to satisfy the funding agency. Since organizational bias (and pressures they exert on their researchers) may not be known until after the fact, this information should always be mentioned so that we can always make the best judgment of the results in light of current knowledge.
Part of the point of funding you is so that the organization's name is out there and associated with (hopefully good) research.  If McDonald's funds your race car, you're expected to put a sticker or something on it with their name on it. Grants often include specific language requiring you to mention the grant in any work that directly utilizes it.
So the grant agency can track work done with their money. These agencies want to know that their money is being used appropriately and for good projects. They don't want to just throw large sums of cash out there willy-nilly.  Money isn't meaningless; it's worth something. This may even be required by law: if they are funded by a government, the government is going to want to know how the money is being used.  Without such tracking, funds can be misappropriated or embezzled, or wantonly wasted on clearly sub-standard proposals.

Your last point is the most important and presumably the only real reason.

@Walter Agreed, but it depends on the funding power; for other funding powers the other points are more important. The first is usually covered separately as well, but the second might be more important for smaller funding sources or funding sources named in honor of some donor or other individual.

+1 good summary. Actually, all points are relevant in different circumstances. But in short, acknowledgement goes to people to give them credit for a contribution, and same holds for the institutions, for slightly different reasons.

And for the third point, the funding agency can go to their funders and see "look how much good science we have enabled! give us more money for next year!".

@Walter The last point is not the only real reason. Funding information, especially for medical studies, often contains very salient information.

@Fomite: Things may indeed be very field-dependent then. In applied CS, funding information is usually the part of an article that is grudgingly added by authors (as it eats away another two lines from the precious space allowance) and will be gladly ignored by readers.

@O.R.Mapper Then it's the space restriction that's the problem, not the requirement to acknowledge funding. Why does CS set limits, in a world where storing additional text is close to free?

@JessicaB: There is a question about that.

@O.R.Mapper Thanks. That's a slightly different question, and I don't find any of the answers really convincing.

@JessicaB Habits are hard to change, and inertia is a powerful force in academia. You might think that CS, being the poster boy of a rapidly changing and increasingly digital world, would be immune to that.  But it's not. Possibly they're also borrowing the old high school essay rationale: the page limit forces you to reflect upon what's really important to say, and the best way to say it; as opposed to letting you ramble on, drunkenly stammering towards some semblance of a point.

There is also a technical reason: to prevent a certain form of a fraud.
Imagine you have grants from agencies A, B, C, and D. For all of these you will need to submit final reports that detail how you used the funding and what you achieved with it.
If the papers didn't contain any information about the source of funding, a dishonest academic could just take the list of all papers produced in their group, and submit a report to agency A claiming all of them were solely funded by the grant from A, and a similar report to agency B, etc. Each agency would think that you have produced a good number of papers in comparison with the volume of funding they are aware of, and they would be happy.
To prevent this, the agencies require that you can only list papers that explicitly acknowledge the source of funding. This way the above type of fraud is not possible. In essence, to submit convincing final reports you will have to have a research output that is somewhat proportional to the total amount of funding, even if you have multiple independent sources of funding.

The main concern for the reader will be conflicts of interest.  Acknowledging government or charity funds are an appropriate way for an an academic author to show their finding is impartial. If they have commercial funding, it is even more more important to disclose it. It may also be informative of the standard of the work or career stage of the researcher, just as authorship order or journals are indicative in many fields.
It is also polite to acknowledge those who contributed to the work. This includes advisor, employees, students, and finding bodies. It is especially important for funding bodies as they need to show that their finding had supported publishable results and the author needs to show these to get grants renewed. Including the funds in the work makes it easy for them to verify and search digital archives.
In short. This is common practice and recommended academic conduct.  You are not the only reader of the work and others will look for this.

They might be completely meaningless to you, but they may be meaningful to someone, and if you don't have it as a standard policy, you won't catch those edge cases.
In my experience, there are two major reasons, both of which are important:
"Credit Tracking" - What grant funded what is essential both for claiming projects on grant reports (many funding agencies won't let you claim a piece of work comes from a particular project unless it's in the funding line) and for the public perception of the program. To use two examples from my own work:

This project was supported in part by a research grant
  from the Investigator-Initiated Studies Program of Merck Sharp & Dohme.

In this particular case, Merck is actively proud of their investigator-initiated program, considers research publications to be the primary output, and wants people to know that.

This work was funded by NIH MIDAS Grant XXXXXXXX...

In this case, the NIH has a specific funding mechanism set up for a specific purpose involving a network of researchers. This is, essentially, marketing. "Remember that program we set up? This is part of that."
"Disclosure" - Knowing how a paper was funded can provide useful context. There was once a paper that made very little sense in terms of what they were doing until I realized that they were funded by a particular company, and essentially talking about that company's product without saying it's name. Then, suddenly, the specificity of what they were looking at made perfect sense.
It's also useful context - a study of the efficacy of an alcohol-based hand rub will be read in a different light if its funded by the NIH, a soap manufacturer, or the maker of the hand rub. Even if it's good science it's useful information, and disclosing it for everyone and ignoring it most of the time is better practice than hoping sometimes if it's relevant we find out about it.

"Then, suddenly, the specificity of what they were looking at made perfect sense." - in this particular case, I do not think a mention in the acknowledgments should have been required to compensate for an apparently lacking explanation in the introduction of the paper.

@O.R.Mapper It was perfectly clear what they were doing. "Why are they looking at that, there's no treatment that does tha...oh, they're pharma funded, that makes sense."

Yes, and such a rationale should go into the introduction, if it otherwise leaves the reader confused. Trying to imagine the situation you describe, a sentence such as "While a treatment whose effect is ... is currently still an open subject of research, this work examines the perspective of a pharmaceutical solution for ... in order to ..." would probably remove my confusion. But maybe norms are different in medicine compared to my field.

@O.R.Mapper All of that was clear. What was unclear was "Why in the universe of possible questions did you pick this one?" given medicine doesn't often do "interesting for it's own sake".

I'd expect the fact that the question is relevant to be established by pointing out a couple of papers or other resources that raise the question, or at least describe a situation that readers should be familiar with that would make the relevance of the question evident. And that would happen in the introduction. Again, norms may vary by field. For instance, I have never seen a paper justify why it picks a particular relevant question over any other relevant question (nor wondered why it would).

@O.R.Mapper Well, as fun as it's been, I'm not interested in a back and forth with you on my lived experience.

In a nutshell: because if you don't, then you won't have funding for your next paper.

@Joe_74 - Please keep your tone more civil. Threats are never appropriate.

@Yossi - I agree that this answer should be expanded, as the current answer (1) gives no rationale (why wouldn't I get more funding?) and (2) gives no context (does this apply for all agencies? all countries? all fields?). I appreciate that a witty answer feels fun, but we have many students and non-academics here who aren't familiar with academia, and answers like this are completely opaque to them.

I don't see a problem with this answer (in the context of the question). Newcomers in particular should be aware of the importance of this. Research costs money: equipment, consumables/reagents, and hiring staff. IF you don't acknowledge funding, the funding bodies will notice and refuse to fund you again. I don't know of many exceptions to this. It's hard enough to get and retain funding without compromising your chances.


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Applying for PhD position to multiple professors in the same department
I got interviewed by a potential supervisor but she said she couldn’t accept me because I have no research experience related to her projects. I still want to do research in her field; so I contacted some supervisor from the same department as her and will be interviewed next week.
I want to know if it is ok to contact another supervisor from the same department if she finds out about it.

Related: PhD admissions - Contacting multiple profs from the same university.

Well, all I can say is Academia is a small world.

It is ok, since she already told you no. It is your right to find new one and to apply to us many as possible positions.
I think you should know that if you would like to work on someone's projects, it is highly desirable to have experience.

Its absolutely fine. even if she did not give you a definite no and she told you that she has to think about it or she is not sure about her funding and stuff you are still free and fine to approach other people in her department. However, if you were asked that have you applied to anyone else to that department you should tell the truce. And it MIGHT even help to mention if you have a non-negative feedback from other colleagues in the department who do not have funding.

It is pretty Okay! I have faced the same situation. One professor rejected me, then I contacted to another, who accepted my candidature, and gave me an offer.
There is nothing bad doing so. Go ahead. Good luck!

