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Should one pursue a Ph.D. with non-tenure track professors?
Are there any disadvantages with working for non-tenure track professors? Is it possible that they get fired and you need to restart with someone else? Do they have less funding? Any other drawbacks?
Currently applying to phd programs.

Not quite a duplicate, but most of the answers at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/168444/what-are-the-risks-and-benefits-of-being-the-first-phd-of-a-new-supervisor will be relevant. See also the various questions linked to that one.

Do you mean on a permanent or on a fixed-term contract? Both would be possible (at least in Europe) and would lead to different answers.

Are you interested in this question for advisors who are not yet tenured but are still in the probationary period before tenure?

This answer might only apply in the US and only applies in certain very restricted situations. I know a few people (maybe half a dozen) in CS who would be suitable as advisors, depending on your interest.
There is a special category of faculty at some top US universities called, perhaps, "Professor of the Practice". They aren't tenured (or tenurable), but serve on long term renewable contracts (about seven years). The ones I'm thinking of hold solid doctorates themselves, but are primarily responsible for teaching undergraduates. They all do research themselves, but it is more likely to be in something like pedagogy of their field. They are quite prominent in the (CS) profession and are frequently seen at conferences, and such. For these few people, having them as an advisor would be safe enough.
I don't know if there are similar situations elsewhere and, even here, they are a bit uncommon, though they tend to occur at top universities (Stanford, Duke, ...).
And note, that I haven't asked any of them if they have done such a thing.
But, for the general case, it would be quite risky. They might leave for other reasons than getting fired. If their main subfield isn't mainstream you might have trouble finding another advisor to take their place, necessitating a change of field or a move. Much better to have someone with stable employment and the time necessary to give you proper guidance. Even non-tenured, but tenure track, people can fail on that.

This is not to mention that for the garden-variety non-TT position, such supervision duties are typically not part of the job expectations. Such a person may do very well because they are self-motivated and care about the student, but there may be no external incentive for this person to invest in the advising relationship and said person may have more cross-pressures on their time/energy than someone in a TT position.

The one concern I would have with pursuing a doctorate with a non-tenure track professor is the potential they could leave the university before you finish. Then you would have to find another faculty member to advise your research. Tenured professors do leave universities, but the likelihood is less with more secure employment and a commitment by the university.

This concern is highly relevant (+1), but: "Then you would have to find another faculty member to advise your research" That depends - in my field, it's quite common that people work remotely with an advisor who switched universities.

You are getting politically correct but misleading answers.  The canonical answer to your titular question is usually just: no.
One way to think about it: would you perhaps like to be tenure track faculty at a research university some day?  If so, make sure to choose as your advisor someone whose research is top notch and well known.  With very rare exceptions, these people are all tenured or tenure-track faculty.

Perhaps more accurate to omit "politically correct but".

I have seen "If so, make sure to choose as your advisor someone whose research is top notch and well known" offered before as advice in a USian context and while I admit I have not experienced life as a graduate student in that context, I am instinctively leery of this.

There are always risks with any advisor.  For instance, I had one die on me.
But it's perfectly possible to have advisors who aren't tenure-track, especially if they are primarily researchers.  For instance, I did my MS with a lab director who was also a practicing MD, and taught only an occasional course.  He had several PhD candidates working under him.
Another who I seriously considered doing a PhD with was primarily a researcher at (large tech company), who likewise taught the occasional course in his field.


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Why isn't it the norm to have research repeated immediately by other academics?
The potential benefit to society of good research, and the potential costs of acting on bad research, seem to be extremely high in both directions.
Why is it the norm to simply peer review research, including the methodology, but not the norm to have the actual data collection and experiments re-run by other academics for cases where it is relatively low cost and fast to do so? E.g., where a second experiment/data collection run would take < 20% of the cost of the original research and < 3 months to conduct.
If this were standard practice on inexpensive, short term studies it could improve trust and integrity in research, so why isn't it standard practice?

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Out of curiosity, are you entering academia or looking to it as a possible future?

@Aruralreader I’m not. I did a bachelors degree and some tutoring (~TA) many years ago and that was great but sufficient for me. I’ve had research jobs (but not academic research), and indulge in a lot of self-study, so I still satiate my curiosities.

Researchers make or break their reputation on ground-breaking, innovative, and high-impact work. Reproducing the results of another group provides essentially no benefit to any individual group (even if a culture of replication could arguably benefit the field).
More often than not, in my experience (in physics), reproduction of results is done as a first step in a new research project. The point of this is usually to check one's code/understanding before building up to something new. But it is not unusual for errors to be found and corrected this way. If a result is important enough to serve as a stepping stone for another research work, usually the key aspects of it are reproduced and it's not common for a visible, erroneous result to survive very long.

+1 for the info. "Researchers make or break their reputation on ground-breaking, innovative, and high-impact work. Reproducing the results of another group provides essentially no benefit to any individual group" .. wouldn't this logic also rule out peer reviews? i.e. if academics are completely preoccupied with exclusively new research, wouldn't they consider peer reviews an unnecessary distraction too?

@stevec Many secretly do! But more to the point: peer-reviewing a paper is something you can do in an afternoon with experience and attention, and can be recorded on a CV as service work. Reproducing the result of another group can easily take months of the time of a PhD student or postdoc and by itself does not help anyone involved with their career.

