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Trying to write several short, unimpactful papers to boost publication record
During the postdoc phase, at least in math, it's usually a very short period, like 1 or 2 years. Isn't it really important to write something and get it out there, even if it's of no real significance or interest? The reason I ask is that a postdoc could spend more time working on a more significant paper, but if you have to apply for a job in one year, if you don't do something to put something on your CV, people will look at your publication record and say, "This applicant didn't do anything!" I don't want to give people the impression that I haven't done anything if it's not true!
If a postdoc is actually doing something, but it doesn't appear on the CV, does it count? A postdoc could be working on a project that will take several years, but if people look at the application and there's no string of papers, people may automatically reject it. "Invisible work" appears to not matter.

The norm has unfortunately moved to 2 3-year postdocs, so the postdoc phase is now more like 4-7 years.  Also, accepted papers are as good as published ones, and part of the job of your letter writers is to explain the impact of your papers, whether they are accepted or in review (and presumably available on the ArXiv.)  Also, the papers accepted by any given journal has a wide variability in terms of quality/impact, so several experts' opinions of a paper should (but does not always) matter more.

"I don't want to give people the impression that I haven't done anything if it's not true!" So instead of giving them the false impression that you haven't done anything (which can, as indicated in the above comment, potentially be corrected), your proposed strategy is to give them the correct impression that you have done something, but it is not of any "real significance or interest"? Your goal is not to have no-one accuse you of not doing anything (that would be a strange goal on its own), it's to convince people that you do valuable research so that they will want to hire you.

Maybe I just have a different understanding of the word "impact" - but I find the premise of both the question and several answers a bit strange. The vast majority of math papers (also those that are published in decent journals and by established professors) have very little "impact" at all (and even less so after a short period of time).

You are right: the system is just that, a system, and therefore you can play it, "game" it. However, this then comes to the question: the why the heck are you even on it? No researcher started research thinking "numbers go up", we are supposed to at least somehow believe that what we do matters. What you are proposing is more or less morally rigging the system. It does 100% work. But then, why play? Or in the real terms, why waste your talent and time in research that is unimpactful. Academia is not the only option in the world, you can do something else too.

I disagree with one point made by Buffy. People will absolutely count your papers. Whether it is a job interview panel or a promotion, the number of publications is going to be a metric everyone will take into account. In some less research-focused places the number of papers is going to be the only measure of research performance people are going to be concerned with. In more prestigious and research-oriented Universities some people on the panel might have a better understanding of how good the journal is. And only in the top-tier places someone on the panel might actually have the expertise and time to bother reading the papers and evaluate the quality of your research.

Boosting the number of your research outputs (e.g. via salami slicing, proceedings, short articles with bloated list of authors, repeating the same research with minor modifications) is grumbled upon. But it will get you through the majority of doors in your career, except a few most challenging ones. People do it, and in most places they absolutely get away with doing it. This is generally a safe and reliable strategy to move your career forward -- see Mark Griffiths's Google Scholar as a notable example.
Focusing on quality and ending up with less publications might close many doors (as your CV will be dismissed without exploring the quality of your papers), but may potentially get you to the top-tier places. This is a high risk / high reward strategy. People who attempt it are usually perfectionists or idealists, for whom writing a sub-par paper is not an option.

This highlights a poor state of academia these days, with simplest metrics of performance being predominantly in use. As the number of people competing for place in academia increases, and the number of available positions shrinks, the change towards a more rigorous and nuanced evaluation of research efficiency seems unlikely.

If I had something like a 5-year position, then I would have a reliable source of income so I would be less pressured to just do something, write it up, and put it online for people to see. But if I have only 1 year, then I want to make sure my CV actually has changed. If a big paper takes 5 years from start to completion, then I cannot wait that long because I need to stay in the running and inform people that I am not just wasting my time. I think I have no choice because I'm doing what the situation calls for.

I think to some extent this is culturally dependent.  Most universities in the US, including less research-oriented ones, are perfectly willing to read your letters of recommendation to evaluate the quality of your research even when they can't evaluate it themselves.  It's only cultures that are more concerned about corruption (for good reason or not) that view subjective or possibly biased information as worse than no information.  Americans are usually willing to accept occasional unfairness if it leads on average to better decisions.

200 papers a year?! Dang, he must have exposed the big lie of academia, them lazy researchers absolutely can and should work harder, let us raise the requirement for getting any funding at all to at least 20 articles a year! /s

-1 for exaggerating the extent to which people just 'count papers'. Recruiters increasingly ask you to list your few best papers. This happens not just at top-tier places, but also in countrywide systems e.g. in the UK or at CNRS (France).

I am not sure if all of this is totally true although it might be.  I have published around 20 articles in 2022 (almost all of them as the sole author) and did not find it easy to get a postdoc, although I did get one.  The postdoc which I got was directly related to what could be classed as my ''best'' article which I published on the PhD.

Hmmm, I didn't say people don't count. I said "People won't just count your papers and assume they are good." That is quite different. Professional applications are read by professionals who are in a position to judge these things.

On the last search we did a few years ago (when I was on the committee), we did not seriously consider the applicant who had about 5 or 6 times as many papers (all legitimate, but of negligible impact) as the next most published applicant.

@AlexanderWoo, correct. One doesn't want the reputation of producing dreck.

@Lodinn The papers listed on Mark Griffin's Google Scholar belong to more than one person named Mark Griffin.  The lesson here is not that Griffin succeeded by publishing lots of low quality papers.  The lesson is that if you let Google automatically update your profile, it will get flooded with low quality papers.  This is often seen on Google Scholar profiles of people with common Asian names.

@AnonymousPhysicist Oh right, thank you for clarification. Common Asian names are for sure problematic in that regard; I did some ORCiD searches out of curiosity a while ago, there are about tenfold as many Zhāng Wěis indexed as there are James Smiths, and odds are also fairly high that there are 3-4 researchers going by the same name working in the same university.

I do not believe that his GSc account score is heavily inflated by publications of his namesakes; the majority of titles are definitely in his research area. One can cross-ref with his ORCID record, bearing in mind that ORCID is a unique identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524

@AnonymousPhysicist did you make any attempt to check your wild claim? I looked at the published versions of the 25 most recent articles (all 2022). 24 of those gave author and affiliation as "Mark D. Griffiths, Nottingham Trent University", clearly the same person. The other one (a book chapter) didn't give an affiliation, but it's in exactly the right field so I see no reason to suspect it's a different author.

Meta discussion on this question.

I'll add that this is also likely to substantially differ both between and within countries/systems. I am not directly in math (bioinformatics/biostatistics) but my perception is that my country's hiring/evaluation system (Czech Republic) is more skewed towards publication counting than say US while other countries bean count even more. A friend of mine has a well paid side-job in a small local university close to where he lives and was hired there just because he had some papers. So if you would consider a job in less prestigious country/uni appealing, churning papers may be good idea.

@AlexanderWoo You may not have chosen the applicant with the most papers...but how many applicants did you choose with no papers?  OP is concerned about having no papers in a year unless he spams at least one.

@tbrookside - OP isn't a competitive applicant for permanent jobs in a year regardless.

I find it ironic that Mark Griffith with the crazy Google Scholar is a researcher of behavioural addiction. He must be living his discipline--this guy is definitely addicted to publishing research! :-)

I am a professor in a mathematics department at a state research university (University of Georgia).  We do not have requirements on the publication rate (or record) of our tenure track faculty, but we have some informal expectations.  Two or more papers per year is pretty good.  Less than one paper per year is not so good, unless these papers are exceptional in quality: in mathematics, the very top journals are so elite that the majority of lifelong research mathematicians never publish in them.
On average, a postdoc has a lower teaching load than a tenure track job, and even when the numbers are equal, postdocs mainly teach less demanding courses.  (For instance, several of our postdocs are currently teaching two sections of first semester calculus.  I am currently teaching undergraduate real analysis and graduate algebraic number theory.)
So the following conclusion seems reasonably inexorable: if you wish to attain a job as a tenure-track professor at a research-intensive institution, you have to show during your postdoc that you can attain the quantity as well as the quality of research that will be expected of you in that tenure-track job.  Many postdocs are still finding their research footing and, in some cases, really just beginning doing their research in a largely undirected way.  Such people may not be putting out multiple strong papers a year.  But I can assure you that the tenure track job interviews are full of postdocs who are hitting those marks.
In 2022 an assistant professor of mathematics is not really a "journeyman" who is just starting to do business for themselves; rather these are people who already have a research program with some successes in their rear view mirror.  To get to this point takes time, and as mentioned in another answer, multiple postdocs totaling 4-6 years are becoming increasingly common.
I do want to end by mentioning that we are also not looking to hire people who are in the practice of writing papers just to have publications.  If half of your publications are in journals that are not especially reputable (or worse, conference proceedings or other venues where the rigor of the peer review is less than clear), you will not be an attractive candidate.
It's a competitive world out there, for sure.  Good luck to everyone.