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Should I cite a really bad research paper published in my small research area?
I am working on a special topic in applied math. We are trying to explore a new and largely unexplored area in our line of research. Our hope is to be the first researchers to have solid results in this new line of research.
Couple days ago, my co-author and I have stumbled upon a paper that is titled almost exactly as the topic that we wish to explore and publish.
However, upon further reading, we realized that the paper (despite being published in a journal) is actually very low quality. Not only that the theoretical guarantees does not support any of the applications in the paper, the theories themselves are also very poorly explained, definitions are missing, handwavy at times, and we suspect that the proofs are wrong, but cannot be verified due to author's lengthy and unconventional proof style, which involves some vague interpretation of results contained in other references, one of which is written in a language that is completely foreign to us and couldn't be found online after a quick Google search.
This isn't to say that the authors are cranks (even though the paper reads like one). The paper is roughly 10 pages. Properly formatted in the style of the journal. With ample (albeit, strange) diagrams. It is just that the results are confounding, suspicious, and paper is lacking in rigor, despite being peer reviewed and published in a journal.
For what it is worth, the authors are not working at a top-tier research institute and the journal is not the highest quality of this field.
What should we do when we start our writing process?

Should we painstakingly go through the process of providing a
critique of a paper that is written in such a way that it is difficult to critique (without dismissing it as poor writing)?
Or should we ignore the paper and pretend that we didn't see it? (Despite the fact we wish to work on the same, very specific, topic?)
Ultimately, what should you do when you see bad research papers like these?

Related1, but probably not a duplicate since in this case the paper is not unique. Related2 but here the questioner (me) is writing a review. Probably neither is a duplicate, but nonetheless the answers might be useful to you.

Is the journal in question recognised as a bona fide (as opposed to predatory) journal in your field?

A very relevant point raised by @user2390246 which I should edit into my answer depending on what comes up !..

Is your aim to provide an exhaustive overview of the field? If not, what speaks against ignoring (irrelevant) prior results in the field, regardless of their quality? If they’re relevant to your findings, the answer changes.

@user2390246 he is organizer of the same journal he published in

"organizer" meaning ... what? An editor? This can mean a lot as well as nothing at all depending on context. I think the main point is, is this a at least marginally relevant journal?

The paper must be acknowledged as proper research is based on published literature. You don’t really need to provide some passionate negative critique of the paper like you’ve done here. You can merely point out main reasons why it could not be included in your analysis directly. However I am sure many of the points you raised here should be fairly straightforward to be clarified by the first author (e.g. some relevant passage in seemingly alien language). It would be better to state you’ve tried to clarify key points you couldn’t understand on your own. You never know: perhaps not everyone agrees in that the previous paper is that unclear.

Citing this paper will also help others who, perhaps coming across this questionable paper's title at some later time, might think the paper had been overlooked by others and then waste time tracking it down and looking over it to learn what you've [the OP] already spent time learning.

@DaveLRenfro Exactly. I have been on both sides of this situation before. I have cited papers which I did not find 100% sound, which often contradicted what I was trying to state. And I have been left out of subsequent papers which overlapped with my conclusions. Remarkably so, in a recent case. I think ignoring relevant literature looks quite bad on the authors.

Yes you should cite it because:

You know about that paper
You read it in the context of preparing your work. Finding gaps and flaws in previous works is a major part of designing and refining your own research
By your own judgement it’s highly relevant.

Explain your rebuttal of their claims or method using proper scientific arguments. If I were you I would refrain from using words like “hand waving” or “cranks” in a scientific context.
Whether or not you are the first to discover something isn’t really something you can control. It’s possible that they actually did find something of value but were bad at communicating it. From what you say there seem to be still time for you to be the first to get it right but you won’t achieve that by ignoring previous work.

This seems to me like it doesn't really engage with the situation described by the question. Enlightened One is describing a paper so badly written that they cannot even determine the argument being made, not one where they are sure the argument has rebuttable flaws. A critique of such a paper inevitably isn't going to involve any "scientific arguments" (or mathematical ones, or whatever - we don't know that the OP's field is a science); it's going to involve painfully picking apart one significant sentence at a time to explain how there's no possible interpretation of it that makes sense.

You have stated that you "wish to explore and publish" on this narrow topic. This suggests that you have not yet achieved the result you want to publish.
Understanding this paper, and determining whether it is correct or not, may benefit you in your own exploration. If that is not likely, then perhaps an understanding of its failings or virtues will become clear as your own (correct) work evolves, and citing it will not be as problematic as it currently seems.
If you do reach results that conflict with those in the published work, then citing the prior publication is as simple as a sentence stating that that is the case, and your own clear proofs are sufficient explanation.
If your result is essentially in agreement with theirs, in order to claim to be the first with "solid results", you'll have to give readers at least an assertion that the prior paper did not beat you to it. If the paper is really unreadable, you can do as Sander Heinsalu suggested and find one proof you can refute. If the field is interesting enough that someone will find your paper, it seems unlikely they will permanently miss the other one.

If you can find a counterexample to one of the paper's proofs without too much work, then this would be critique enough, I think. You are lucky to be working in mathematics, where the falseness of a claim can be clearly shown.
I would not spend too much time on providing a critique. Ignoring the paper is what most people would do in this situation, but is unethical. Some journals' Guidelines for Authors explicitly require citing all relevant literature.

It is well worth a reference.  Firstly because it illustrates that your specific field is not just yourselves but that there is some general interest.  Secondly in your introduction you might point out how your framework makes it much clearer to grapple with "this poorly understood" realm.  Thirdly you can be explicit and say your results are independent and not based-on or rely-on theirs.  This means that if their paper is later shown to be based on fairy-dust then yours won't fall like a domino.  Fourthly, can your results be shown to be more specific, more general or more stable etc. than theirs?  Do they conjecture and you prove?  This of course illustrates the value of your approach over theirs.

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Paving one's way out of academia
The current research climate favors the proliferation of many early-career-stage researchers (PhD students, postdocs) who have not enough places to go if they want to stay in academic research (recent Nature article on the issue). The amount of research-based positions in industry is arguably even more limited.
The limited amount of overall positions available make competition fierce and, even when successful, often one needs to be flexible to relocate, including moving to a new country. This all gets increasingly difficult as one becomes older and family, mortgage, etc. start to be parameters in the equations.
Doing a PhD + (one, two, three...) postdoc(s) usually makes you highly specialized in a field/discipline, but also gives you skills that can potentially be very valuable in the general job market: dedication, technical writing, analytical skills, ability to quickly learn new things, possibly proficiency with computers including coding... to name a few. I am however a bit skeptical of how much these abilities are appreciated by the average employer, and there is also the issue of how to adapt to (i.e. how to feel motivated at) a "boring" "normal" job after spending several years in the exciting and challenging world of research.
While I would ideally like to keep doing research, all the points above make me fear that at some point I will just need to seek a job outside academia, and I want to be prepared. My question is for those who have made the transition out of academia or are in senior positions and have witnessed people (un)successfully making it out. How does one pave his way out of academia? What skills are useful to develop in order to have good chances to make a successful transition? What strategies to follow and which behaviors should be avoided?
I work in condensed-matter physics, so answers specifically pertaining to STEM disciplines are particularly welcome.

The answer to this will depend on the field. CS PhDs are likely to have some programming skills, English PhDs, maybe not. The kinds of skills that you cultivate in grad school will depend on what kind of job you want when you get out. There are plenty of non-research industry jobs for talented CS (and maybe other STEM) PhDs, but a PhD in Political Science might not qualified for. They might be qualified for policy work, though, where the CS/STEM students are not.

@BillBarth I'm in physics, I will add that to the question.

Believe me, jobs in industry can be just as exciting and challenging as in academia. It all depends very much on what you compare.

@Miguel: In physics, there are likely large differences between people developing solid state devices, photovoltaic cells, batteries, etc, and people who are doing quantum loop gravity or theoretical particle physics. It all depends on how applied it is what you are doing.

@WolfgangBangerth I do computational materials modelling.

How does one pave his way out of academia?

Ideally you will want to get a non-academic job. You should start listing possible careers which you might consider. Contact friends or former lecturers who have quit academia and learn about what they have done. Maybe get involved in something on the side. For example, a friend of mine, who is now a lecturer at a university, previously did an internship at an investment bank while he was a postdoc in the US. It gave him some credentials for his Plan B, even though he didn't execute it.
It is important to have non-academic connections. Maybe go to some meetup groups in different areas. I got my job while I was a visiting lecturer because one of the profs at the university at which I was working took pity on me and mentioned to a friend of his that I was looking for a job.

What skills are useful to
  develop in order to have good chances to make a successful transition?

In STEM areas, computing is essential. If you have never coded, learn how by trying a small project. If you have, consider learning more languages. Look at job ads to see what skills they are looking for.

What strategies to follow and which behaviors should be avoided?