I see. What if norms were changed so that reproducing research held the same gravitas as, say, 20 peer reviews, and that became a very respected activity on researchers' CVs too. What stops that from happening?

@stevec Institutional inertia. You would essentially need to convince funding agencies to fund work on replication studies, and you would need to convince high quality journals to devote space to publishing these studies, and you would need to convince hiring committees to look for this work, and you would need all of these bodies to accept that there would be less time and resources spent on work that would lead to new research.

Wouldn't it be in all of those institutions' interests if it i) were not economically prohibitive, and ii) offered a substantial improvement in the perceived quality and integrity of the research they conduct/promote?

Plus people get into science because, at least on some level, they think they will make a ground breaking discovery, not to spend months of their time trying to reconstruct someone else's work from a sketchily written methods section.

My personal theory on this is that you are running into a classic problem in economics. There may be global solutions where many parties cooperate that are optimal for the community, but they are "unstable" to individuals not cooperating to maximize their personal interest. The current system is a kind of local equilibrium responding to various sources of pressure where no one can do significantly better on their own. But maybe I am too cynical.

Good point about people avoiding drudgery especially where there would be little credit for original research. On the point about local maxima, I hope we are not yet at optimum but just that it's such a slow convergence that even in a few years it's hard to see change, but hopefully over decades a convergence to greater reproducibility.

This is another example of an answer that directly contradicts itself.  You start out with Reproducing the results of another group provides essentially no benefit to any individual group and then go on to show exactly how reproducing others' work does provide a direct, tangible benefit - namely, in setting the stage for the next round of innovation.  So reproduction does happen all the time and it does have benefits... so why say that it doesn't in the opening of this answer?  It's otherwise spot-on.  Just don't shoot yourself in the foot out of the gate and it's perfect.

"Researchers make or break their reputation on ground-breaking, innovative, and high-impact work." Unfortunately, and to a great extent, you can rephrase that as "on work published in highly-regarded venues", which is not the same thing; and repetition reports will not be published in those venues.

@einpoklum I 100% agree. It has to be work that is considered as being ground-breaking at the time it is published. Historically, many (though of course not all) of the results we now recognize as truly ground-breaking were ahead of their time. And many papers published in high end publications, which are considered high-impact by definition, are forgotten months later.

experiments re-run by other academics for cases where it is relatively low cost and fast to do so

The proportion of novel experiments which can be quickly and cheaply replicated is extremely small because the quick and cheap experiments were all done decades ago.
There are some exceptions in synthetic chemistry where, once the right reaction conditions are found, replication is quick and cheap.
When experiments can be replicated quickly and cheaply, and the experiments are actually valuable, then the experiments are, in fact, repeated promptly by many labs.  Examples include CRISPR-Cas9, exfoliation of graphene, and perovskite solar cells.  While this is not a "standard" practice, it does happen automatically; sometimes the replication is actually excessive.

Also, with examples like the ones you mention, there's the possibility of interesting (and potentially lucrative :-)) further research.  For instance, Group A demonstrates that it's possible to make perovskite solar cells, then Groups B, C, & D all jump on the idea because of the possibility of making better ones.

Because not all research is interesting or important enough to other people for them to spend their own time and resources on it.
Because replication is frequently made difficult when original researchers won't share their methods or data with researchers who might try to disprove or discredit their work. ("We have 25 or so  years  invested  in  the  work.  Why  should  I  make  the  data  available  to  you,  when  your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.") Some journals have started imposing data-sharing requirements on contributors, but not all. So replication is often more difficult than original research where you have unfettered access to all the supporting materials.
For the same reason, some journals don't like replication studies that discredit research published in their pages. (There is a humorous essay here that describes an example.) They don't enhance the journal's reputation to the same degree as exciting original research, and are likely to be less interesting to their customers. That makes them harder to publish.
Because it may be seen socially as 'not nice' to trash somebody else's work. Many narrow research topics are 'small world' communities. You might find yourself applying to some professor for a job after previously discrediting his life's work. Or others may see a way to get preferential treatment in employment by falsely supporting a professor's work. There is scope for corruption.
Because conventional measures of academic research performance (number of papers published, journal impact, number of citations) don't measure it. If published papers didn't count towards your academic record until they had been independently replicated, research would look very different!
Because there is no need to check for replication before citing a paper's results in another work. Journals will allow you to depend on cited results that have not been independently verified.
Because replications are less likely to be cited, (especially if it results in the original paper being discredited) and so garner less academic credit.
Because there is no comprehensive systematic record of when and where papers and results have been replicated or discredited associated with the paper. (Counting reverse citations - where the original paper is considered to 'cite' the replication studies supporting or undermining it - would help.)
Because a culture of 'Argument from Authority' has built up that regards peer-reviewed journal papers as a scientific 'gold standard', rather than a work-in-progress in need of verification. They assume peer-reviewers have done all the detailed and comprehensive checking needed, rather than (in many cases) an unpaid expert spending a couple of hours briefly glancing through it to filter out the crazy. This means people often don't see the need to check for replication.
In summary - if people aren't motivated to replicate results by requiring it, they won't. Replication isn't required for someone to have a good publication record.

Very nice. And, you aren't going to get a doctorate for this, almost assuredly.