It does seem like UGA expectations in 2022 > USask expectations in 2022. (Certainly UGA expectations in 2022 > USask expectations in 2010)

A two-edged sword, perhaps. Writing "impactful" papers in math, short or not, isn't an easy task or one that can necessarily be time limited.
Papers of low quality aren't going to help you. People won't just count your papers and assume they are good. The market is too tough for that to work.
The alternative is to have a section on your CV for Work in Progress in which you name projects that you are working on. This is worth having in any case.
If you are collaborating with people, they can help you in your job search, indicating your work and the quality of your ideas. If you're not collaborating, then consider starting.
But if you can, indeed, whip out short impactful papers, then, by all means do that. But you won't likely get published within that year's timeframe in any case, so at best you may have some submission(s) in process.

I don't know how to force my papers to be more impactful. It's like digging somewhere. You dig and then you get whatever you get.

I understand. Do what you do best. Collaboration helps though. Even if it is just coffee room chatting about ideas.

You can't ''force'' papers to be impactful.  Try to work on things that you feel are intrinsically interesting in a way others would be interested.  Another way to ''cheat'' citations is to produce some workhorse result which is useful in applications, my most cited paper has a result of this kind although it's not actually really that great an article.

@cgb5436 good analogy, only to the extent that it defines the mentioned digger as a stupid person.
If you dig and don't know why you dig somewhere, you are likely to get only sweat.

The job market in pure mathematics is extremely competitive.
If you don't have an impactful paper out of your postdocs, you won't get a permanent research-oriented job, no matter how many short unimpactful papers you have.
The job market essentially is forcing everyone to gamble.
For further postdocs, what matters is convincing people that you have that impactful paper in you - in pure mathematics the value of postdoc to a hiring department is mostly that they can say 'This excellent mathematician was a postdoc here.'  (Pure mathematicians do collaborate, but postdocs are usually working on their own projects in collaboration with permanent faculty, not working on the projects of the permanent faculty.)  Having some moderately interesting papers does give evidence of potential for future productivity.  Publishing worked out exercises does not.

My experience of the tenure-track in non-high-flying Canadian institutions is probably out of date now, but I would still prefer some clarification or hedging regarding "impactful". "Impactful" to which community, and in whose eyes?

@YemonChoi - how about "likely to be cited outside of the circle of the collaborators of your collaborators" - though one or two papers that barely meet this standard is unlikely to be enough.  (I don't think I could get hired these days.)

@AlexanderWoo: Hmm, I'm not sure if I find the "outside the circle of collaborators of your collaborators" criterion convincing - this circle tends to be much larger than one might expect.  zbMATH actually gives the number of co-co-authors for every author profile. For instance, mine is currently 345 (although I haven't been particularly long in the business, yet; started my PhD in 2013), yours is 495.

@JochenGlueck - maybe I would have better off being more vague and say "likely to be cited by someone who did not learn of the work through a direct professional relationship with you or another of the papers' authors"?  Not all collaborations are equal of course.

@AlexanderWoo: Agreed, this seems like a better criterion.

You are still in the beginning of your career, and writing good papers is also a skill that takes time to learn. You don't specify whether how much experience you have with getting papers published so far, but it's likely at most a couple of papers, possibly none as first author or the main writer.
Getting your first paper all the way through the publication process will teach you a lot, and will improve the chances of timely publication of your later, more important results. If you already have that basic experience, there is still more to learn from comments from new reviewers, and trying to get the papers through to higher rated journals.
Whereas if you focus on purely research for a few years, it may be that your eventual results don't get the attention they deserve due to poorly written paper.

Is writing lots and lots and lots of unsubstantial papers is a career booster in academia?
Hell yes, it sure works for some.
But does this not undermine the efficacy of academia in the long run, degrade public trust in science, and create an environment in which hiring and promotion decisions are increasingly made by people who never contributed anything of substance themselves?
Yeah... what do you think?


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How to participate in a remote IEEE Conference, due to politics problems in my country?
Today I study in Chile, and I have an accepted paper at an international conference of the IEEE of good level. I need that participation since it will help me in my Postgraduate program, but I'm afraid I will not be able to attend. It is unsafe to travel at the moment.
How could I ask the Chairs of the conference and convince them to pay registration and let me present by video-conference? Or if anyone has any idea how to justify my paper appearing in the proceedings of the conference?

Contact the conference chair and/or the program chair of the conference as ask how you can proceed. For some conferences this will be possible, and I suspect that IEEE will support reasonable requests. Most large conferences will have the ability to project from remote sources.
To actually present, however, will require some infrastructure on your end, including some sort of video link (maybe just a web cam) and adequate band width for the link. It might even be possible for a prepared talk to be sent to them prior to the conference by digital media. But you can explore the possibilities with the PC or CC. But you need to do it early.
A third possibility is to have you not present at all, physically or virtually, but still have your paper appear in the proceedings.
Happily, digital solutions exist. Sadly political issues make some things hard.

There are, indeed, time where I think a band witch is necessary to get a video conference to actually work. Sadly, I usually end up with the wicked witches, not Glenda the Good... (I can't edit to change one character, but that typo did tweak my weird sense of humor.)

@JonCuster. Mine too. Thanks. Fixed. Patience, though, I'm older than dirt.

Do you know if there is an IEEE support email to help and address these issues?

Sorry, no. The conference website should be able to give you the information you need, though. The organizers are usually pretty visible people.

Thanks for all, in a few days, tell them how I was.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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Is my Nepalese MCA considered valid and equivalent to Indian MCA in India?
I have a Master's in Computer Applications (MCA) from the Purbanchal University of Nepal.  I intend to apply for a MTech CSE in India as people with MCA are eligible to study MTech CSE in India.
Is the Nepalese MCA considered valid and equivalent to Indian MCA in India?

For what purpose? Admittance to a doctoral program in India? For employment?

@mkennedy
to study MTech CSE in India as people with MCA are eligible to study MTech CSE in India...

Why not ask an Indian institution whether you are eligible?

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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What will happen if I quit my MS? Will I be able to get a job?
I am currently in my third year, 5 semesters over, of my MS programme at a top Indian institute. MS is a research based Master's programme in engineering.
Being a research based curriculum, there is no fixed time and I have seen people do it in 4 years also but the average is 3 years. Also there is no fixed criteria of what defines ``satisfactory work'' to graduate.
My advisor is saying my work of 2.5 years is still not publishable and added that a lot more work has to be done yet.
I know my work is not a very novel work, unlike all the lab-mates around me, but for the current work I had to put a lot of efforts and overcoming my mental barriers. I started taking therapy few months back to make sure I keep working.
After my advisor's comment, which happened for the first time a few weeks back, my world is now upside down. I do not know what to do, and he keeps telling me to do things in a deadline which I don't think I can do. I am feeling like sh*t as my whole work till now has been just a ``colouring book'', to quote him.
I have been talking to my friends about my situation, they are saying just keep pushing; but do not know if I have the ability to push or even work anymore. I am coming to lab daily, dragging myself out of my dorm, and wasting a lot of time. I haven't told my parents yet, because they think I will graduate this December with a job in hand, FYI Indian institutes have a concept of campus placements. But the reality is I do not know when I will graduate, or even if I will graduate! I do not know if I will get a descent job if I quit.
I don't know what to do. Should I quit? Even if I quit, will I get a job? My self-image at this time is at all-time low because I actually wanted to do research and now I am hating it to my gut.
Can someone suggest a way out please?
Apologies for the long post, I had to vent it out.

Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer.

Can you get a job? Well, do you have the skills required?
Go to your local jobs portal (or your university's career portal if they have one), and see what jobs are available that you think you might be interested in. Read the job descriptions, see what they ask for. Here's an example I got from a quick search.

Do you have these things? If yes - then sure you can get a job. If no - then no, you won't get this job. But you might be able to get another job. You won't know until you search.
By the way, there's nothing stopping you from applying for a job before you quite your MS.

I can answer it from the Indian perspective. I have seen some of my friends stuck in similar situations during my Ph.D. I would recommend that you don't quit yet. How easy it would be for you to get a job depends on which branch you are in. If you are in CS/EC/EE, I think it should be pretty easy. If not, I'd suggest you start preparing for placements. Most companies that come for placements don't care about what research you have done as long you can perform the job that they hire you for. During our time, most companies wanted software developers or data analysts. So, preparing for those roles will maximize your chance of success.
Once you have a job, you will be in a better position to negotiate with your supervisor. Of course, there is no guarantee that they will let you graduate even if you get a job, but you will be in a better position to push. All the best.