It is perfectly possible to work on a Plan B without committing yourself to leaving academia. I've seen a lot of people do this. For example, one of the best graduate students I've ever seen used to attend seminars to brush up on his mathematical finance, in case he needed it. (He never has.)
For me, the biggest obstacle was the sunk cost. All those years of study and the sacrifices made in order to do a PhD in "my" area wasted.

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Are dressing habits at poster presentations influenced by implicit sexism in STEM disciplines?
I am currently attending the meeting of the American Chemical Society and was surprised by the way people were dressed for the poster presentations. In particular, many young women (and some young men) seemed to be dressed for a night out (tight clothes, heels, make up, etc.). This is not what I'm used to in European or international meetings (including international meetings at the US). More senior female (and male) researchers were wearing clothes I'm more used to in this kind of setting.
This made me wonder: is there some sort of implicit sexism at play here, and do some of these young female researchers feel the need to impress other researchers (both male and female) with their appearance?
I probably should also add that I usually attend physics meetings rather than chemistry meetings, where the ratio of female/male is much higher (we really need to work on improving this in physics). So perhaps dressing habits are simply different across fields.

This question seems to be a duplicate of http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11618/what-do-people-usually-wear-to-conferences

@TomChurch My question is about implicit sexism in dressing habits, I don't think it's a duplicate of that particular question.

If your question is "do some of these ... researchers feel the need to impress other researchers ... with their appearance", I don't think this is an appropriate question for this site -- it simply isn't possible to answer it.

My experience at mathematics conferences: the young people dressed more formally are the ones looking for jobs.

It's funny, I always found American conferences to be much more laid back in terms of dress code than European ones.

My experience is that young (American) people often feel uncomfortable in business-casual type clothing, because they are not used to it. Perhaps these people are just wearing the clothes that they feel most confident in, and the culture in this meeting allows it.

Have you considered that maybe it is sexism on your part that made you realize what the women were wearing?

You do understand that e.g., high heels and make up constitute  the formal appearance for women in most Western business settings.

@StrongBad It would be sexism if what they were wearing made me judge their work differently, which is not the case. I am not judging anybody. I find your comment very cynical.

".. seemed to be dressed for a night out .." !! may be there is a night out plan after the session. After a long (sometime boring) day of conference, got almost drunk during the poster session and then had to bar/pub with the other young people you met during the conference!!!

Wait is the female/male ratio in physics higher or lower in physics than in chemistry? I would expect lower, also given the parenthical sentense

This made me wonder: is there some sort of implicit sexism at play here, and do some of these young female researchers feel the need to impress other researchers (both male and female) with their appearance?

It is certainly possible that this is because of some sexist problems in this specific society / community that are not present in the international community. However, given Occam's Razor, I think we should assume that the more simple and straightforward answer is that this is just a regional peculiarity of these meetings, and that we should not extrapolate too much from this without further evidence.
It is not at all uncommon for individual conferences or communities to develop their own standards and behavioral patterns. Basically, this is true for each event where students are likely to attend over multiple years, hence can learn from their experience in the year past. Assume, for instance, that you are a young female PhD student that attends such a meeting for the first time in casual wear, and you see many other students in a similar career phase dressing more formally. Would you not bring more formal clothing next time? I don't think that this should be qualified as "feeling the need to impress", or as any problem that needs addressing.
It is also not overly weird to see more senior people wear differently - they have been attending this meeting for a long time, and (a) don't care much about the current dress code culture, and (b) have probably been nurtured at a time when the dress code was completely different anyway. These things change over time.
Also keep in mind that your own expectation of what is "normal" wear in conferences has also likely not been set in stone from day 1, but is the product of what you have seen in "other conferences". There is no god-given law that jeans are more natural to wear to a conference than nice dresses, heels, or suits.
(Actually, in most non-science conferences, it is normal to dress rather formally, so one can argue that what you have seen in your conference is closer to "normal" than what you are used to)

Thanks, this is a good answer. I will wait for other people before accepting it. I agree that each community develops their own subculture and me being new to this community might be the reason why it's shocking to me.

The way people dress is their own business, I don't know how you conclude sexism out of it. You could go with an old never washed before shirt or wear your nice clothes for the conference. People are there in the conference to learn/present ideas and their contributions.
Your conclusion on sex/sexuality of individuals based on their clothes, should be kept to yourself.

I don't see how you conclude I conclude sexism. I am precisely asking if there is sexism present.

I am not sure why this gets downvoted. I have seen people being treated with open or indirect sexism - this is utterly unacceptable. It's toxic, it's evil. However, I find it very questionable that the dress-up of people in conferences is being the target of a question. No, the OP does not directly imply sexism, but the OP's question is as neutral as asking: "is my office mate stealing my data?" It is not up to us to judge other people's dressing habits at a professional event, and already if we put a question about that, it implies in my opinion an - ever so slight - prejudice.

+1. This a 1000 times. A pretty woman or a handsome guy at a conference may dress as she or he likes. Why should a woman (or a guy) downplay her/his looks? To fit in? People at a conference should be judged by their research output and if some beautiful woman / handsome guy produces good research then more kudos to them

@Alexandros I do not understand why you are assuming I am judging anybody. I have observed a clear difference between how young and senior researchers were dressed at the poster presentations. I did not observe this same trend among the males (at least not to the same extent). Since there is a clear gender asymmetry I am trying to understand if this arises from sexism.

@Miguel Because as I said in my other comment: Women in professional settings wear make up and high heels. Also walking in any European city, you will see that tight jeans / trousers is the default dress code for young women. Your question assumes that this is peculiar, when it is not. Women coming to conference dinner with sneakers and baggy clothes is more strange, when you seem to assume to be the norm.

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Extensive introduction in an incremental paper?
Suppose I'm writting a (mathematics) paper proving that a famous conjecture is true in yet another special case. Should the introduction to the paper include extensive background explaining why this conjecture is important and what is already known?
On one hand, my first instinct is that, of course, if I'm writting a paper on a certain subject, I should explain the relevant background to my reader. If there were relatively few papers on this subject, there would not be any need for this question.
However, if I were to be totally honest, my introduction would go something like this:

A lot of people have worked on Conjecture X. For instance, in [1] {insert name of a famous mathematician} proves that Conjecture X is true for all flabby sheaves*. Here, I show the same conjecture for fine sheaves, for basically the same reasons. I could explain why, but you'll be better off reading the introduction to [1] instead, so I won't bother.

Is it a bad practice to write a more polite version of the above instead of a genuine introduction?
There is also a matter of citations, which work out very differently in the two sceniarios: in the latter case there would be much fewer. It's not the most crucial consideration, but I would be interested to hear if it is a separate reason to avoid minimalistic introductions like that.

*) The conjecture I'm talking about has nothing to do with algebraic geometry and I myself know nothing about algebraic geometry beyond the very basics. I'm only talking about sheaves because I'm enamoured with their terminology.

The answer fundamentally depends on who the audience for the result is.
If you are addressing people familiar with the conjecture, then your introduction makes sense, because it consisely conveys the information they would be looking for. In the rare case that a novice reader comes across your paper, they may be a bit put off, but can still follow your reference to read the introduction there.
If there is a reason why people not familiar with the conjecture should care about your paper, then you should give those people more. In particular, you'll need to tell them why exactly they should care.

Well, I would not write in the same style you wrote, but a similar, even if diluted a bit, message:

Conjecture X on flobby heaps is a major question in modern flap theory. Borkington (2014) proved that Conjecture X is true for all flabby shoves of discrete curvature. In the following, we use the terminology from Kal El (2015). The essential idea of this work generalised Kal El (2015): we postulate that flobby heaps are not only flabby on shoves, but also flippy for fine sheaves. The essential difference to prior works (Barkington 1888, Sockington 1999, Kal El, 2015) is that we iteratively construct a Noether pyramid of flobby flabs (Torkington, 2001) in slob space to show flippiness.

Notice that I would recycle the terminology (it still needs to be briefly introduces, but the lengths can be spared), but keep the motivation. You need to say what are you doing, how it is different from what others did, and why does it matter.


text:
Appendices to other people's papers - what's the incentive?
I've noticed several instances of papers in mathematics which include an appendix written by someone who is not among the authors of the main body of the paper (for instance, here).
I'm quite curious about this practice (I don't have a practical reason for asking, except for wanting to understand academic environment a little better). Specifically:

What's the motivation for the authors to for this kind of partition? It seems that it would be entirely within the ethical and cultural norms to simply write a joint paper, or to write two independent papers. Joint paper seems like a much easier option, two disjoint papers is simpler and more clear cut (and a cynical person might add - produces more citations).
For the sake of keeping track of publications (for the sake of CV, citation counts, etc.) does the author of an appendix count as being one of the authors of the paper, not being among the authors of the paper, or being the sole author of the appendix which counts as an independent publication?