Fascinating and brutal! Interested to know why the system hasn't self-corrected from this state? Other systems sometimes improve over time via self regulation or inquiries of various sorts. For example, various industries (e.g. telco, financial, fisheries etc) often go through multi-year/decade mires often followed by inquiries and subsequent improvements. Why don't the obviously imperfect incentive structures you outlined get addressed? Is the system too complicated? Are there vested interests in keeping the status quo? Or is imperfect system already the best it can be?

@stevec Strict scientific principle is all very well, but scientists are human too, we all have to pay the bills, and get along with our colleagues. Industries have a strong and direct financial incentive to root out sloppy science that overrides this, (and even so are by no means perfect) - academics funded by government bureaucracies that are themselves staffed by more senior committee-minded scientists not so much. (It's even worse when science gets political.) Evolution needs natural selection. It will take an even more major scandal than we've yet seen to trigger those inquiries/reform.

@stevec You may be interested in the book "Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions" by Richard Harris.

E.g., where a second experiment/data collection run would take < 20% of the cost of the original research and < 3 months to conduct.

Just because it would be cheaper and quicker than the original research, does not mean that the money and time are available to some other group.
Other groups have their limits on money and time that they are likely dedicating to finishing their own projects.  It is very likely they are trying to find additional funding and to squeeze more efficient use of their time into their own projects, not looking for ways to burn their time and money checking someone else's work.

I'm going against the grain here and will say that any important result does get replicated, and this happens all the time.
Science and engineering are fields where we are always standing on the shoulders of giants.  New science always builds upon older science.  If the old science doesn't work, the new science doesn't either, so all important discoveries are necessarily verified since they can only be useful to other researchers when they are actually true, working, and correct - at least to some degree.
A large body of scientific work, of course, does not get replicated.  This tells us only one thing - that said research had little intrinsic value to begin with.  Nobody bothers to repeat something unless it helps them further some other goal.  If the work is not worth repeating because it doesn't further any future scientific goals, then it is simply a dead-end curiosity, and it doesn't really matter if it was correct or not.  It's not until new work begins to depend on it being correct that people start to care about whether or not is really is - and this is when science finds its faults and corrects those old crufty theories.
I suppose we can draw from this the conclusion that a lot of work is not repeated because much (most?) work in academia is either fruitless or useless and, while curious or interesting, doesn't actually contribute anything that helps the world get on with doing whatever it is we need or want to do.  So nobody really gets too worked up about whether or not it was correct, because in the end many times it really doesn't matter - because nobody depends on it being correct, and nobody cares if it isn't.  Some work is just not that interesting.

Nice expansion of the terse second argument of my response. +1.

@CaptainEmacs Yes, a few answers (like yours, +1) touched on this, but I felt the presentation could be inverted - (ie: frame challenge - we DO repeat important results, with caveats that garbage tends to get ignored).  The fallacy in academia is usually to fail to appreciate just how much research is not particularly useful, whether it's correct or not.  I think that clouds the perception of how repeating experiments works.

Quite so. It reminds me a bit of Pauli's "Not even wrong..." criticism. On the other hand, it's often hard to see which research is actually fruitful in the long run, which one is rubbish and which one is simply dormant.

@CaptainEmacs I think Pauli's statement is more about foolish hypotheses that are fundamentally un-testable - in this case, though, it's more about being simply irrelevant, whether correct, incorrect, genius (underappreciated), or rubbish(rightfully ignored).

Agreed - that's why I said "it reminds me" rather than "it's like" :-) On the other hand, I detest having to give significance statements as a reviewer, as they pretend to be objective whereas only the future can be. Even Adleman from RSA seems to have thought their paper was quite a minor result with no major relevance.

This answer matches my experience. My group normally replicate at least one or two plots from a paper we are building on, just to check our own data/equations/algorithms are good. Once we actually couldn't replicate part of a plot and we did discover an oversight in the other paper's methodology. It was minor, but important enough to mention in our paper.

Your comment goes hand in hand with the pther answer https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/168411/128758
"Because a culture of 'Argument from Authority' has built up that regards peer-reviewed journal papers as a scientific 'gold standard', rather than a work-in-progress in need of verification."

Academia doesn't pay well enough for comparatively high qualified people to do the boring work of reproduction by default.
If you want such people to do boring work on a regular basis, you have to pay them much more.
That being said, scientists will often try to reproduce results they critically need, so you could say that, on the long run, natural scientific selection will actually end up probing important results for correctness over time anyway and there is no direct need to enforce that in the standard rules of operation.

Scite.ai attempts this in a meta-level, classifying publications citing prior work as either a) supporting, b) mentioning, c) contrasting.  There are some publishers already using their service regularly or even are partners (see). But depending on your field, some big ones (by number of journals / by impact of their journals / an other criterion) are evidently missing.

The difficulty with this lies in uniform application. The proposition makes a distinction between some types of research that should be verified and others that shouldn't (on time/cost basis for example).
This incentivises some research at the cost of others; it would be more fruitful/lucrative to do the kind of experiment that can't be easily repeated, because then the acceptance is not subjected to verification. That provision can be gamed by adding some component to the study that is difficult to replicate. In that way, essentially all experimemts could be facetiously shown to be difficult to exactly repeat.
The alternative is of course that all research be verified by reproduction; this would become unfair to those experiments that require very specialized equipment that is likely not available elsewhere.

+1 I agree it could create some of its own perverse incentives (e.g. to avoid having research reproduced). But I'd also guess it could create an excellent avenue for confident researchers to demonstrate the robustness of their findings.