There is no shame in quitting a shitty MS program, or a bad relationship with an advisor. There's something to be said about persevering, but what they don't tell you is that persevering is only good up to a point, and that the "always persevere" mantra is usually accompanied by the sunken cost fallacy. And you've hit the nail on the head with the statement

Also there is no fixed criteria of what defines ``satisfactory work'' to graduate.

One of the most frustrating parts of doing a research-based MS or PhD is the lack of consistent criteria for what constitutes enough work. This works across programs, but you often also find inconsistent criteria among advisors at the same program. For example, colleague of mine from my undergrad years decided to do an MS at the same university, since her experience there was good. She spent 7 years on the MS, every year being told to do "just one more experiment". In retrospect, this was unfair, and I consider her thesis to be a lot better than PhD theses I later saw accepted at the R1 institution where I did my PhD. Again, this is all in retrospect, but she could have quit her MS degree and done a PhD instead at a better institution.
I don't know what will please your parents, but pleasing parents is rarely a good criterion for deciding what to do with your life.
And yes, you can certainly get a job without an MS degree. Most people in the world don't have an MS degree.Your criteria for "success" will vary, but to take a common criterion for success, money: many of my friends back from when I was an undergrad never went higher than the bachelor's degree, and they all make more money than I do with my PhD. Two of them come to mind, one is an electrical engineer, the other a civil engineer. So there's definitely a market for engineers without MS degrees (caveat: this is in the US; the market for engineers in India will be different, of course.)
Before you quit, however, speak with your advisor and tell them about your frustration with the moving target nature of finishing your current degree. If they are reasonable, they might even be willing to put in writing what you need to do to finish, and with that you can make a reasonable plan to finish. But again, if they keep yanking your chain with "one more experiment" BS, it's time to cut your losses.

no downvote from my side, but "I consider her thesis to be a lot better than PhD theses I saw accepted at the R1 institution where I did my PhD." no one cares, you are just a random person in the internet.

When reading other's answers, I always appreciate answers that refer to their personal experiences and opinions stemming from those.

+1 for mentioning the sunk cost fallacy and stating "pleasing parents is rarely a good criterion for deciding what to do with your life." I think the anecdote about the friend's thesis is unnecessary but doesn't detract from the rest of the answer.

Personal experience:
https://xkcd.com/1827/


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How do I write long answers?
I am a Material Science and Engineering major.What I am having doubt with is how I am supposed to write long answers.Lets say someone asks,"What is a Lomer Cottrell barrier?" or may be,"What is solid solution strengthening?"Actually I write answers to these but those answers never fetch me a more than 50% marks.How do I get through?Please help.

This is a good question for your instructor, not for us.

I find this question interesting because most of my experience, and that of my friends when in school, was trying to write shorter answers, because it's usually harder to say something in a few words than in many words. So I suspect in your case the problem is with not knowing how supportive your answers need to be. For example, instead of saying "demand increased so costs decreased", do you need to specify which costs, which period of time, which type of economy, etc. and do you need to mention this is the law of supply and demand (a phrase the teacher may be looking for)?

Your question, and a comment you posted, suggest a misguided belief that “the art of writing long answers” in the context of an exam or homework assignment is somehow different than the general art of writing (and the even more general art of communicating your thoughts to others clearly and efficiently). Sorry, but that’s not true, and you’re looking for help in the wrong places. I, and everyone posting here, have never taken a class or read a manual on “writing long answers”. To write long answers well, you need to write well, and that’s something that a stack exchange answer can’t teach you. There are many books about it, but as people on the sister site writing.stackexchange like to say, the best way to develop good writing skills is to write, write, and write some more. Over time you will see your skills improve with practice.
Second, my experience with science and engineering is that the focus in these areas is usually on answers that are conceptually correct and show a good level of understanding of the material (even if they are not especially well-written or phrased) rather than on the quality of the writing itself. So you should also consider the possibility that if you’re losing 50% of the points or more on your answers, that may be because you don’t actually understand the material as well as you think you do (and as well as you should) - this may not be a writing issue per se. Even the best writer in the world will not be able to write a good answer to a question on a topic they don’t understand well. As others have said, it would be a good idea to review the feedback you get from your instructors and if necessary ask for additional feedback, to try to develop an understanding of where exactly the problem lies. Good luck!

I perform exceptionally well in objective exams even where numerical only answer type are present.The problem only arises with subjective tests.Is it not that I would perform poorly in objective tests as well if performance if a "function" of knowledge as per the subject?

@user586228 I can’t say if it is or it isn’t, sorry. It’s possible you have an understanding of certain topics that’s good enough to get correct numerical answers but not to answer certain conceptual questions correctly. Or there might be some other explanation, I just don’t know. Someone would have to actually look at your non-numerical answers and give you feedback about what you‘re doing wrong. By the way your writing here seems fine - it’s a small sample but just based on that I’m not seeing anything that should stop you from demonstrating knowledge that you have in response to a question.

@user586228 good that you perform well on numerical questions though! That’s one less thing to worry about, and to me it suggests that you should have the core ability to understand the material at a high level and be able to show it, once you figure out the issue with conceptual answers.

The only person who absolutely knows what they are looking for in your answers is your instructor. You need to talk to them about this. If they have office hours, visit them during office hours. If not, email to politely schedule a meeting and bring this question to them.

One way of grading that sort of question is to have a list of key facts that need to be in the answer, with a number of points for each fact. If that is what is happening, the OP needs to learn what sorts of facts the instructor wants and the OP is omitting.

As @GrotesqueSI said, go ask the teacher what s/he wants in an answer and the format of it. The length, how many references (you are adding references, right? in APA? from veritable sources?).
It also helps if you revise how you write. Given your field some tutorial/books about technical writing could be useful. In the first paraghph you give the concrete answer and then you explain the details in the next paragraphs. max 5 paragraphs and .5- 1 page should be enough.
For docs on technical writing:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-question/
https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7656/how-do-i-write-a-good-answer-to-a-question
https://msu.edu/course/be/485/bewritingguideV2.0.pdf
https://medium.com/technical-writing-is-easy/style-guides-for-technical-writers-72b011f84c4b
http://site.iugaza.edu.ps/mahir/files/2017/01/Handbook-of-Technical-Writing-9th-Edition.pdf
https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/tech-writer-guide

Could you name some books which teaches the art to write proper answers?

@user586228 I added some links in the response.

Looking at your questions on the chemistry forum (from your profile), I get the impression your issues are much more from knowing the material than from exposition (writing ability).  Although there's definitely an English language issue as well (if you are taking tests in that language).
My advice is to work more problems and get help with teachers (reviewing your drill problems).  Basically what you are doing on the forums here, but with more intensity. Do homework problems until you puke and then wipe off the puke and do some more.  Look into getting extra problem sets (with solutions or at least answers, so that you can check your work).
Get help for questions you don't understand--good that you are actively using the chem stack exchange.  But you may want to get in person help as well.  Also, perhaps you need to work more easy problems if you are struggling with all the hard problems you're showing on the site here.  (Like working on my double back flips to get them perfect, if I'm having a problem with triples.)
In particular, many of your questions revolve around the trickier types of stoichiometry problems, especially in an applied (therefore complicated word problem) setting.  The problems you're mostly showing seem to have some complication around them, but at their core they use freshman chemistry insights.
I have seen EXTREMELY poor English speaker/writers, still able to do well in classes like material science or inorganic chemestry.  Even to ace the material.  So, I really suspect your issue is more one of the subject matter content than of writing ability.  Yeah, you need work on that too, but it's not the "limiting reagent" of the getting you a good grade reaction.


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Best way to create & update lecture notes
I have a draft that contains 15-16 seminars (=detailed solution of problems + some additional information that was omitted in lectures). Currently I am polishing my draft in order to provide my students with this notes. However, I gradually extend the content of seminars and sometime adapt them for the audience and the final notes can be different.
So, I would like to ask: what is the best way to create, update and versionate lecture notes?
Now I have the online LaTeX project (in Overleaf) but it is need to compile the project which can be sometimes a bad practice: a student can obtain "messy" version of text. I teach Statistical Physics & Condensed Matter, so LaTeX-support is absolutely required. Also, I use TikZ to make some plots and so on, so support of including png/jpg/pdf images is required. The lecture notes are subdivided by parts and chapters (each chapter = one seminar), so at least markdown support is required. In nutshell, the perfect solution should have:

LaTeX-support (at least common packages)
Image including support
Content structure (headings, sections, etc)
Easy to edit

I have a brief look at Notion, Obsidian, Word-Press and github-pages. But all three variants seem not perfect. I would be grateful for any comment.