1) The results of an appendix are usually much less significant than the results of the main paper.  It usually would not be within the cultural norms to produce a joint paper, because the authors of the appendix did not actually contribute to the important parts of the paper; in mathematics, a 3%-5% contribution doesn't usually warrant adding an author to a 2 or 3 author paper.  It would be possible to publish the appendix separately, but only in a bottom-tier journal that accepts any contribution that is correct and not plagiarized (or at least a much less well-regarded journal), at which point the appendix may very well get more attention attached to a somewhat important paper rather than buried in some obscure journal.  Also, producing a separate paper is more work, because the authors would need to write an introduction, set notation, restate the results of the main paper, and so on.
2) Only idiots care about these counts.  If an insignificant contribution of the kind you would put in an appendix actually matters for your career, you're doing quite poorly as a research mathematician.  (Exception: sometimes a top mathematician will write an appendix whose contents would be considered significant if produced by me but are still rather insignificant in the context of their work.)  If your university gives you a raise or a bonus per paper, they are idiots, and you should discuss with your dean beforehand how an appendix will be treated.

"Only idiots care about these counts. [...] they are idiots [...]" - You should rephrase these sentences... Especially since this does not answer his second questions at all.

"Only idiots care about these counts": Do you realize that in certain countries (not too few, actually), like it or not, among those idiots there are governments that on the basis of those counts decide career progresses, university funding etc? And that you cannot discuss the point with anyone?

In most cases that I've seen, it seems that the contribution of the appendix is small, but could easily be argued to be > 10% (which is sometimes cited as the threshold for authorship). To the best of my knowledge, contributions at about 3% would normally be handled by thanking the other person in the acknowledgements and pointing out that they provided said contribution. As for bottom-tier journals - it seems to me that the way that papers attract attention these days is through being noticed on arXiv, or reached through citations, or found through googling, regardless of journal.

As pointed out in other comments - that's a pretty strong wording... I'm not really asking whether writing appendices to people's papers will further one's academic career (which is the question which you seem to be answering). I'm just curious about how various practical (and arguably trivial) matters are handled in this situation.

I don't think there is a standard way for the trivial matters to be handled.

@MassimoOrtolano: The mathematical community should conspire against these governments by creating silly authorships.  If I were in a situation where it mattered, I would gladly add X as an author, and put at the end of the introduction "X was responsible only for section A, which we would normally consider an appendix with X as the author, but we have included X as an author for this paper since is government/university gives her (department) $3K for every paper."

Alexander, many scientific communities try to fight every day against such evaluation practices (which can also lead to bad scientific practices like the creation of citation rings), with newspaper articles, actions against the government etc. Do you really think that your proposal would have any effect apart from making a few people laugh? Without offense, but you probably have a limited view of the global academic world: please, don't be simplistic.

"there are governments that on the basis of those counts..." yes: only idiots care about these counts. Such metrics are entirely non-scientific. Sadly people have to care about what the idiots think, even if they don't care about various "counts" themselves. (+1 Alexander :-)


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pros and cons of submitting a conference paper in first round vs second round
I am not very familiar with the pros and cons of submitting a conference paper in the first round vs second round. In particular I am referring to the dates given for FG 2021 here -  http://iab-rubric.org/fg2021/important_dates.html.
I would prefer to submit in the second round as it gives me more time. However, is there a chance that there would be no second round if sufficient papers have been accepted in the first round? Could someone briefly explain to me the first round and second round process. Thank you!

The conference's important dates precisely mention both dates, namely the first and the second submission rounds. Although I understand your worries, I do not explicitly see on the CfP that the two overlap.
So I would suggest you to move as you planned. But! In any case, since those sensitive matters are not well defined, you can easily send an e-mail to the respective organizing committee/program chairs with your question. Thats what I would do if I were you.


text:
Cannot publish my research as I am a sole author
I am a Dr in Statistic. At my PhD journey, I developed four new ideas. During my study, I tried to publish my first paper. Therefore, I sent it to three different high-quality journals. They all rejected it.
The first one said that my method is very reasonable, but the data does not follow the scope of their journal. The second one said that the idea is excellent, but the area that my method was in is a black box. One rejected reasons is that, how can I wrote in this area, alone!!. Another reason is that my paper is out of their journal scope. The last journal rejected it and gave me several comments. All their comments regarding my method were wrong. Their comments reflect that the reviewers are not expert in my area. Then they told me that I should ask someone to be a co-author as they do not expect me to be a sole author for this complicated topic.
After these bad experiences with these three journals, I stopped sending my paper to any journals. After I graduated, I again start writing new research. Then sent it to a new journal. However, it also rejected, as it does only cover a small region. Surprisingly, they have published a region paper that does nothing more than finding the Pearson coefficient between variables! And it has been written by several professors and doctors. While my research does a lot of statistical works.
From these experiences,  I found that each journal asked me for my publication record. Therefore, I feel that journals rejected my paper because I have no publication records.
As a new researcher, if journals do not publish my paper, so how can I build my publishing record?
My question is: Do you think I cannot publish my paper as a sole author if I have not already had a publication record? In other words, do you think being a sole author (with no publication record) is a reason beyond rejecting my paper?!
How can I publish my paper as a new researcher? Must I include co-author in my research, while they do nothing?!
Any advices, ideas, comments?

I do not think all of them reject it because you are the sole author. I think they would like that you have a co-author or other persons who discuss the paper with you before submission, because it sounds like it has some flaws that you do not acknowledge. You blame it on the reviewers, on the journals, on being the sole author, but do not consider that you may still need to invest more work in the paper. If the paper was that good, not all of the journals would have rejected it for dubious reasons. Do not give up, but use the comments that you already got from reviewers to improve the paper.

" I found that each journal asked me for my publication record."  This sounds unlikely.

@allo Thanks a lot for your comment. I have acknowledged my supervisors. I did not get any comments. The comments of the last journals were wrong. I have discuss their comments with experts, who agreed that their comments are not true at all.

@Anonymous Physicist Thanks for your comments. It has been happened with me.

You could also try to submit one of your papers to a relevant conference with double blind reviewing process. In such a manner you could ensure that your publication record and lack of co-authors are not considered in the acceptance decision.

Publishing is a painful experience, and everybody gets rejected most of the time. That you got 3 rejections on the same paper is perfectly normal. The comments in the reviews can be brutal and sometimes they are wrong. That can be infuriating, especially if they are both. In short, publishing requires a very thick skin; learn what you can from the reviews. Even if the comments are wrong, they may point you to a passage in your paper that was hard to understand. But don't take them personally, and persevere.
Previous publications are not required before publishing, and co-authors are not required to publish. You should definitely not add them "while they do nothing". However, doing a joint project with an experienced researcher can be a valuable way to learn "how the process works".

This answer seems highly field dependent. It is certainly not the case in all fields that "everybody gets rejected most of the time".

+1 for learning from "wrong" reviews. If the reviewer got confused, chances are other readers will, too.

I would more strongly make the case that if the reviewer was confused, that is YOUR fault. This means the paper did not explain clearly enough. Your paper should be clear to both people who are experts in your area and people who are experts in semi-related areas. If they criticized something you know to be correct, that means you need to more clearly justify your choices or explain your rationale in the paper.


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FZ grade and PhD application
I am graduate of Toronto University. In my master program, I, unfortunately, fail an elective course. I took an extra course to offset the credit and I pass.My overall grade is A- (except for the FZ one!).
I am intending to apply for a PhD. However, my transcript has an FZ which may be will interfere with the application procedure since UofT is very competitive Uni.
Can anyone please suggest me if it would be a good plan to retake the course (fail course)? Suppose I got a good grade, what would be the improvement?
or, any other way I can impress the admission authority.
NB. Other than this FZ (I call it as a disaster in my academic career), I have a good academic record.
Thank you in advance for your time and be with my worries.
A person with a passion for research!

Can you explain what an FZ is?

Ask UofT about the replacement grade for one, and ask the place where you apply for the PhD...


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At a conference, should I visit other people's posters during my poster session?
Usually, conferences give you between 1-2 hours to present your poster. My dilemma is that sometimes I am interested in learning about other posters during that time period. But I also have to keep next to my poster in case a referee or a potential collaborator of the conference comes and wants to learn about my topic.
So my question is what should I do? Should I stay next to my poster and try to talk to the other poster attendees afterward or should I visit their poster and risk missing out on potential important visitors to my poster?