Papers and research in general are a proof-of-concept of a certain idea. The results must be reproducible, but not necessarily reproduced: only time will tell if the proof of concept really works.
The peer-review should guarantee that the method is working as it claims to work, as well investigating if the claims are correct and the state-of-art is respected.
Research being reproducible should be a (natural) consequence of research itself, it should not be the goal of research.

Nicely put. Proof-of-concept. It is (or at least, should be) in the authors own interest to make that one hold water. Why else one would go to a precarious academic career.

The problem here, as in everything regarding the reproducibility crisis, lies in the incentives given to academics. As long as academics have (in this case, financial) incentives to focus on their career advancement, rather than on doing good and honest work, we won't get out of it.

The response is somewhat polemic. I do not see anything not good or dishonest in not being interested reproducing some mediocre uninteresting result of some fellow researcher if one believes one can find interesting and relevant results oneself instead. I'd prefer scientists to rather try to be productive than to demonstrate that some pointless work is indeed pointless. The interesting stuff will ultimately be checked.

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Writing Statement of Purpose As a Bachelor Student (Physics)
I'm a third-year bachelor of a science student. I'm shortlisted for an interview for the Integrated Ph.D. course. I'm Physics major student. It's asked by the institution for a Statement of Purpose.

One-page original research write-up by the candidate (research statement of purpose).

I have never written a statement of purpose in my whole life and this is the first one. Now after searching for what it is. I found several posts which help me a lot and the most important one is this one. If I summarize the points given in the answer as

What have you already done?
What are you working on now?
What might you want to work on in the future?
How does my department fit your research goals?

Well, this is it, and for me, it's quite satisfactory.
Now the shortcomings as a bachelor's student are that we are not exposed to real research. We just get an introductory idea of different branches of physics. Now the problem is, As a bachelor student, I haven't done any research work in the past (I did an intern on Astrophysics but it was based on introductory knowledge) nor I'm currently working on any project and apart from a little glimpse, I have not a big picture of what I'm going to do in future. I know I want to be a particle physicist but I don't know what specific thing in particle physics, I want to do work in and It might possible that the interest might divert to some other path, say Astrophysics.
This eliminates the first three points. The fourth one, again, I can only say, the department itself help me decide what I need to do in future. It gives me an understanding of the subject and so on.
So It seems there Isn't much to say in the Statement of Purpose as a bachelor student. So I want advice on How should I write my statement of purpose?
Please ask any information you need about me if necessary.

I'm not studying in United State. I'm a student from India. And I don't understand what's common between this and

How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?

"I have not a big picture of what I'm going to do in future."  I strongly recommend you fix that before you enroll in a PhD.  Maybe a PhD is not going to help you achieve your goals.

I haven't a big picture of ..... I mean I don't know very specifically what's I'm going to do in the future or what my thesis will be about. But I'm absolutely sure PhD is going to help me achieving my goals

I've added the India tag, to make it clear that this question is not a duplicate of the other one.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/57806/statement-of-purpose-how-much-detail-in-describing-ones-research

Is the course you are applying to also in India?

@cag51 Yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Institute_of_Fundamental_Research

SOPs are a rather dreaded part of the application process for many students in the tagged geography, precisely because there is a big gap between the expectations and method of working that students are typically used to. The previous comments and answer are indeed relevant. Given your current situation, I'll add some specific things that you can think about, leaning towards pragmatism rather than the ideal.
(1) The SOP is essentially a narrative that has to sell. (Arguably so is most research, but that's another tale). You must know your audience. Don't make one boilerplate SOP for all the departments you apply to. Visit their websites, read up what they work on. Try to use social media to speak to current students. You may not know what you want to work on, but you must know with reasonable veracity what they work on. Don't start writing your SOP without doing this. The underlying benefit (arguably the real reason) is that you will me more updated about what is currently happening in the field now, and this will help you cultivate your interests more sensibly.
(2) Treat each SOP as an independent and exclusive document. Once you've identified the department & professor/group you would like to work with the most, think of everything you've heard, learnt or done that may be relevant to the topic. Oftentimes this is a research project, sometimes it is a class that really interested you and motivated you to read up further. Sometimes it is even a personal experience or anecdote that left a deep impact on you, inspiring you to move towards the respective field. You need not have done concrete research work on it, but you should be able to demonstrate some interest or passion, or even a convincing motivation.
If you are not able to find yourself motivated by a certain field, it may be a strong indication to look elsewhere - one more underlying benefit.
(3) Connect your background (educational, personal if it is relevant), your motivation/experience/interest and relevant achievements to the field of interest. Avoid irrelevant history. The badminton championship you participated in is unlikely to be helpful, unless you are using it to make a point about striving for excellence. Or being fascinated by the aerodynamics of a weighted shuttlecock. I hope you catch my drift here.
(4) Take seriously the last segments, which describe how the university could help you achieve your goals, and equally, why you are a good fit for the university. Be very specific about the first. You should be able to demonstrate that you know what the department/group is known for, what sets them apart, what sort of impact they have. Use details if possible. If you've been able to speak to some students there, mention it (show your efforts and initiative). As to why you are a good fit, describe your attributes and qualities; but ensure that they relate to the personal history/experiences/achievements that you previously mentioned. This adds continuity, keeps you honest and prevents the SOP from reading like a boilerplate job application.
Take your time with this, and remember to respect the reader. Its a big opportunity for you and an important investment for the group/department that you join. The worst thing that you could do is treat it flippantly and churn out something that doesn't show serious thought.