Why not just post on your school intranet a pdf generated from your LaTeX? What additional functionality do you want that pdf wouldn't provide?

@DimitriVulis , for instance, for a given seminar I would like to have a possibility to explicitly hide/show supplemental info like proofs, more complicated problems and so on. In the PDF I can still use Appendices or highlight supplemental info, but if some desired solutions (mentioned in question) exist I would like at least to look at

Many people like to print out their lecture notes, and read them on paper, although this may be more common among people older than your students. For them, a proof in an appendix would be preferable to "click to reveal" text.

It seems to me that you are looking for a non-existing software solution that allows you to include and exclude parts of your manuscript based on rules you are setting.
The best work-around is to have a modular latex structure where you can manually include and thereby exclude files that you want and do not want in your pdf.
You will still need to proof-read each custom-built pdf, but this should be quick.
Also, once you start handing out pdf to students or publish pdf on the web, you no longer have control on what future students have access to. You are working in a sufficiently hard field to guarantee that most of your students are quite smart and capable to find holes in the walls that you build around your products.


text:
Industry or Pure Academic?
I am a woman in a conservative society, my parents are strongly arguing I should have industry experience before pursuing a career in academia, although most professors in my Uni did not actually have an industry job experience.
If I take an industry job, I can't take it for more than two years, otherwise I will be too old to be in the academia. However, I need some safety, for unpredictable events such as marriage and having a children, so academia is risky because I amy not be tenured before the unpredictable event and therefore the industry position may be safer.
Is it necessary to take an industry experience first before entering the academic job or you can just skip it and begin a career in the academia?

"I want to ask, if it is necessary to take an industry experience first before entering the academic job or you can just pass it and begin the career in academic?" I am not aware of any field which requires academics to have industry experience first. If you want a more useful answer, probably you should specify what your field is. In any case, your life story (which takes up most of the question) does not seem to have anything to do with what you actually want to ask.

I don't understand the question - you have several examples at your university of academics without industry experience. Can you clarify what you are asking?

Which country or cultural area are you based in? What are the motivations behind your parents statement?

In applied areas, a year or two of industrial experience will not hurt your CV -- but it certainly isn't a necessary requirement.
In pure sciences (mathematics, physics, astronomy), this may be more like waste of time.
No rule is without exceptions, of course. If you spend some time at a research unit of some highly advanced and renown company -- then this may look good in the eyes of the people from academia. But then, again, this is likely to happen in applied areas. The general rule, however, is simple (at least in the West): if you are building an academic career, then stay in academia and don't leave.


text:
Is future academic placement an important factor in picking a PhD advisor?
I'm a M.A. student in Art History looking to apply to PhD programs in the Fall. I have heard that it is important when choosing an advisor to pick one that is good/efficient in getting their students academic postings/postdoctoral work. I'm not sure what the validity of this statement is given that it came from a fellow graduate student, but the person seemed very adamant that it is really your advisor's job to get you an academic posting after your PhD and not your own responsibility.
I am wondering if this is true? Also, if it is true that job placement is important in picking an advisor, I am wondering where/how I would find out specific advisor's job placement rates?

I am afraid many of the response you will receive here are STEM oriented, where there are (almost) more jobs than PhD holders (and even candidates).
I would say that although your point will be seen as näive, it may be true in a field where there are way less opening than candidates: the network of your advisor may play a huge role. Please weight the answers you receive accordingly.

There are a lot of factors to consider in choosing an advisor, including this one, but this isn't the overriding concern. You need to do good, publishable, work in a doctoral program and you may (probably will) need guidance and assistance in that.
So, the more important considerations for an advisor is their knowledge and helpfulness in guiding your progress. This requires that they spend some time and effort in their advisement.
But even when an advisor is very instrumental in getting you a postdoc position, after that it is pretty much up to what you produce (even before that, actually).
I'll agree that an advisor has responsibility to help you get into the marketplace initially, but to say that it is only their job is a mistake. It is, fundamentally, your job, though at the start you are only a novice at it.
I'll also guess that, generally speaking, advisors who have a good track record at placing their students also do a good job on the other aspects.

Thank you so much for this insightful answer! I really appreciate it!

are you discussing the situation in STEM field or is your experience much broader?

@EarlGrey, I have had two family members with such experience, one education and one philosophy.

that it is really your advisor's job to get you an academic posting after your PhD and not your own responsibility.

This strikes me as extremely naive. It is certainly your advisor's job to help you, and some advisors do a better job of this than others -- but ultimately your career is your own responsibility.
I recommend that you look before you leap. There are likely to be far fewer tenure-track jobs available in art history, than there are strong candidates. (You do not want an adjunct position, at least not in the long term.) Are you dead-set on academia? Are there other jobs you might enjoy doing? Would you enjoy doing a PhD in art history, even if you end up at a job that is not directly related? You might get lucky but you probably shouldn't count on it. The narrower your career ambitions, the more cautious you have to be.
Looking for career placement rates is an excellent idea. Probably a good first step is to try to find CVs of professors in your target department. These often have lists of former graduate students, and you can do a little google-fu. This is nowhere close to foolproof, but with some internet sleuthing you can often end up finding out where some of them ended up.
This is a good idea independently of your advisor choice: it will give you a sense of what some of your long-term options may be.

is your field Mathematics?

@EarlGrey Yes, and I am basing my answer on what I have heard and read about the US academic job market in the humanities.

the person seemed very adamant that it is really your advisor's job to get you an academic posting

They are wrong.

Is job placement an important factor in picking a PhD advisor?

Yes.  Those advisors whose former students have jobs that appeal to you will be able (but not necessarily willing) to help you meet the people who are hiring for those jobs.

I am wondering where/how I would find out specific advisor's job placement rates?

Check their website.  You might find that information there 10% of the time.
If you are not getting your PhD in computer science or one of a very small number of similarly fashionable fields, your chances of becoming a professor are extremely small.

is your experience in physics?

Others have discussed the question of who is responsible for your career. I endorse those answers and have thumbed-up them.
I want to discuss a means to attempt to find where a prof's students have gone after their degree. In physics there are some magazines with titles like Physics Today and similar names. They are non-technical magazines giving such things as creation of new departments at different universities, who has been hired, what conferences are happening, changes to grant agencies, new journals or changes in journal staff, and many other related items.
One thing they often have, possibly only once per year, is recent graduates at MSc and PhD level, and where they have gone on to. So you can get back issues of such magazines and find out where profs have sent their students.
Yes it is your responsibility. But if a prof has sent his last five students to a similar sort of career, it's a good indicator of how you should expect to proceed if you get a PhD working with that prof. If 4 out of 5 are now in tenure track positions, that means something. If instead 4 out of 5 are doing something else, that is probably indicative.

4 out of 5 are doing something else: extend your time frame to 10-15 years after PhD and you will see that even considering tenure, that is a very optimistic estimate.
Is your experience in Physics/STEM?

It is certainly not the advisor's job to get a PhD graduate a job placement after they finish.  They should be big and ugly enough to look after themselves by then.  What a supervisor should do is be willing to provide a timely letter of reference and reference for job applications, and be willing to provide general career advice to the extent of their knowledge.  In some cases advisors might be able to open doors for their graduates through their own professional networks, but this is not obligatory (and not something you should rely on).
As to the broader question, I think it is a bit sad that an incoming PhD student would look at their choice of advisor in this way.  An academic program to get a PhD should be driven by love for the subject matter, interest in the field of study, and the degree to which an advisor's work and approach inspires and assists the student with respect to the substantive field.  Ideally, the career prospects of the student should then be determined by their skills and the quality of their work, not the professional network and glad-handing of their advisor.  It is certainly a shame if job placement is an overriding concern for an incoming student.  That is not a criticism of you --- I know you didn't invent the tough job market for art history doctorates, but it is still a real shame to look at things this way.


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What are some tips to improve the output of a study group?
Let's say a group of students decides to study an existing subject X collectively without a professor. What general guidelines should be followed so that the group can make the most out of it?
I am mainly interested in things like

What should be the ideal size of the study group?
Should all the members do the same thing or different things?
Should there be a categorization of members, like should some members do fundamentally different things than the other ones?

etc.
(for context: subject is math)

I don't think there is an ideal. Lots of things can work if people are committed, though continuing commitment will be an issue for most.
I'd suggest asking a professor for some guidance, especially initially. They can suggest books and papers to read.
More than six in a group will start to get unwieldy. Two is fine if both are committed. But the process will differ depending on group size. I'll suppose closer to six than two in what follows.
Someone should take the lead in scheduling meetings but that is probably enough.
One way to make it work is for everyone in the group to study the same material for a week (or so), but one of the members (rotating) is tasked with making a presentation to everyone on that material. That can include both an oral presentation and a written summary. Everyone else is expected to read and actually put some effort into the same material, but that will probably be the hardest part to maintain.
But someone needs to be the "leader" for any given meeting; the presenter. If no one leads then little is likely to happen.
The presentation of the material includes a discussion of it with corrections suggested. To really do a good job of it the presenter then produces a second written report that includes updates from the presentation. This is distributed to everyone.
People could volunteer for some set of material or the "organizer" can assign people, say in round-robin fashion.
Let any of the members suggest new material. Check back with the professor on occasion, perhaps by showing them the reports.
Since this is math, don't neglect the fact that a lot (most?) learning takes place while doing exercises. A group can be used to get feedback on individual attempts at problems - especially difficult problems. It is easy to be misled as to your level of knowledge if you don't test it with application to problems.
Note that this isn't limited to students. A group of professionals can do the same thing.