Should, should... I think you "should" relax a bit :-D And just naturally follow what you feel driven for ;-) of course responsibility is part of that but I feel like you need to up the other elements now :-D

It depends on the venue. In a small room, you can easily wander around and get back to your poster quickly if you spot someone interested. In a huge conference hall, if you abandon your poster you may never know who visited it and when.
So, if you have a large venue, ask yourself, what is your priority: to get your work out and have a chance of presenting yourself, or to check out what others are doing. Both are valid options, and both are important. It's your call how to balance them.

Someone should probably stay by your poster throughout. If there is no one there it won't generate much of any interest. Posters are seldom so self explanatory that people will gain much without a bit of help. Perhaps a colleague or even your professor would be willing to help you out for a portion of the time required.
But it should be someone who can answer questions and someone who can quickly find you. Make sure that if you have to leave it, that you have something by which people can contact you. A hand-out is good, or even a business card.

Dear Buffy, congratulations on 100k! :)

If there's anyone else from your group at the conference, they could easily look after your poster for 5 minutes at a time, while you browse a few others.  If it's a co-author, they could cover half an hour.  I've done this at almost every poster session I've been to (as I've been presenting myself or had colleagues who were).

Although it sounds plausible, is it actually true? I've seen crowds standing around interesting posters, with no-one knowing where the author/presenter was. And I've found that if the presenter isn't practiced, it feels much less awkward to read the poster in detail.

For the following I assume a conference with at most a few hundred participants that is well organised, i.e., early poster session(s), and posters can stay on display for the entire conference.
In my experience, there are basically two kinds of “customers” you can attract with a poster, with little middle ground in between:

People for whom skimming your poster suffices that they want to talk to you about it. These people will usually make an effort to contact you even if you are not present at your poster or if you are busy at the moment they are visiting.
People who get lured into a guided tour of your poster by you talking them into it or by joining a running guided tour. Importantly there are some people who are much more likely to join a guided tour than to ask for one if you are alone at your poster.

The last point leads to a positive feedback loop (customers beget customers), which in extreme cases can lead to such situations as I once experienced: I hardly got any customers during the first half of the poster round (partially due to my poster being in a unfavourable location) and afterwards I was overrun and busy until long after the official end of the session.
With this in mind, I suggest:

In the beginning, stay at your poster and shamelessly try to talk people into guided tours. When everything else fails, explain your poster to the author of the poster next to you (and vice versa). If everything goes well, you will be busy for the entire session.
Only leave your poster if it becomes clear that the majority of the audience has stopped browsing posters, so you do not get any customers of the second kind anymore. Be patient; if you are amongst the first poster presenters to do so, you are almost certainly doing it to early.
Make it very easy for customers of the first kind to contact you: Put your e-mail address and a portrait of you on the poster.
Find out early which other posters you want to see. Most conferences facilitate this by either publishing abstracts of posters, having a poster flash, or allowing posters to be displayed before the session. This way you can solicit guided tours of those posters from their owners outside of the poster session. Ideally briefly inform the owners of your interest before or during the poster session – this way both sides can work towards it.

As for making it easy to contact you: consider putting a QR code on your poster that links to to a website with your paper & contact info. Assume people find typing email addresses on their phone unpleasant. Make it so that people can just take a picture of your poster (so: clear researcher name and paper title on it) or scan a QR code for later follow-up.

Break the rules, and don't do it during the poster session!
Before the poster session starts you quickly put up your poster (there is usually a time-slot for that with large margin) and then you look around to find if any of the other posters are interesting.
Be prepared that the other poster presenters are busy and/or missing from their poster, but at least you know which ones to contact and don't have to leave your posters to find the interesting ones.

How is this "breaking the rules"?

It's not during the dedicated poster session, and it technically doesn't answer the question about how look at other posters during the poster session. Obviously if everyone is allowed to look at posters before the poster session (as is often the case) you don't really break the conference rules.

Split the time allocated to the poster session 50/50.  If your poster designation is odd be at your poster for the first half of the session. If it’s even, then the second half.  Use the other half to look at other posters.
If the conference organizers are really on top of things, they may already have some system like this setup, in which case follow their system. If they don’t, use the conference feedback forms to suggest it and get as many fellow attendees as possible to do so.   With any luck the organizers will implement the idea in the future.  Be prepared for a several year effort though and to keep reinforcing the message once you get it.  Back when I was in graduate school, a campaign like this was mounted at AAPT and it was only in my last couple of years that the policy finally got implemented.  However, after being away from the conference for a while, I didn’t notice it happening at the most recent, so it might have lapsed due to insufficient positive reinforcement (though I didn’t present a poster this time, so I might have missed the memo).

"If your poster designation is odd be at your poster for the first half of the session. If it’s even, then the second half."  This is arbitrary and adds nothing of value.  If everybody does it, then half will be away from their posters during the only times you can walk around to see them.

Of course it’s arbitrary.  What matters is that you have a system for deciding which half of the poster session you’re at the poster and which half you’re not.  This particular system which I have experienced so that’s what I put down.  As for the “everybody does it” argument, there is no avoiding that.  Unless you’re going to give each poster presenter an individual chance to wander the posters while all the other presenters are obligated to stay at their poster (something which is time prohibited at all but the smallest poster sessions) any system will have this problem.

It is probably OK, but don't just walk off and abandon your poster if the other posters are in another room.  In some conferences the posters are split throughout several rooms, so I think it's fine to look at the other posters in your room but not to go to the others.
For example, they might want to take a photo of you with the poster and then just take a photo of the poster by itself if you aren't there.  Essentially, if have lost sight of your poster for more than twenty seconds, that's not ideal.


text:
Do professors starting at a school in the US in the future have any say/influence on the decision process for that particular round of admissions?
I'm a master's student applying to PhD programs this round, and a few schools will be bringing in new professors in my field of interest starting from 2021. When I sent in my applications and checked off faculty of interest, I chose "Other" and wrote their names down.
I'm just curious if these professors have any say in the admissions process? Does the school grant access to the information for those professors even if they're not yet officially affiliated with the institution?

As far as I know, my department does not ordinarily involve future faculty in the admissions process for graduate students. On the other hand, if a future faculty member told us "I understand that student X is interested in working with me and I'd be really pleased if you'd admit her" then that would certainly carry some weight with the admissions committee. If we had nothing from the prospective adviser but the student had said "I'd like to work with Prof. Y", then an alert member of the admissions committee might email or phone Y and ask about that student.

I'm incoming faculty for 2021, and I have been given access to the admissions system and asked to review relevant students. So it seems like the correct answer is that it varies from school to school!

@JHare I think both your situation and the OP's are not standard for the US: in many schools, the hiring for Fall 2021 is not yet done, and would not be finalized before we start reviewing PhD students.  Though things might also vary quite a bit by department not just school.

The US does not have a national higher education system. Policies vary by State by institution, and possibly even by field. Moreover, what is appropriate in one field may not be in another. There are likely also different policies in place for the consideration of candidates with baccalaureates only, vs those with masters degrees.
My guess is that the most common system is to have a committee review all candidates to attempt to assure fairness and even treatment. Such committees will have policies set, perhaps, at the department level or, perhaps, at a higher level. In most fields, professors don't sponsor candidates as they do in some other countries.
Such policies might include the opportunity for exceptions in some cases, or at least taking informal advice from outside the committee. But it is also possible that policies are strictly observed - fairness, again.
On the other hand, if a new faculty member expresses an interest in a particular person, especially in a field in which the advisor needs to be chosen at entry, then their views would probably be considered and even have some weight. How much weight is impossible to say.
On the third hand, I think that if the new hire were at an entry level, Assistant Professor with no prior experience, that they won't have any leverage at all, other than a sense on the part of more senior faculty that a collegial atmosphere is good to establish.
Thus, I would expect that at most institutions, the "boost" such an applicant would get would be small and tenuous. But possible.