Should I need to see if I have mentioned something that interests me but I don't have depth knowledge of the topic? Like, I want to be a particle physicist and I read about a g-2 experiment that interests me most in the field. But As  I'm in bachelor's, I can't get into depth. Should I need to consider the possibility that they would you my SoP to ask me questions in interview? Because the topic most  interest me might not be the topic which I'm good at. There are two different things.

They won't expect in-depth knowledge, but if you're interested in something, you'd be expected to know something beyond your regular coursework. It need not be extremely specific, i.e. a particular research paper or an experiment - that would be unusual. The field should be enough. Moreover, I'd suggest getting better at what you find interesting, its the safest strategy.

I am mentioning the following in terms of what you have said in the question and not in general.

What you have already done?

Coursework, Homework, mini project? Something that really caught your interest or you spent good amount of time working on? Schools which give importance to classes are actually really good experience. Just writing that you attended the class makes no difference. But, if you have something worth while which explored out of the class, that's great!

What are you working on?

This may sound foolish but start working on something if you haven't! Explore using the internet, try to finish a couple of courses! You can't immediately hit the big picture. There must be many sub-domains to astrophysics. Why not explore them? Search for a few open problems?

What might you want to work in the future?

Suggest the open problem you find while exploring. Or mention that a specific sub-domain interests you because of so and so reasons. They don't really expect solved work or a ground-breaking idea. A personal experience, I was just simply surfing YouTube and came across this certain domain. I spent a week just reading simple articles and this one good review paper and it just really interested me. I haven't been able to generate anything worth while but I'm really loving the process!
Finally, try to relate these points with personal experience if possible. An internship needn't mean you publish something or get magnificent results. You could mention that your time spent in the internship brought you to a certain problem you would like to solve! I have had 2 internships till date. The first one, just like yours covered only introductory material. But I had two sessions which dealt with this one algorithm and that's what I focus on now!
(I am an undergrad as well, please do correct me if I am wrong somewhere, I can't really put the perspective of someone who has already gone through the process.)

Really I don't like the idea to explore the unsolved problem. It's not like haven't done so I know the unsolved problem in most of the field and what people are doing or what the currently hot research is. I also read the paper given by the noble prize community every year about the research or discovery made. But I believe and correct me if I'm wrong that If you want to get up to what is currently the research topic is, you have to know what has been done so far and to know you need to learn. It's just nice to learn about g-2 muon experiment and what they did.

But anyone with good knowledge of the subject will able to catch that I don't know much about this and how shallow my words are.

I spend most of my time reading books. That's all I have done so far. (Its pandemic here >>  university is working remotely). Few question and concepts caught my attention which I have asked on PSE site and some of them  interest me as well.

I understand where you're coming from. You don't really have to go in depth. Just mentioning that you would want to work in a particular domain should do well. I suggest if you have some time before your SOP submission, you could work on a mini project if possible. I'm sorry but I do not really know the Physics domain well. I hope someone from that domain answers.

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How is the PhD system in Turkey?
I met someone who graduated from Firat University in Turkey, and claimed to have published 60 journal articles in his 3 years of PhD studies (2015-2018).
Although I haven't studied in Turkey or Asia(Malaysia, China, etc) before, this throws me into confusion and doubt, as I know this is no way near possible, at least in places I have studied (Europe and the UK), particularly in his field of study (Applied Mathematics).
Checking through his scholar page, and follow up to the articles, I noticed first author is the professor that supervised his work in majority of his works.  I also noticed about two other PhD candidates in his connection that made such an "outrageous" publications, thus a high Google scholar index score.
I didn't want to dig further with the guy to know how that was possible, as he might see it an attack on his personality.
Out there, I know people might have some idea how is the PhD process in Turkey.

You don't say anything about just where said articles were published. But 60 articles in 3 years has alarm bells ringing...

Was this in a "big science" field?

There is no way anyone can actually churn out a paper's worth of worthwhile new ideas every two weeks...

@JonCuster he claimed to have published in mostly Q1 and some Q2 journals. I added a link to his scholar page.

I don't know any specifics about Firat University, but I will mention a few points:
There are a lot universities in Turkey more reputable than Firat, both private unis and state unis (e.g. state: Bogazici, METU, ITU, Ege, Ankara; private: Koc, Sabanci, Bilkent, Ozyegin, etc.). So I would not put the university to a high standard.
State universities in Turkey, and especially the internationally less reputable ones, are not known for their high ethical standards. There has beeen countless reports of political appointments, nepotism, and favoritism. I would not be surprised if unrelated students' names were being added to papers at the request of professors, or similarly if professors were "asking" for themselves to be written as the first author.
That being said, I know that there are people at those schools who are trying to do their job in the best way possible, but these things happen and cannot be ignored.
Edit: There is a great book written (in Turkish) by two researches based on their interviews with faculty from private Turkish universities that highlights the corrupt practices in many places.

Would serial plagiarism be significantly more likely in this environment than elsewhere?


text:
I have two papers in an up-coming conference. Is it appropriate to cite one in another?
I had two papers approved for a workshop in a IEEE conference and I'm going to send the camera-ready version soon.
Is it OK to have one paper cite the other? If it's OK, do I have to reference the other paper as "to appear"?