First to answer your specific questions.

The group size is going to depend on how effectively you can choose active contributing members. Three useful members will be better than any number of unhelpful persons.
Uniform activity for some phases and type of group, individual for others.
See point 2.

The primary thing is to get people who will work and not simply coast. If you can find more people who will be active and contribute meaningfully and usefully, then more is better. But each person in the group who does not help is worse.
Keep in mind that project managers nearly all say that if you are going to fire a project member, you want to do it early rather than late. Early replacement means you have more time to make up for the problems. Ideally you want to filter out the bad apples before any work at all gets done, but that is usually impossible.
Once your group is selected, then what is the goal? Is it to keep everybody motivated? If so, how? Maybe you set goals, set each other tests or homework assignments, kick each other's chair if the other person starts to slack, or whatever. Make sure everybody knows the goal and the method that are to be considered acceptable.
Or possibly the goal is to perform some practice task. Will that task be one-person sized and done by everybody? Or broken down into different one-person sized tasks that build up the complete task? Each of these now involves some degree of management. You need to decide these things very early. And you need people to understand and agree to the plan.
Getting this far will give you some idea of whether you have the right people. If you wind up not completing this, you are probably doomed.  Pay attention to who doomed you, keeping in mind it might have been yourself.
Just some possible models for a study group.

Quiet study time. Get your study material and go to the same place as your study group. The group is empowered to push people back (shush them, etc.) to keep them working. If somebody gets stuck on some question then ask your neighbor.
There are many variations on the previous one. For example, it might be possible to hire a tutor. The tutor could give a quick lecture on a topic, then quiet study time would start. The tutor would circulate and answer questions as required.
Get old exams. Divide the questions and each person or set of persons do some part of the exam. Then when everybody is ready, regroup and compare answers. Record which types of question gave the most difficulty, and use those to guide where more work is needed.
Get a textbook (or other document such as a research article, etc.). Assign each person some part to read, chapter or section or whatever. Then regroup and report to the others on your portion. If your portion is too easy, go ahead and read other parts. After each section there should be practice problems. These could be done individually or taken up as a group.
Pick a subject. Each person (or sub group) researches some part of that subject and prepares a report. Then regroup and give presentations on the reports.  The trick here is choosing the right sized parts of the subject. And again, there should be practice problems.

Of course there are many other possible patterns. You need to decide what and how based on the people available, the level of work you are prepared to do, the time available, and so on.

Quite a late answer, but it seems so this is a very well studied topic. The key search term is "Organizational communication". This book in particular discusses some of the important outputs of research in this field.
I found this Youtube channel also quite helpful as a primer of the many ideas in this field, which I believe would be useful to academics of various different fields.


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Can I publish a piece of software as a research paper?
I am currently working on a Unity 3D FPS game. and I was wondering if I write a detailed paper on what a made in a specific part and steps to replicate it like a documentation .Would it qualify to be a research paper considering I had to research a lot of topics mainly about unity engine to make it? and do I have to publish it in a journal or I just put it in a personal website/Blog?

It doesn't seem at all like a research paper. What would the "research question" be?

That's a valid point. I haven't thought of one yet but can it be something like  "How to create a Unity 3D FPS System" and if its not a research paper what can I call it.

Sounds more like a technical manual. A research paper has a hypothesis, null hypothesis, a model - at least in ideal conditions.

What would u call this one : https://asawicki.info/Mirror/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games.html

An impressive, high-level and thorough tutorial. Well presented and clear. Teaching material perhaps at A-Level/undergraduate level for programmers.

Ok. Thanks for the help

Almost perhaps a physics manual. Very useful in the right hands though.

Dear OP, my apologise for what may look like a very strong edit from my side, but I had to change the title of the question: given the description of your problem, it was misleading.

This does not seem to address the particular software that you have written, but for readers intrigued by the title, the Journal of Open Source Software seems to be exactly the venue where one would publish software "as a research paper". Their stance is that research papers form the currency of academia, so for people who produce useful software, they need "research papers" and citations of those papers to earn comparable recognition.

Does this answer your question? Can open-source software be peer-reviewed and published?

@Ian, certainly many things get published that aren't research. I don't think this question is a duplicate for that reason.

Perhaps an old example will help clarify things. One of my professional interests (before retirement) was languages and compilers. One of the issues in some languages, like C, was, and remains, memory management. Some important programs can require more memory than the architecture provides, so memory needs to be recycled during execution. Some languages avoid the issue by using a run-time feature called garbage collection. This frees the programmer from making sure that memory is used efficiently. But efficiency is relative.
At one time, garbage collectors provided a benefit to the programmer but were very slow. One version resulted in measurable delays in the progress of a computation while the garbage collector took over the processor and returned now-unused memory to the pool of available locations. There was a great need for faster and non-disruptive garbage collectors and it was, for a few years an important research area. Even a small advance was considered enough to earn a student their doctorate.
But, research proceed as follows. A proposal would be made about the possible structure of a more efficient GC scheme. Then, the student would spend a year or so building an implementation and refining it. But that wasn't enough for the awarding of a degree or the publishing of "research papers", though they were clearly conducting research.
What resulted in the degree was the analysis of the behavior and efficiency of that implementation (or, more generally, the underlying algorithm) in a variety of useful cases. If the new software could be shown to be measurably and reliably more efficient than existing approaches, even by a small amount, say 3-5%, then the student would earn their degree, publish the results, and be praised by the language research community.
The dissertation was not the code listing of the garbage collector, though it would include at least some high level description of it (with source possibly available). The important part of the dissertation was the analysis that led one to treat the approach as superior. That was the research contribution.
If the software failed to show an advance, then the student went back to work, even though some valuable things might have been learned. In a few cases, it might have been possible to publish the fact that a certain "interesting" approach actually fails to work, but not a lot of that happened.
Short version: the software had to show a measurable and reliable advance over existing practice to be seen as a worthy contribution.
I'm guessing that what you have done has none of the above characteristics. It might be an interesting "case study" for someone wanting to do something similar and wanting some guidance in how to go about it, but as research it seems to be lacking that "advance over current practice" that is normally expected in software research.

A "research paper" is a document presenting some novelty to practitioners in a certain topic of a certain fields. (side note: counterintuitively, a review paper is also presenting some novelty: the review itself.)
Your question is if the product you build can be presented as a research paper. Of course, the product itself is a novelty and it can be presented in a scientific way.
However, the fact that it can be presented as a research paper does not automatically mean that it would be interesting to the research community.
The research paper goal is to share research results with researchers that may further build up on the tool itself.
Let's take the Python module called NumPy (Harris et al., 2020): it exists since almost two decades, it has been used intensively in the last two decades, but it has been presented in a research paper only in 2020.
Moreover, it is not even the NumPy itself presented, rather NumPy and its application (the title of the paper is "Array programming with NumPy"). But in the previous two decades there were user's guide, blog entries, technical notes about NumPy.
Try to look for software similar to yours, try to see if anyone published a paper (a research paper about DOOM? that would have been cool!) ... I guess your product can, in the best of the worlds, follow the NumPy way: available, manual published, 20 years later if succesfull finally published as a research paper.
Maybe someone will blend your FPS with a ML-driven robotic proton guns shooting at singular cancer cells, with the surgeon carefully checking the robotic gun job using 3d VR-glasses, who knows?
Ref.:
Harris, C.R., Millman, K.J., van der Walt, S.J. et al. Array programming with NumPy. Nature 585, 357–362 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2


text:
Should I contact journal editor?
I submitted an article to a journal last year in July. It took some months for it to be processed and peer reviewer to be assigned.
I received the first decision in March (major revisions). The article went through several rounds of revision. The last exchange I had with the journal editor was a month ago. The editor stated that they would go ahead with publishing the article.
I was required to make one last small change after which my article would be sent to typesetting and proofreading.
I revised accordingly and emailed the editor.
Since then, radio silence. 10 days after I sent the latest version of the article, I emailed the editor asking whether it would be possible to receive an official letter of acceptance at this point as I needed it for a deadline at work (the deadline came and went). No response. It has been 20 days since then, and I have heard nothing.
I understand that the editor must be very busy, and I do not want to badger them.
However, I am getting extremely apprehensive given that the issue my article is supposed to appear in is this month's issue and that it usually isn't supposed to take longer than two weeks for typesetting and proofreading, yet I have not heard anything yet.
So, do I contact again with a polite question as to what is going on? Or do I just wait?