As far as I know, in most schools there is a committee made up of professors and administrators that decides on which students get invited for interviews (or gets offer letters). While the committee members may take your interest into account, I do not think that the newly recruited professors would be part of this committee, so they likely wouldn't be directly involved in the process.
However, again depending on the university, the committee may ask different faculty members to review students and I assume newly incoming faculty might be included in the process. And even if the new faculty may not be an official reviewer, the committee may still reach out for their opinion.
So I'd say it won't hurt to include the new professors in the 'faculty of interest' category, but I would not have this be my only choice--just in case that at his university incoming faculty member opinions are not considered.


text:
Can I ask to be assigned to another project, if the ones I'm on seem unsuccessful?
I'm doing my MSc. in Computational Mathematics in Central Europe. Right after finishing my Bachelor's degree I began to work in our National Supercomputing Center, a research institute that is associated with the university where I'm studying. It is considered quite a prestigious position in my country. Because of this offer I quit my job in the industry.
At first, I was enthusiastic about the research topic and after several months I was assigned to the second project (completely different from the first one).
This job began to consume almost all my time, so I gave up all my free-time activities and devoted myself just to this research. Because of the amount of work here I got into some serious problems with school projects and exams, but, so far, I managed to pass them.
In the first project my job is the implementation of some direct solvers, but some time ago we found out, that the technology used in the implementation is not suitable to our problem at all, so this solver will be useful just in some special cases, or possibly, it'll be unusable at all.
The second project appeared well - we managed to write some papers and tried to publish them. This week I found out that all of them were rejected.
Now I feel terribly disappointed and inferior to the others. All my colleagues have some publications, because, their other projects are usually successful. I'm working on two projects, where both of them are now just a waste of time for me, because I'm not going to have even one publication from them.
Normally I would try to discuss this with our team leader, but, to be honest, I'm scared to do that. He's not very sympathetic to the fact I'm still studying nor to the fact I'm there just for part-time job, so I shouldn't be working this much. I'm afraid he'll simply tell me, that in my position I should be glad to be working there at all, or something like that.
I'm not asking about some "improvement" of my personal feelings, as in How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student? - I'd rather like to know, if it's a common situation and if I can ask to be assigned to another research topic (I have no prior experience with research, so I don't know if it's considered impolite etc.).

It's not clear whether you're asking about overcoming your demotivation, or whether you are asking about talking to the team leader about assigning you to a different project..

(Note this answer in particular, which I think is especially relevant to your situation.)

If you want to know about etiquette, you should specify what country you're in. You should also provide more information about the kind of workplace (is it a research institute associated with the university where you're studying? a private research institute? a government research institute?) The workplace etiquette will depend very much on those things.

@ff524 I've added those details into my question.

When you add details to your question, you can just add them "naturally" into the narrative. No need to separately mark the edits, anyone can look at the revision history to see what edits have been made.

"we managed to write some papers and tried to publish them" Mm... if you tried to publish several papers in parallel, this might be a misguidance on the part of your advisor.

We tried to publish 3 papers to 3 different conferences. And I'm not sure about "standard" publication procedures, but, obviously it could've been done better :-)

"We tried to publish 3 papers to 3 different conferences". You have not written a paper before and you co-wrote 3 papers in basically 1 year, working part-time? A good paper in many disciplines needs at least 1-2 full years when written by a novice PhD student. No wonder, that those papers got rejected.

@Alexandros I was not personally writing the paper. I was assigned as a co-author, because I was working on the research and so, those results were partly my work. All the writing was "physically" done/supervised by our project coordinators.

It is not the writing that takes 1-2 years. It is coming up with a novel solution and implementing it that takes all this time. In my CS discipline, the first good paper written by a PhD student takes at least 1-2 years, mainly because a) literature review b) coming up with a better algorithm / method c) implement the new method d) implement the old methods for comparing your work against them and so-on. None of this, can be done for 3 concurrent good papers in six months. Period.

@Alexandros I guess it was because of some deadlines the coordinators wanted to met, that we needed to publish so many papers almost at once. But, you're apparently right...


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Do you think a computational math student should go to student seminars about pure math?
I am a first year graduate student with thesis topic on computational math, in particular inverse problem. Based on what I know, this area requires a solid background of functional analysis and numerical PDE.
Currently I am wondering what kinds of seminars I should attend. My department have weekly student seminars on analysis and theoretical PDE. Basically students presenting their work/research output to their supervisor. As this post and the great mathematician Terence Tao suggested, attending talks and conferences in different areas is beneficial.  Hence I will try to attend other numercial analysis groups' seminars. But I was wondering whether it's helpful for me to attend those pure math seminars about analysis or PDE.
Though I found those seminars are interesting, my main concern is that being lack of suitable background, I may only be able to understand a small part of the seminar (a PHD student working on theoretical PDE once told me he can't understand his group-mates' seminar until his third year). The other concern is I will have less time for my own research . So in your opinion, what kinds of seminars I should attend? Shall I attend seminars in other departments (say physics or engineering) regularly?

Attending a seminar gets you connections. Somewhere down the road, if you need a programmer or a physicist or a mathemagician, those people are able to help, and vice versa. It's not just about what the seminars are about. A seminar lasts a day, and chances are, you may not remember any of it a year later. The people you meet last far longer than that!

Why don't you just try it and see if it is worth your time? If you're not giving a talk yourself, you're not committing to anything. (Also, going by your other questions as well, you're seriously overthinking this. You're not expected to have a fixed plan for your entire graduate studies from the beginning. Do what seems most useful at the time, adapt as needed, and talk to your advisor frequently.)

"I may only be able to understand a small part of the seminar" - there is an old story about seminar talks in math. The first third should be understandable to any mathematician. The second third should be understandable to experts in the field. The third third... well, if the speaker himself doesn't understand it, that's not a big problem.

You're not going to be able to determine which seminars are useful to you without going to some of them. And yes, some of them will be wastes of time. But I've gone to seminar series that should be extremely topical to me that never benefitted me directly, and some from peripheral departments that turned out to be very useful - as mentioned in one of the comments, even if you don't take away anything from the lecture, it's useful to know people. One day, you might find yourself in need of a graph theorist or some such, and it's helpful to have met them once, or be able to say "I saw your talk..." in an introductory email.
Also, selfishly, from an applied field, having applied participants in more theory heavy fields is helpful for teaching theory students how to present their topics to people outside their narrow subfield.

As an early-stage graduate student, you should go to whatever seminars seem interesting to you, so long as it isn't interfering with your research too much.  A good way to think about this might be to budget a certain number of hours per week for seminars (I'd suggest 2 to 6 hours/week, depending on your load), and within that budget see which are the most attractive.
Over time, you will figure out which ones are most interesting and useful to you and which are not.  It will no doubt shift with time, as well.
Furthermore, never be scared of going to hear a talk just because you aren't working in the area.  You never know which interactions will turn out to be important.  For example, half of my own research program ultimately stems from sitting in a lunchtime seminar series that had nothing to do with my thesis and that I attended just because it was neat to hear what was going on in that area.
Ten years later, here I am.

@Faheem: Sure he can.  But it will be much more interesting if he elaborates. :)

@FaheemMitha Consider for reference, the following: my thesis, cited by three publications, this decently cited workshop paper from one year later, and its well-cited immediate descendent

@PeteL.Clark: Fine. Pretty please Jake, tell us the story of the Lunchtime Seminar series that is responsible for half your research program. What seminar was it? And what half of your research is that?

@FaheemMitha Sorry, wasn't really trying to be mysterious, it's actually pretty straightforward: synthetic biology was starting to take off at MIT around the end of my grad school years, and started sitting in on the lunch seminar series where people were presenting their work.  Combining that with my background in AI and language design turned into the BioCompiler, which was the starting point for a fairly diverse set of synthetic biology research I am currently involved in.  Meanwhile, my work in core AI has mostly quietly sputtered out...

Writing on inverse problems in particular, there is plenty of research of inverse problems for PDE from a pure mathematics perspective. For example, see the uniqueness results for Calderón's problem, enclosure method of Ikehata, and many results on hybrid data imaging (the recent book of Alberti and Capdeboscq is good).
There are a number of people who approach inverse problems for PDE from both theoretical perspective and the direction of numerics and functional analysis. There is plenty of space for collaboration and many conferences in inverse problems (e.g. Applied inverse problems, SIAM imaging, Inverse problems: simulation and modelling, Inverse days)  have both theoretical and applied talks, and everything on the spectrum between them.
I would say that if the analysis talks discuss the equations related to what you are working on, or equations with obvious use in modelling concrete physical situations, then you should certainly consider listening to them.
For seminars in physics or engineering, you should check if the subject matter is related to your own research interests. If you work on medical imaging and someone is giving a talk on EEG, go and listen at least once so you know what kind of questions they ask in their research and how they present the information.


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Why do some editors/journals withhold response letters from reviewers?
I recently reviewed a paper for which I recommended rejection. I wrote a comprehensive review with a list of items that needed fixing to motivate my decision. I spent some time (between a day and a day and a half, perhaps) carefully reading the manuscript, writing and motivation my review.
Today I was curious to see what happened to the paper but since the journal uses Manuscriptcentral, the information regarding what decision was taken does not appear on the online system. I googled the title and found out that the paper has indeed been accepted by the journal. Having a quick look, it is obvious from its present form that the authors did receive my review and made changes accordingly.
I would have expected to receive a response letter to my review, especially within the context of my negative recommendation. However, this did not happen. On the one hand, I understand (and fully respect) that it's up to the editor whether to follow a reviewer's recommendations or even fully discard their review. On the other hand, given that I spent some of my time producing the review, it would have been nice to at least be able to see the response of the authors (even if not requested to produce a second review). Precisely because the paper was eventually accepted, I would have liked to read the author's criticism/rebuttal of my own criticisms - I might have been wrong after all.
What is the reason behind some journals keeping reviewers "in the dark" regarding what happens to the paper? Would it be appropriate to ask the editor to have a look at the author's response letter?