This is acceptable, and fairly common. You cite as usual, and the citation itself would be identical to a standard citation with the exception that the date and page numbers would be replaced by the phrase "in press".
From the American Historical Association's "Professional Standards" page:

The AHA suggests the following lexicon.

"In Press": the manuscript is fully copyedited and out of the author's hands. It is in the final stages of the production process.
"Forthcoming": a completed manuscript has been accepted by a press or journal.
"Under contract to . . .": a press and an author have signed a contract for a book in progress, but the final manuscript has not yet been submitted.
"Submitted" or "under consideration": the book or article has been submitted to a press or journal, but there is as yet no contract or agreement to publish.

That's right, IEEE also suggests "in press".

It is okay for each paper to cite the other.
It would be better if more accurate publication details were given. Sometimes the published will add this information (this happens at Springer for LNCS volumes). Perhaps you can alert the editor of the fact, and they might be able to make sure that you have the right information for the citation or they can ensure that the publishers do the right thing.

Yes, it's fine.  I would probably cite it as follows:

First Author and Second Author.  This is the title of this paper, which is also found several times in the paper itself.  These Proceedings, 2013.

it is better to avoid citing as "These proceedings" or similar formulation, I'll explain why:) The problem is that this reads nicely for a human being, but when processed by various citation services (e.g., Scopus, Google Scholar) will not necessarily be resolved correctly. Therefore, it is always better to be specific about which proceedings/issue you refer to.

@al_b The expectation is that it would be replaced with the appropriate citation at the time of typesetting - when the exact data (incl. page numbers) would be known for the other publication.

@Peteris This is not a reasonable expectation.  In my field, papers are typeset by their authors (via LaTeX), often months before page numbers are known.

"These proceedings" is likely to persevere till the final version, since the publisher might ignore your request to correct it. This method is not good.

Why should the publisher correct it? It’s already correct!

Because it's not a full bibliographic reference. Moreover, it's void of meaning if the paper is read standalone and the proceedings are not mentioned there otherwise.

I agree with @al_b Automatic recognition of the source won't be possible.

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Age and Graduate school
I am 33. I live in the US. I am a neither a US citizen, nor a green card holder. I have worked in various jobs as a research assistant (physics, biology, economics) usually involving programming, mathematics or statistics.  As a newly minted undergraduate, I didn't really have much confidence in myself and I completely ruled out graduate school as pointless.  I didn't think of myself as smart enough.  I drifted into working in labs, because those are some of the easiest ones for which one can get a work permit in the US as a non-American.
Having worked in academia for a while now, I've had a chance to leap into various fields and help build solutions to complex problems.  I think I have literally gone as far as I can go researching in academia with no higher degree.  I work at one of the top universities in the world.  (If you looked at US News rankings or the Academic Ranking of World Universities, it's in the top 5.)
Lately, I've been thinking about applying for graduate school.  I do have a few papers in various fields.  I'm thinking of a PhD in either pure mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics or computer science.
I see two big minuses to applying to graduate school:

Most people applying are more than a decade younger than I am.  (Alas, more than a few gray hairs have made an appearance in recent years.)
Perhaps my achievements would look good for someone younger, but partially my achievements are the result of a long career rather than any special brilliance. So, I wonder how my record will be perceived.  I did take GRE and I scored 800 quantitative, 800 verbal and a 5 on the essay.  (I would most likely have to do a GRE subject test depending on what field I ultimately decided.)

Please advise on how accomplished, but older candidates, are viewed in the graduate school application process.

Don't sweat it. Accomplished but older candidates are viewed as accomplished candidates. What you view as minuses are, in my experience, positives.

I started my master's degree in my 40's, and the Ph.D. at 56.

Anecdotal, but: I was 31 when I started my PhD, and it wasn't an obstacle at all. There were more than 80 applicants for two places. I have the impression that what matters a lot (at least in neuroscience, at least at my institute) is how much training the supervisor would have to invest in you. I've seen many times that the applicant who already did some similar research gets the position, even though there might have been someone else who is in principle just as good. Previous research experience carries a lot of weight.
From what you write, it seems to me that you would have a very good chance in getting into a program - publications and good GRE scores are both a big plus. Recommendation letters are also important. I would be surprised if your age would be an obstacle. But beware that it might be an obstacle for some sources of funding! I don't know if it is the case in the US, but I'd guess that's the only potential problem with your age.
...And now we wait for someone on the other side of the application process to give their answer :)

+1  I was 25 when I started my B.S. and now I am 30 finishing my M.S. and starting a PhD.  The hardest thing for me was giving up my salary and office to become a full time student

Age is something we might notice, but is rarely an issue. In fact, there are many schools where the added maturity you'd have would be a major plus, because you'd be able to articulate some clear research directions and would be able to get into research directly. If so, then you should be clear to say so in your statement.
While this is unlikely to come up in the application process, it might also be helpful to think about what your post-Ph.D career plans would be. Would you want to move into a research job (in academia or elsewhere) or is a Ph.D just something you'd like to do for the purpose of research exploration ? Because this age discrepancy issue will come up again and again in the academic line of work.