It seems to me that you should have received an email of acceptance after you answered the last reviewers'comments, otherwise the publisher would not engage in typesetting and proofing. Did you check your spam mailbox?

The only form of acceptance I received was the editor stating that they would go ahead with publishing the article and that after the last edit, the article would go to typesetting and proofing. However, I cannot use this as evidence for acceptance at my work. According to the journal's website, they send a formal letter of acceptance only after typesetting and proofing has been done. What do you think would be the best way for me to proceed with this?

Deadline approached, arrived and went by, so your need for the acceptance letter is a lesser pressing concern.
The solution is: be patient. It may be that the paper will not appear in this month's issue. It is journal-dependent, but it may be you will receive the acceptance letter and that the article will be available online before the issue is published (so your paper will be "in print")

Thank you for your response.

How do you know that "the issue my article is supposed to appear in is this month's issue" and that "it usually isn't supposed to take longer than two weeks for typesetting and proofreading"? What is your source of information?

I was informed by the editor that they would like to publish my article in the June issue. As for how long it takes for typesetting and proofreading, I don't know for sure, but after searching online, that seems to be the general timeline for such a task although could be longer definitely.

Does this answer your question? What does the typical workflow of a journal look like? How should I interpret a particular submission status?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with contacting the editor. In fact, instead of the editor, locate the email that deals with publication related matters, which you are likely to locate on the journal site. Mail them. They usually respond way quicker than the busy editors.

There should not be any harm in asking them politely if there is anything more they'd need from you to publish the manuscript.

The decision is yours, but note that writing to them won't have any positive effect on speeding up the process. There are a lot of reasons why things take time and others why you may not get an answer. Even in the smoothest running organizations, things happen. In a pandemic and in which a lot of people need to "touch" your work in some way to get it published, bad things happen.
While I recommend patience, since it is what it is, a (very) polite note asking for an update is not out of line.

"but note that writing to them won't have any positive effect on speeding up the process" - I think that this is often true but not always. I once wrote to an editor and got an apology that things had taken so long (this was after having been patient for longer than the person who has asked this question here) followed by immediate processing. Apparently somebody had forgotten something. This can happen even though I believe that more often than not writing "won't have positive effects".

I agree - I wrote a very gentle email to to check and follow up after 3 months of radio silence. After that I received the camera ready copy in one day. No one said this explicitly, but something had been forgotten.


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Postdoc project: Bait and switch
Earlier this year, I interviewed and received offers for two postdoc positions from competing universities, with one- and three-year contracts, respectively. The first is more related to my PhD, while the second is a bit distant but still in the general area of my discipline. I eventually accepted the second one for different reasons:

It's in a multidisciplinary research centre, and the description was that I will be part of a large team working on a massive project, which I found really exciting and non-traditional.
Huge amount of money is being poured into this centre by the government, so there's a good potential to grow.
The project itself is interesting and I will gain different skills by pursuing it. The intended work was of industry-like nature
The PI was extremely keen to have me onboard, which made me feel valued.

On the flip side, the university is large, but I will be working at a small campus. Most of the team are from one discipline and only a couple of members are actually from my discipline (say, for example, most of them are mechanical engineers, but I'm an electronic engineer). The PI is not from my discipline.
The disadvantages did not mean much to me when I received their offer as I considered myself joining an industry R&D department, which I also confirmed during the interview, and from the position description.
Once I accepted the offer and joined the research centre, I was shocked that I was assigned a very boring project that I will work on alone and doesn't fit my background. It's academic in nature, but with almost zero supervision. The potential to publish in reputable venues is small. I also found out that they hired another postdoc to fill the advertised position. This was a dead-end for me. I felt like I was put under a glass ceiling not to join the other university (a competitor). I deeply regretted accepting this offer, but at the same time, I cannot resign as I have just moved to a new city with a spouse and kids.
The good news is that I did a really great PhD on a hot topic, and was approached by 3 universities abroad to co-supervise PhD students distantly.
I communicated with my supervisor in this regards and expressed my feeling of being alienated and my preference to be integrated with the large team and be given a role as discussed during the interview. He agreed and gave me a task to do, but never replied to any email I sent later. He ignored me big time. Under the fear of being kicked out and putting myself and family in a financial hardship, 6 weeks later, I agreed to work on the project he assigned me earlier while working distantly with the other universities to keep my passion and academic career going. Ever since, our communication improved but still I feel isolated and doing worthless work.
What's your advice for me? Finding another job is a top priority for me but that is going to be hard due to job market trends and the limitation of moving with my family to  a new city/country for another time (kids, school, etc). I have been in this position for 4 months - long enough to hate it.

You have been scammed. I recently went through a rather similar situation, see the thread below:
Persistent issues with salary pay as a postdoc in China: What can I do?
Apparently there are several cheaters fishing for foreign postdocs into such schemes. Tracing the parallel of my situation onto yours, I was hired by a Chinese university on a false salary expectation under their pretence that all my project ideas sounded interesting. They were keen in that I would convince my wife to move as well to another department, and kept encouraging us into joining the university later as professors.
As soon as I landed and lodged, salary was "unexpectedly" irregular and much lower, and they started pushing to work 12/6 on other undiscussed projects. Their strategy of manipulation was exactly as you describe: no email communication unless where I complied with their demands.
I played their game until the end of the contract. I am sure they hoped I'd give up. I was actually benefitting from investing time on personal projects, saving money, and learning a foreign culture while they shunned me. I kept wondering whether they'd eventually kick me out, which they never did. But I do not recommend this line of action: I do not like playing games, and everyday I felt angry. Furthermore it is a waste of time, in the end.
My advice to you is that you focus 100% on networking and finding another job asap. Apply for an industry position within the same region. Of course the PI will feel you're up to something but try to keep this person isolating you. (A trick is to look miserable whenever you're seen.) They expect you to just settle, and they probably will not fire you unless given a good reason. So don't fall for any provocation, play victim, and invest heavy on getting a new position. How is your LinkedIn profile? Ever heard of The Cheeky Scientists Association? Aware of any networking fairs around your location? There is a lot to be done.
You will win: just bite the bullet and cheat these cheaters. Good luck.

That's a really annoying situation!
I'd start by seriously considering finding another postdoc position somewhere. It may not be possible due to the job market and because of your spouse and kids, but you need to find out if this is a possibility at all or whether it is not. Talk to your spouse about this and put out feelers for other postdoc positions.
If that doesn't work, look for other work in or around the city you are living in right now. This would mean leaving academics and that's a hard pill to swallow for some, but many, many people are perfectly happy not being in academics.
The final option is to find a way to make things work in your current position. I'm ranking this third because you sound like you lost trust in your supervisor and/or employer and that's quite difficult to recover from.
Good luck!


text:
How to de-escalate a heated argument with my undergrad advisor?
The original issue is explained in detail
here - the gist of that is that the advisor used the "I have a PhD and you are a puny undergrad" line on me while arguing about the substance of my thesis. We are both emotional people, and the discussion got quite heated.
I have since tried to change the advisor, but our department rejected my attempt. I suspect this is because the head of the department is a close friend to that doctor, so I'm planning to write a complaint about it to the dean of science. What would be a good way to navigate this situation?

so what is your question?

This seems like a fine rant! What else have you got for us?

We can't answer your question if you don't have any.

I presume the question is: “How do I effectively file a complaint against the very poor behavior of this doctor?”.

(Or otherwise navigate to a successful outcome, perhaps by finding a ombudsman or some other resource)

@zachHunter Yesss thank you for articulating better than I could ever have

I have edited it to the best of my ability. Please review it and, if possible, add a country tag - local cultural norms might be relevant. More importantly, please outline your desired outcome space: how long until your graduation, do you want to change advisor, do you consider mending the existing relationship at least to the point of graduating under your current one etc.

I suggest to edit the question "how to De-escalate [...]" ... when you are the weakest side, a conflict will lead to a loss.

Your link is to a Math Overflow answer, not something that explains the original issue?

From what I can tell, your advisor

is a complete jerk

could stand to read an introductory book on algebraic number theory.