Responses are written to the editor, to help them decide whether to accept or reject the paper, not to the referee.  It's entirely up to the editor whether to share them, and sharing them makes little sense unless the editor wants the referee to respond to the author's response.  (Symmetrically, referee reports are primarily reports to the editor, not to the author.)

That's why peer review process has to become open some day. There is a promising initiative from MIT

@Ilya What "that"? As has been explained here, there is not necessarily any problem here to be fixed by making the peer review open.

You learnt that the  authors' response was essentially "we accept the reviewers comments and have revised the manuscript accordingly."  If such revisions were clear to the editor there's no need for further review or communication.
Don't forget that while you may turn reviews round quickly (or you may not), there are plenty of reviewers who even for a second review  have a high chance of sitting on the paper for an unreasonably long time.  This (on top of workload) is a further incentive for the editor to minimise unnecessary links in the chain.

I have no experience as an editor, but have read and discuss these things quite a bit. I infer from these discussions that the main reason could be the workload.
It seems like it is easy to give referees some feedback, but in fact it involves a not-so-trivial action to write an e-mail, to decide what to say and what not to say, what to share, etc. And if the editor makes the wrong call here, he or she can end up with an angry referee or author to deal with. The worst enemy of editors seems to be the long tails or really painful cases, so not risking triggering one would be a good incentive not to communicate more than strictly necessary.
As a referee I do appreciate feedback, but it needs to be well thought-out to be properly embedded in the workflow of a journal.

Peer review is for the benefit of the readers of the published journal.  It is not for the benefit of the reviewers.  The editor would only send information to the reviewer if it would lead to an improvement of the publication.
It would be okay to ask the editor to see a letter.  But I think a better strategy would be to set your role as a reviewer aside and adopt the role of a reader of the published paper.  You may directly ask the authors questions about the published results without considering the confidential review materials.


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Standard style when citing different authors from the same group
I want to cite a series of three papers (condensed-matter physics, if it matters) where the first author is a different person in each case, say authors A, B and C, but all the papers come from the same group led by author D. That is, the list of authors in each paper is "A, ..., and D", "B, ..., and D", and "C, ..., and D".
Cited independently, I would refer to these papers as "A et al.", "B et al." and "C et al.". However, I want to cite them as the most correct variant of "a series of papers by D's group".
My question is whether this is acceptable as above or it would undermine the work done by A, B and C, considering boss D was paying them but probably was too busy to work out the details of the paper, and most of the work was presumably done by A, B and C.
Is there a standard styling for these cases I can rely on?
Edit:
I finally just opted by
... as pointed out by the same group of authors on a series of papers [1-3], ...

which I think strengthens the idea that A, B, and C did not reach their conclusions separately but as part of a wider collaboration.

This is exactly the reason for the phrase "X and {colleagues, co-authors, co-workers}."

What's wrong with "A et al., B et al., and C et al."?

Nothing wrong, I could just do that, but I want to emphasize the unity of the work, rather the individuality of the different papers. The only common author in this otherwise very "compact" work is the group leader.

If you want to emphasize the unity of the work, emphasize the unity of the work, not the common coauthor.

This is most likely a field-culture thing, but I find it very odd that you would treat the three papers as anything but independent pieces of work. If you want to indicate that the three papers are part of a series, you could always say something like

a series of papers [1,2,3] presented blah blah

On the one hand, you want to give the "group leader" prominence, and on the other hand you clearly recognize the potential unfairness. I can imagine some of my students being rightly upset if their dissertation work was referred to as "work from the lab of Prof. Venkat".
I realize that many lab-driven disciplines are top-down in this way, but since there's a perfectly reasonable way to cite the work, I'd avoid highlighting the "lab leader" any more than merely by their presence on the author list.

Thanks for your contribution. As a matter of fact, one of the papers is "Title. Part I", the following one is "Title. Part II", and the third one is very similar. So there is a very clear continuity in the series except for the list of authors, where only the group leader is a constant. It is acknowledging this continuity while not diminishing the work of the first author of each paper that poses the issue.

Why do you have to "acknowledge the continuity" any more than the authors do in the way they construct their titles ? And why does this have to be established by emphasizing the "group leader" (which is a horrible term btw)

This really depends on what you are doing. I think it is fine to do

D and colleagues have written about X (A et al., XXXX; B et al., XXYY; C et al., XXZZ).

buy you need to ask yourself what, beyond avoiding the passive voice, it adds over

X has been written about (A et al., XXXX; B et al., XXYY; C et al., XXZZ).

One case where it might be useful is if you are pointing out a potential bias or criticizing a technique.

No criticism, just building up on previous work. The work these different people have done is on the same topic, so the continuity in the subject is provided by the group environment and its line of research, and this is in turn held together by the group leader and common author. I want to acknowledge this line of research but at the same time, having published a few papers myself, I know that it is the PhD students or postdocs who probably did most of the work.

Where are you sending the work? It might be such that the citation style is numeric, and then you can write whatever words you like:

D and colleagues A, B, and C developed the state of the art in this area over the last several years [1-3].

Etc.


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Republishing an article on a second journal (with permission)
I have recently published an article (written in English) in a Finnish scientific magazine (for outreach mostly). This magazine reaches only a few thousand people in Finland. Most of the articles are not made available online and, those that are, are so behind a subscription paywall. It is thus extremely unlikely that the wider potential audience in my field will be able to access it.
Because of this, I have asked the publisher for permission to post the article on a repository (likely to be the arXiv), to which they have agreed after a 6 month embargo.
I am now wondering if it would make sense to publish this in an international scientific journal as an outreach piece.
Assume that the original publisher in Finland grants me permission to do this (with attribution, linking back to the original source, etc). What about the international publisher? Are there journals, specifically in physics and chemistry, that would consider republishing an article whose copyright belongs to a different publisher and that does not represent an original contribution?

If there is already a journal publication and a freely-available version, what is the motivation for releasing a third copy?

Did you publish the first paper in English or in Finnish?

@DavidKetcheson The motivation is to gain more visibility. I guess the same reason why people prefer to publish in Nature than in Scientific Reports. Also, note that the work is originally published in a magazine, not a journal.

@TheGuy English, I should have mentioned that.

You can't do this and it's not because of copyright, but because journals generally don't accept unoriginal contributions. For example from Elsevier's policies and ethics page:

Originality and plagiarism: The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.

Springer's publishing ethics page:

Maintaining integrity of the research and its presentation can be achieved by following the rules of good scientific practice, which include ... The manuscript has not been published previously (partly or in full), unless the new work concerns an expansion of previous work (please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the hint of text-recycling (‘self-plagiarism’)).

I know that journals generally (as you write) don't accept unoriginal contributions. The whole point of the question is to find our if there are journals that might make exceptions under some circumstances. (I will edit the question)

@Miguel That sounds like a shopping question, which aren't permitted.

@Miguel if there are any non-predatory journals that will accept unoriginal contributions, I'm not aware of them, unfortunately.

What about the international publisher? Are there journals, specifically in physics and chemistry, that would consider republishing an article whose copyright belongs to a different publisher?

Typically an academic publisher will not republish a published work, since publishers are seeking novel contributions (and copyright issues will arise, albeit the OP assumes those away). This can be sidestepped by significantly extending the original work with a new, novel contribution.

Legally, the copyright and license status is important. If you signed away all your copyright upon publication in the Finnish journal, you need permission. If you granted an exclusive license, you cannot except by revoking/adjusting the original license. If you granted a non-exclusive license you're free to do as you please.
Professionally, it depends. It is generally frowned upon to republish exact works (translations less of a problem). There are exceptions (e.g., medical guidelines are often republished across journals for maximum reach), but the best advice here is to supply this information in the submission or ask the editor (say it's already published in XY and why you're looking to submit anyway). Note that for publishers a large part of it is due to the legal issues outlined above (e.g., commercial publishers want the full copyright assigned to them to maximize revenue they can get from publishing your article and any activity they want to with it afterwards).