33 is not old. We had 40+ year olds in my Ph.D. program.
The biggest hurdle might actually be that your study habits are rusty.  You might consider taking a single class in the field as a continuing ed student just to get back in the studying grove. A good grade and reference from your professor won't hurt either and will show you're on top of your academic game.

Again, anecdotally: age is simply not a factor in applications. That being said, you'll also be expected to do all the things grad students would do; put in the hard work, write the papers, be available for conferences and such, take courses, act as a TA, and put in the necessary hours to get the work done. Given your description above, though, you're familiar with what the requirements are, so that shouldn't be a problem; if anything, you can put it to your advantage that you're more familiar with the experience than all those inexperienced undergraduates. Good luck with the application process!

This is also anecdotal but I was 32 when I applied to graduate school and started when I was 33.  My observations have been the following:
Many of the professors that I've interacted with (some of whom are inevitably going to be part of the admissions process) are very positive about accepting older students, especially if they have work experience.  From what I've been able to tell, the reasoning is that having worked and been out in the real world, you probably have a better idea of what you want to do and where you're going.  In addition, you are more likely to be dependable about getting the work done, will bring more experience to the table, and have more realistic expectations and strategies for coping with things.  This can be really good for getting an RAship and it sounds like your research experience will make it even more applicable.
On the other hand, being a student again means that in many cases people will make assumptions about what you do and don't know and how you will act.  I've had a number of people treat me like I've never worked before, making comments about, "You'll find out once you've actually worked..." and things like that.  This can make a difference in how you're treated, it's disconcerting to be treated like a student again after being more of an equal with all of the people you're working with.

I do have to say that I have seen the age issue work both ways:

I do know of programs that are biased against older applicants, unless they have remained "active" in research-related fields; these tend to be "cutting-edge technology"-type programs where out-of-date knowledge is essentially useless for research purposes. These locations have also been international, where the funding situation is quite different in the US.
In the US, I do not know of any age-specific bias; technically, it's probably against the law in most states. On a personal level, I have known many students who have returned to academia after extensive careers outside of it, and some of them in fields quite far removed from anything of a traditional "academic" nature. The ones who returned to academia with a clear sense of purpose have thrived, and many of them have even won prestigious fellowships. On the other hand, I've also known people who have been unable to hack the rigors of a graduate education and essentially gave up within a few weeks.

In general, though, if you know what you want to do, and can convince someone to give you a shot, you have an excellent shot at getting a good PhD and having a fruitful career.

This is two years too late but someone else might find my comments useful.
A Math department would likely not care about your age. Most US University teach some baby-calc type course to most of their undergraduate students and Math departments generally are in need of bodies to teach and grade those courses. They take a lot of students in and pare them down at the comprehensive exams stage.
Unrelated to your main question about the admission process, I would like to point a few things out though:

Statistically, Pure Math is a young person's game. Most pure mathematicians do their best work in their teens, twenties, and thirties. You'll be 35 by the time you're done with coursework and nearing the end of that window. Still, if you're having fun and making a contribution then that's the only thing that matters. You'll find out during coursework and later while preparing for your Field Exams (or equivalent) where you stand when compared to others. To use a basketball analogy, you could always be the Kareem Abdul Jabbar and play at a high level well into your late thirties but most NBA players start slowing down past their early thirties.
I noticed that you're considering applying for both Pure Math and Applied Math . In general, I have seen that if you have a head for pure math, if you love topology, algebra, measure theory etc, you're generally less excited about coding, numerical methods, scientific computation type stuff and vice versa. You seem unusual in the sense that you're attracted to and have talent in very different kinds of mathematics. This is a hard process and a minimum requirement is that you should really enjoy this stuff. So I hope that your decision to apply to a pure math program stems from some real exposure to it.
The next 10 or so years of your life will be disproportionately devoted to your career. First to get out of school and then to publish to get tenure. Spending that type of time away from your family and kids becomes difficult for older people who usually have a different perspective on what's really important in life as compared to someone in their twenties. If you're single, you may find it harder to find the time and energy to date someone outside of grad school. If your first job is in a small town then your dating options will be even thinner, especially since you're not a native. These things may not seem important now but you may change your mind later.

I have a friend who worked in the automotive industry (all the bigwigs in the US) for about 7-8 years after his Bachelors degree. He joined a university for a PhD at 31 about 2 years and he is well on his way now having finished his qualifiers etc.
Although he isn't working in mathematics, I think it's fine to start your PhD in your 30s. You might actually have an advantage because you have several years of practical/research experience and also maturity that 20 year olds may not have.
Good luck!

I've been admitted to two graduate programs (finished one).
In my experience, admissions committees are generally looking for "mass," rather than "velocity," even though both are components of "momentum."
You have the "mass," with your test scores and course work. You seem to fear that older age implies less "velocity." That may be true technically, and it could factor into a few decisions, but I haven't seen much evidence of it.
At some level, admissions committees are looking more for evidence of "likely to finish" (the degree), rather than "likely to be brilliant."

It really depends on your field and the admission committee. Some fields like mature candidate with lots of industry experience as they can be productive at lab work etc.