Personally, I wouldn't try to "win this fight"; instead, I'd recommend attempting to de-escalate to the extent possible and focusing on your own career goals. You might start by seeking out any faculty member in the department whom you know and trust, and asking them how to proceed.
Best of luck.


text:
Formulating research question
I am international student and have a problem with formulating a research question. I know the gap, but I could not make it clear. + my supervisor is not convinced of what I am doing and believes that there is no problem really(the research gap).
Any advice.!
Thanks,

If you can't make it clear to your supervisor then you have nothing to work with. That is pretty much a minimum requirement.

The question is very general so the answer is going to be as well.
A research question is a plan for working on some specific piece of research. Making the plan clear is an essential step. You should be able to give a specific answer to the three standard questions:

What is it? What is the object of the work and what is the context? Are there any similar questions already solved or studied in the literature?  How does your goal/question differ from existing works?
Why does it matter? What are the motivations for doing this work? What problem does it solve (or contribute to solve)? what use cases does it apply to?
How? Which method can be used? Why this method in particular? What are the potential limitations of this approach?

Having a clear answer to all these questions will allow you to have a discussion about the details with your supervisor: either they are convinced by your plan, or they can tell you exactly where is the problem in your plan.

@Mary Paraphrasing a professor at UPitt in the U.S., you need to first convince yourself before you can convince the world. Ensuring that you deeply understand your question will help you convince other people.


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Most efficient way of developing a comprehensive understanding of a field
Are handbooks on a particular field you are interested in, the fastest and most comprehensive way of learning about that field. For instance, if I were interested in cognitive science would a book like "Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science" be the best way to go. Also, if there are multiple handbooks from different publishers which one should I pick?

I'll note that unless you qualify it a bit, in some fields it isn't possible. An undergraduate degree in mathematics, for example, gives you a fairly comprehensive understanding, but there is just too much in the field to know it all. But getting a fundamental notion of the essence of the field is more attainable, but won't come from handbooks which stress detail over deep understanding, I think. But I've never looked at the tome you cite.

I think in mathematics it would be a very exceptional undergrad degree that would give any “comprehensive” understanding at all... and there are no meaningful “handbooks” in mathematics. Unclear that other subjects’ alleged “handbooks” really do any better. I can understand that there is some impulse to call a thing a “handbook”, but that doesn’t mean that it fulfills the role.

according to my experience: no. Those books are just for reference, not suitable for teaching & learning

A PhD in mathematics doesn't even give a comprehensive overview of mathematics as a field! It's so vast and frankly esoteric I don't think anyone could have a comprehensive understanding of it.

To me a comprehensive understanding of a field means that you understand, apart from the methods and theories applied in a scientific branch or topic, especially the past closed and open major questions. As a PhD student you should be able to ask such questions at some point, then you have the intellectual maturity to work independently from your supervisor, as a post-doc or pursuing an academic career, the PhD is then rather a formal issue to succeed in technically. When and how you reach this level of understanding, some even not after getting PhD, is very individual.
A good way to get there are reading review articles over the years, discussing with colleagues on conferences ideas/problems at poster sessions, but also reading intentionally journals that have only interdisciplinary connections to your special topic and methods or googling roadmaps of distinct fields published often in journals or by institutions like EU research ressort. Handbooks are scientific dictionaries to look up details, you don't understand a language by reading one. Your PhD work has to/should try to penetrate the boundaries of published literature and knowledge and for this you need to know the details, but also see the bigger picture/questions behind your topic. But I don't think you need a comprehensive understanding of a whole field to earn a PhD, often the requirements are much lower. But for an academic career/tenure in a competitive field it will be necessary, also not sufficient.
PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems today it is also easier to increase your understanding, if you use modern tools and know that google and search engines for scientific literature have powerful search operators

The answer of course is "it depends" on the field, the handbook, your ability, and what exactly you need in terms of learning the field.
In general, I think you are better off getting an easier review article or a textbook.  But a handbook may have a lot of condensed information and be a sort of "encyclopedia" of the field.  But generally, it is written more for practitioners than for newbies.  It is not (usually) written exactly for your problem.
To evaluate handbooks, ask others opinions, look at Amazon reviews, and skim it in the library.


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Awaiting AE Recommendation to Awaiting AE Assignment
Paper just went to this after review. Any idea what this means in terms of the paper's status at this point?

Odds are this means the AE changed. This could be because the original AE declined the assignment, resigned from the editorial board, is too busy to make a decision, and so on.
See also this question: Manuscript status changed from “Reviews completed” to “Editor assigned”


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Is Characterizing an Algorithm's Behavior worth Publication?
I am planning on characterizing the performance of an algorithm (specifically the DIRECT algorithm) with respect to a particular parameter mentioned in the original paper but for which I have found no usable characterization of the performance impacts of. This algorithm isn't the most popular in its field (nonlinear numerical optimization), but there have been several papers associated with it and it does have applications in other fields.
To be more specific, I am planning on characterizing the performance of the algorithm with respect to its number of iterations in a more specific way than "increasing the number of iterations increases the quality of the results," including a description of how exactly the performance impact scales.
Is this sort of characterization novel enough to be worth publication?

You may get better input if you post on a discipline-specific site (eg or.stackexchange.com). Best wishes!

Is this a purely mathematical analysis, or did you do conduct an experiment to verify your hypotheses?

It may be thin, but you won't know until you write it up formally and submit it to some appropriate journal. The real feedback will come from reviewers and/or the editor.
The question here is just a hypothetical. Make it concrete and ask someone (the editor) who is in a position to make a determination. You will have to make your case there.

In general, to answer the topline question, it may be publishable or not, but the details matter.


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Maintaining Credibility with Data Obtained by Hand
Recently, I was doing a project in computer science (involving modes of computation) that had a very specific time limit. Unfortunately, due to software problems, I was forced to obtain my data by hand. I went to substantial lengths to ensure the correctness of this data, but am worried that my credibility and the credibility of the data will be significantly decreased. What should I do to maintain credibility?

Can you elaborate on what exactly was done to "obtain my data by hand"? Timing experiment running times with a stopwatch? Subjective evaluation of output pictures by whether they looked right? Observation of user behavior in a paper notebook? Something else? Details may matter here.

@Peteris Nothing quite as abhorrent as that, no. The data was obtained by following a model of the proposed system; the main difference was that it was being done by hand rather than by an automated program.

There is probably little to do but be honest about how the data was obtained. If it holds up under review then you have no issues. The past is the past.
However, if you have a chance you can try to obtain a better data set under more controlled conditions. This might be the core of a follow-up publication, either validating or invalidating the earlier result.
You learn something from just about every study. But if you are honest, it is hard to complain.

Unfortunately, it will be several months until I would be able to get a better data set (and even then, I’d have to add something new). I will be sure to be honest about it, though.


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Submit to arxiv prior to a conference or journal
I'm about to apply for phd soon. I have several papers that I'm currently working on that are almost finished. That said, there is probably not enough to publish them on time. I think it might be a good idea to post them to arxiv so that I can point admission committee to my work as "preprints" in my application. But since I hope to eventually submit them to a journal or conference, what would be appropriate way to do it? for example, which license of the following should I choose? What are the difference? Would that affect my later publication?
arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license to distribute this article (Minimal rights required by arXiv.org)
Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0)
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration (CC0 1.0)
 None of the above licenses apply

Check the journal's policies.  It probably does not matter.

Alternatively, see When can I safely use CC-BY license on arXiv?

This differs by field. Your profile suggests you are a mathematician and in math, almost all journals will publish papers previously available at arXiv.
The life sciences seem to be an exception with many journals refusing to publish anything previously published, even if informally. Wikipedia gives some guidance.
I'll leave the issue of license to the other questions linked in comments.


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How would PhD Admissions committee read Statements of Purpose?
I am referring to PhD admissions in US here. I've been always told that SoP's are important and require some commitment in writing. But in the meantime I hear a lot of such voices that PhD programs typically receive tons of applications like 500, so professors in committee would only spend a matter of 5mins-ish long reading about a single application. I am wondering which is the case? I really want to express myself thoroughly in my SoP but I guess a lot of valuable information would not passed to the committee if only under a fast read. (Or is it that I am underestimating their reading speed?)

When I was on my department's graduate committee (which dealt with admissions), I read ~120 applications per year. About half of these are "obviously" not competitive for some reason or other (typically low GPAs) and you might not read all of it very carefully, but I read the SoPs of all competitive applications and I believe that my colleagues did the same. I read them quicker than I would the PhD theses of my students or a scientific paper, but I read them front to back. And they mattered to me and my colleagues.
The message here is: If your application isn't competitive, then you probably don't need to bother with a good SoP. But if your application is competitive, you also need a good SoP. Poor SoPs can and do sink applications.

+1 — this closely matches my own experience of PhD admissions (in Europe).  On a first pass through the applications, I usually just skim some parts, but I certainly read all the “longlisted” applications pretty carefully.