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Where do I contact a professor with multiple email addresses?
The professor I am trying to contact has multiple email addresses listed on the department page. I mailed to one and got no response since two weeks; then I mailed to the other and still no response since a week.
I was wondering if he was receiving my emails at all and I decided to check more into the department page and found out that it hasn't been updated for a good 10-15 years. All the student lists refer to people who passed out decades back, and this made me think that the email addresses listed may also be outdated. His recent papers show a different email address, and at this point I am in a bit of a fix, since I don't want to sound rude by pestering him with emails (if he indeed did receive it and chose not to reply) but at the same time I'm not sure if he received them at all.
Would it be good idea to mail him at his most recently used address?

Yes, write again to the most recent (as mentioned on publications) email address. If you worry about making him feel like you are spamming him, explain shortly that you tried the what you think are old emails first, but then found this (now used) address. The old "excuse for double posting" might also work in slightly changed wording.
You cannot expect someone to check all old email addresses, especially should those be from a different university. Of course it could be that all your emails were forwarded or are connected to the same mailbox, hence you might want to include a short note explaining your potentially multiple emails.

This is highly appropriate; professors get bombarded with e-mail and often thing's slip through and e-mails change (although I still get e-mail from most of my old e-mail addresses-- doesn't mean I respond to all!). By repeatedly trying, you are showing perseverance and a true desire to get in contact. Be polite, explain why you desire to get in touch, be formal (no Dear Tom, if you haven't met), and be nice. If the professor thinks it spam, they will let you know. IMO.


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Phd Professor as co-author
I am an undergraduate student and while I was taking a class I happened to come up with some new concepts contrary to what my professor had told me regarding their possibility.
I have published in other journals but never in IEEE transactions, this could very well give a solid backing to any SOP I would write for my Phd studies. My professor is a Phd and he has various connections and stuff. He was impressed with the work and told me to publish it. However, I have heard that publishing in IEEE transactions is extremely hard: would including my professor as a co-author, with his doctoral degree, help in the review process? Not influence it or something, but would they at-least take me seriously? Normally, I don't fret about being published and stuff but to get a good school for Phd it's essential that I have this done. What are your thoughts?

I don't know about this particular journal but I will make a couple of general observations.  It is good to have a particular journal in mind when starting the writing process, AND to allow yourself some flexibility to revisit the choice of journal after you at least have a first draft on paper.  Above all it is good to get started with your writing up.  If you stand at the edge of the pool too long wondering about the water temp, you might end up deciding not to go swimming after all.  Regarding co-authorship -- perhaps you could decide this later when you are farther along with the paper.

@Hadi what I meant was , I like working on problems but not really concerned about publishing and stuff . Unfortunately the world doesn't see it that way and if I want to learn more I have to get a good school for Phd

@aparente001 I have already prepared a draft .As the answer has mentioned , I wouldn't worry if it was blind peer review but its not certain

That is great news, very exciting.  Do you have one or two other trusted people in your field you could show your draft to?

@aparente001 i can trust my professor , he's the one who suggested publishing it  . I have already asked for his advice

Sounds like you have your answer!

Adding your professor as a co-author in name only won't help from the perspective of being taken more seriously in the review process.
Including your professor as a genuine co-author will almost certainly help in that your professor has a lot more experience in writing papers, knows how to write in a scientific way, how much background to include, what previous work by others is relevant, which results to highlight, how to format the paper so that it meets the requirements of the journal and is enjoyable for experts to read, and how to engage constructively with the review process. And don't under-estimate them: they might even have some scientific insights to add to your own.

It doesn't matter.
IEEE Transactions are using Double-Blind Peer Review, which means that the author identities are not revealed to the reviewers, and you will not know either the identities of your reviewers.
If you are wondering whether including your professor as a co-author will give you some advantage in the review process, the answer is no. However, He can surely contribute with your paper and help you address the comments of the reviewers, so it's definitely a good idea include him if he wants to be involved.
Good luck!

IEEE Transactions are using Double-Blind Peer Review — Generally speaking, this is incorrect.

Where did you hear about IEEE Transactions following a double-blind review process? (It would be better if they did.) Could you cite the reference?

I do not agree. Not all transactions use double blind peer review. It is single blind where author can't know about reviewers.

To be an author on a paper means that person has contributed to that paper. Your question as it is phrased is not properly answerable as a person cannot be added to a paper solely for a possible submission advantage.
But we can consider the hypothetical situation where this occurs (as there is nothing physically stopping someone from doing so). I've reviewed a number of papers over the years, and as a human being, I will start with a more positive outlook when reviewing papers whose authors have a consistent history of submitting good work. This is less to do with their listed degrees, but with my personal history of reading or reviewing their papers. This may result in giving them the benefit of the doubt on some issues, if unintentionally. Overall, however, I believe this effect to be minor; a listed well established name does not change whether the work is novel and a contribution or whether that claim is correctly supported. Adding an author in your proposed case will not lessen the chance of rejection.
As an undergraduate with a limited history of publishing papers, it is likely to your advantage to work with this professor to improve your work for a higher chance of acceptance. He should be able to direct you about typical paper contents and, with his greater experience, may be able to point out and help resolve aspects of your concept you have overlooked. This last component is important and worthy of an authorship. I would suggest considering offering a place as second author if he is willing to help you and contribute in this manner.


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What typesetters do with the submitted paper?
I am informed that submitted paper supposed to be sent to the typesetters today. I am advised to check the mails. Until now there is no acknowledgement except the first mail. I am curious about the typesetters job in this process. Do they make considerable updates? Do I have much work to do, after typesetter is done with the paper? Since, I am on holiday, I wonder if the workload will ruin my holiday?

it depends on the format of your paper. In LaTeX several things can cause problems, like overfull hboxes. In general, you should have no trouble during your vacations, but you may have to do something.

The next step would be that you will be sent galley proofs and asked to go over them. You will probably not have much time for that. Look here and here for that step.

Note that “typesetting” may also include copy editing (though it literally does not).

Typesetting is when the publisher takes your LaTeX file with decently formatted PDF and miraculously succeeds to mess it up completely.

As stated by Massimo Ortolano, the typesetting is followed by a final check, proofreading, by the author. In many journals (I will not venture to say all) the movement of an article from the editor involves additional steps. The article is scrutinized to make sure it follows the journal format down to the smallest detail. this can be done by the editor, it can also be done by the type-setter but there may also be a step where a third person, the copy editor, is involved. The copy editor will make sure there are no grammatical errors as well as checking formal issues regarding style and formatting of journal specific issues including references.
The result of the type-setting procedure is that some changes will occur but they should not be serious enough to alter the meaning of things. However, this can happen and is usually the result of an over-zealous editor, copy editor or type-setter, or a combination of the three. It is therefore quite important to review the proof very carefully. It is also vital to adhere to the journal format already when the manuscript is submitted since the risk of later editing errors is reduced.
What system "your" journal uses may involve all or a few of the ones mentioned above. Depending on the setup the type-setter may be more or less involved with the text but in its pure form the type-setter should only place figures and format headings, text, references etc. according to journal standards. The proof should then also only involve very minor changes (all issue should have been resolved much earlier in the review/revisions process including adhering to journal format).
In most journals with which I am familiar, the time allowed for proofing is very short, perhaps, one work week. this will vary between journals somewhat and I know some may have only a few days whereas other may allow somewhat longer. In the end it is mostly you who will "suffer" from lateness since your article may be published later than originally planned by the journal. My recommendation is to be accessible on a regular basis once a manuscript has gone to type-setting and expect to spend a few hours proofing it within a few days upon receiving it. At least you now usually proof a digital copy (pdf) and not a paper proof that has to be sent via regular mail (although I suspect that still can be the case with some journals).

Typically, once a manuscript has been typeset, the editor asks the author(s) to check for errors that might have been introduced by the typesetting process. The checking process does not take too long, but I suggest you to check carefully the equations (if there are any), for their meaning is unknown to the typesetter and he or she might involuntarily introduce errors in case of reformatting.


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When to change a research focus
Some say that a person should change the work field every 5 to 7 years in order to stay productive and avoid stagnation. How does this apply to academia, for example, changing a research focus?
For example, some universities advise to take a sabbatical every 5 years or so.
Edited as suggested: What are the indicators to show that it is time or an opportunity to change the research area? Perhaps, there is a good answer based on your experience?

I'm not sure there's a real question here.  Some productive researchers never change research topics; others change topics with every new paper.

If you were to rephrase as "Are there useful indicators to tell when I should change a research project", then there might be some hope of an answer.

I know of no university that advises you to take a sabbatical. Lucky people have departments that allow them to take a sabbatical every once in a while. Sabbaticals don't generally result in a change in research focus.
I think there are three indicators about when it is time to change research focus.

You are bored and want to change
You can no longer publish in your area and receive rejections along the lines of "This is no longer a relevant area"
You can no longer get funding in you area and receive rejections along the lines of "This is no longer a relevant area"