Thanks for the answer, I was also wondering as OP how committee read SoP. Would you care to say more about how SoP matters for admission purpose?

@justhalf There are already many questions about SoPs on this forum, covering all aspects. Search and you will find :-)

The world is what it is, and admissions committees are made up of individuals with their own ideas and priorities. So, you do the best you can on every required element of any application.
If a department really got that many applications there might be some initial weeding out process that reduces the number to a more reasonable level, at least for the first pass. Some applications are incomplete, some flawed. GPA can be a gate some places. Those weeded out may get cursory looks later, provided the more likely pool doesn't yield enough good candidates. Even a quick read of an SoP can be useful in avoiding quick rejection.
So, you write the best SoP you can, detailing academic and career goals and some plan, perhaps, for meeting them. If you do a poor job of this it lowers your expectations.
But, writing an SoP has another objective. It forces you to think about those goals and make them somewhat explicit. Know Thyself. A generally useful thing to do.

Might also be useful to explain the SOP must be both short and very readable/skimmable

These two goals — quality SOP and quick reading — are not mutually exclusive, as @Dawn notes in a comment.  Rather, an excellent SOP will be easy to read quickly: it will clearly and succinctly convey your interest in research, interest in the program, and relevant preparation, so that the reader doesn't need more than that 5 minutes to tell that you are a compelling applicant worth further review and consideration for the program.
To that end, I would advise against attempting to explain yourself “thoroughly”. Clarity, concision, and persuasiveness should be your goals, and long-winded SOPs undermine those objectives.


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Paper on mathematical analysis using tools from other (almost unrelated) field: how to introduce them?
I'm a PhD student working in Stochastic calculus/Malliavin calculus, and I am currently writing a paper (my second one), in which I use tools from probability theory to solve an Analysis problem.
My idea was to write it in such a way that not only a probabilist could read it, but also an analyst (since the problem I "solve" has more relevance when considered from the Analysis perspective).
In order to achieve this I had to write an first section with preliminary results where I tried to "translate" some of the concepts/tools into a more "analyst-friendly" language since I am not sure if the general public working in mathematical analysis has some familiarity with Malliavin/Hida-calculus.
The problem is that even though I need only a few lemmas from Malliavin/Hida-calculus,  in order to prove those I've ended up with a 15-pages-long "introductory" section, while the statement & proof of my result can be written in at most 3 pages.
This seems somehow "unbalanced",  what do you think?  Is it always necessary to provide a proof for the "intermediate lemmas", or maybe I could write something like "the interested reader in refer to ...".
If this was a paper for people working in the field I would certainly ommit some.
I know this is something I could discuss with my supervisor, but he is a probabilist and I would like to listen the opinion of some analyst.
Thanks in advance!

Is there an analyst in your department who you could ask to look over the draft and give their opinion?

Hmmm, the "general public" doesn't work in analysis. It's been a long time for me, but a quick wikipedia search suggests that the things you are suggesting should be accessible to any mathematician working primarily in analysis. It is probably enough to cite some things.

@Buffy yeah... Actually the wikipedia article is not very representative of what Malliavin calculus really is..

Is there some kind of a good, widely accepted, well-know in your area, and accessible summary / lecture notes / review article / book? Then just cite it and regurgitate only the major key points very tersely. If not, I'd support @Tommi: use an appendix.

An appendix, maybe
In many other fields it is typical to first choose a journal and only then start writing. In mathematics this is often not done. But here it might be relevant to consider your target audience and thereby target journal.
If the problem is from analysis and you want to publish it in a journal devoted to analysis (or in any non-stochastics journal), an appendix with the stochastics might be appropriate. In any case, formatting the paper so that it can be read without the material in the appendix is a worthwhile task. It also makes it simple to react to referee comments concerning the usefulness of the appendix, if you get such: you can keep it, integrate it back into the main text or remove it with only a little trouble.
If you think the paper is of (more) interest to people into Malliavin calculus, or would be easier to publish in a journal close to stochastics, then maybe leaving out the basics is desirable. But remember to motivate the problem sufficiently.


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Fancy/pretty or concise and informative plots?
I am writing my Master's degree Thesis in Economics and I'm dealing with quite a lot of plots (my topic is more related to statistics, in particular I'm working with B-spline free knot placement) and I am wondering what's better, if to provide very fancy plots (for example using ggplot2) or instead to keep things simple and use the basic plots (from R).
What do you prefer when reading an article?
Thanks in advance.

What have you learnt so far when showing data?

I've learnt that it depends pretty much on your taste, for instance if you see "Elements of Statistical Learning" by Hastie et al. the graphs are masterpieces, quite colourful and "pretty" but not necessarily confusing. My question goes more to the "should I show to the evaluating committee that I've paid attention to the graphs or not?"

You have now changed your question... What you need to show is that you have analysed the situation...

This is why advisors exist. They need to approve your work, ultimately.

Check out the diagram and link I provide here (give it a vote if it helps...) : https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/124249/72855

Indeed @Roland, what I meant was the base command without filling all the options.

I think, that you need to clarify, does "fancy" mean: "cool", but senseless effects (see Excel) or some less-conventional, but more insightful forms of visualization (in the gist of violin plot vs. boxplot). Obviously, the answers are "no" and "yes", depending on what you'd say.

By fancy I mean unconventional forms of visualization. Actually my question was born while I was thinking whether including a violin plot or the simple boxplot!

Plots should be clean.  For instance, MSFT adds some cruft to charts (lines), that is better off culled. Also avoid 3D pie charts or 3 D column charts (makes you look like an undergrad).  After that, it probably doesn't matter if you use R, some custom plotting tool or Excel or the like.
Read "Say it With Charts" book for some good advice on simple chart communication.  Tells you what style shows what relationship best.
Make your figure captions shine.  They should be on the longer side and give clear identification of different symbols and lines.  Figure captions are some of the most read text in a paper.

I prefer plots which communicate information and tell the story so clearly, that I do not stop to think which software was used to create them. There are several good ways of achieving it and many ugly ways of failing it. The art of preparing a good plot (and infographics in general) is a complex matter and can not be boiled down to a one-bit answer like "do/don't use ggplot".
To learn this art, read more papers, highlight plots you like and analyze what you like about them and how it was achieved. Try reproducing a nice plot in your favourite software. Consult your supervisor and colleagues for more hints.

I think the recognition of a plotting tool is often almost subconscious. I have seen a lot of plots (papers and posters alike) where it was apparent to me, whether it's been done using Mathematica, Matlab or Matplotlib. But I agree with you on the oint that communication of information has to come first and foremost.

@Nox The recognition is instant if default settings were used.

Clean and simple is best. However, ggplot2 is excellent at producing clean and simple plots.


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statement of purpose
I am currently finishing my MS in Economics and Finances and I intend to apply for a PhD in statistics. There are many reasons why I did not make an undergrad and grad in statistics but in economics, first of all the fact that in my previous university there was no statistics department.
I'm searching for some advice regarding my statement of purpose since my previous experience is not necessary connected with Statistics. Should I make more emphasis on my quantitative background, on my motivation, on the reasons why I want to apply for this particular program, even though my background might not be entirely relevant?
Is there some advice you can give a student making this sort of "field-shift"?

Your CV should explain well what you have done in the past. Your SOP should be more future directed while also attempting to bridge the past and future. But don't think you just need to explain what is in your CV and neglect what you see as your future. Think about what you want to do and what you have already done that puts you on the path to achieving your future plans. So, yes, say something about your quantitative abilities and such.
People will understand that others may want to change fields for a variety of reasons. You aren't unique in that so don't dwell too much on it. Say where you want to go, what you've done to get there already, and how this program will help you even more. But put the focus on the future, and not just the program you are applying for, but beyond that.


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Use official titles in Acknowledgements
I am writing the Acknowledgements of my thesis and I would like to know if it's necessary to use the official academic titles.
For instance "Thanks Dr.X for his invaluable help in ....", but it could happen that actually Dr.X is a Professor, or he prefers the D.Phil or PhD.
Should I make a little research to be sure that no one will feel "offended"?
Or is there some consensus about this matter?
Thanks in advance.

I'd have expected that you know who the people are who helped you!?

Actually I've received  help  from some authors that I don't actually know personally. I've been in contact with them and they sent me data,R codes, and bibliography.

At least in the US, "Professor" > "Dr." I doubt anyone would be offended if you used "Dr." only, but "Professor" (and their correct title, Assistant/Associate if necessary) would be more correct. It would strike me as odd to use post-nominals instead of titles in this case.

Yes, it is probably best to be a bit formal in acknowledgements. The difference would be two or more true peers, in which case they may collectively decide to be informal. But if you are a student, then it is wise to err on the formal side.