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How can I get copies of library of congress's archival manuscripts?
I require photocopies of "Archival Manuscript/Mixed Formats" from the Library of Congress. They have a collection from one author which has otherwise unpublished technical documents that are very relevant to my area of expertise. Judging by the indicies, there are at least 20 boxes (out of 106) that are relevant. None of these are digitized and most are very technical documents with information not seen by people in my field.
I'm not sure the best way to attack this problem because travelling there is far from where I live now (6 hrs by plane) and the librarian I spoke on the phone with didn't think that our library could request it. LoC seems very restrictive about working with their material, that is they won't let me personally go the stacks and browse the boxes, and they say they only allow 5 books to be reviewed at a time.
Are there any tips or alternative ways to get the materials? Our research team is rather large for an academic team, so would it be worthwhile to ask a Congressperson to request it on our behalf? Just looking for input.

This is not an answer, but too long for a comment.
I used to live around Washington DC metro area. I went to Library of Congress very often. They don't have open shelf policy. You sit in one of their reading rooms and pick a desk. You request for materials to read. The librarian will find them and put on a cart. Somebody moves the cart out to the desk you sit. After you finish, they'll put them back to the shelf. I never checked out books from them. Don't know their check out policy.
I remember there was a certain limit number of books for the request. 5 seems to be correct because you can only load a certain number of books on the cart.
It is definitely worth while to ask a Congressperson to help if you live in the US. But, it sounds like it's worth making a trip there to examine everything they have. 106 boxes is a lot. It takes half a container. I am afraid no libray is willing to take such a huge task - I assume you're thinking of inter-library loan. My 2 cents.

The Library of Congress offers duplication services, but that would be phenomenally expensive for twenty boxes.  I don't do archival research myself, so maybe I'm off base here, but I think there's no way they'll ship you the material to examine at your home institution.  Instead, people who need to sort through large quantities of rare material in archives typically travel there to do it in person.  Flying six hours is not so inconvenient or expensive in the overall scheme of things: examining twenty boxes carefully is a big project, and adding travel makes it only a little harder.


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At the age of 27 is it worth shifting PhD. from strings to computer science?
Will the effort required to learn a completely new subject from scratch be outweighed by the better job prospects when one is looking for faculty positions?

Only you can answer that, but the more important consideration is: if you dislike doing string theory enough to consider switching, will you have any job prospects if you don't?

Can't answer the question at hand, but switching to computer science because you think it will be easier to score a faculty position is ... optimistic.

While I think there is an important question related to what you are asking, as it stands your question does not seem like a good fit since it is not possible to give meaningful answers to questions that focus on perceived effort and benefits.

@xLeitix But isn't it true that the faculty position jobs are still much easier to get in theoretical CS than in string theory? [...in an ideal world I would have wanted to do string theory - since thats what I really love doing...]

I don't know what the situation in theoretical physics is, but in Europe you will in average compete with 100 or  so other people for each of the (few) suitable faculty positions that become available per year, so there's an really good chance that you are going to switch fields only to also not find a faculty job in CS.

To clarify, I truly believe that there are more positions for CS than for string theory, but there are also much more computer scientists than theoretical physicists on the market. And, likely, you will not exactly have a starting advantage when you are the one that is actually passionate about another field.

isn't it true that the faculty position jobs are still much easier to get in theoretical CS than in string theory? — NO.

The terms easy and easier should never be used in reference to an academic job search. Getting a job in any field is difficult and it is more difficult in some fields.

Re: Strongbad.  In some fields it is very easy:  (paywalled) http://chronicle.com/article/Believe-It-or-Not-in-Some/147207/

@user6818 How many years are you studying this major? How much is it left to graduate PhD?

@Parsa I am in my 3rd year of PhD - and my physics PhD is going no where since I don't have access to the topics which interest me.

@user6818 Did not you have to define a topic and proposal in the second year of your PhD? Because I have know most of the PhD students are almost required to finish their courses in the first year, defend their proposal in the second year, work on their research topic in the third year and do their visits, work on their papers and write their dissertation in the fourth year.

Will your degree actually say 'String Theory' rather than 'Physics'? If so, this is unfortunately narrow, and given the uncertain future of string theory as a field I'd rectify it as soon as possible. How close are you to finishing? I wouldn't dump a Physics doctorate a year from completion to start over in CS. If I wanted to change fields, I'd just do a master's afterwards.


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How can an undergrad from a country with little 'international' research improve his chances of being a "good fit" for a top PhD program?
I am in my senior year of studying electrical engineering in an african university. I intend to apply to grad schools(Ph.D) a year after graduation, possibly to the top EE programs in the US (MIT, Berkeley, Stanford...) Despite the fact that ground-breaking/stellar research is virtually impossible to come by for undergraduates in my country, I have sort of gathered some. I have an accepted poster presentation(based on independent research) at the major national conference in my field, and  my present senior year thesis/project may yield three-five papers at IEEE conferences around Africa. I should also be able to get two publications(also independent research) in a continental journal which is popular only among  African Engineers in my field and not much outside.
My degree is a five year bachelors programme interspersed with three internships/co-op experience. One was a summer spent in a local R&D electronics lab/company in which we completed several design projects although all were adaptations/imitation of existing projects to solve problems facing developing societies like ours. Another one was a long internship (~8mths) in the EE division of a world-renowned company with huge presence in my country during which I worked on a major design project which required a lot of technical knowledge and was evaluated. I have also done some remote/virtual research for a foreign, not well-known, research institute in my field and I have completed a technical report (no peer review) of my research(not particularly breath-taking) which they publish in their report series.
My gpa though not near-perfect is on a 'first-class' (we use the british system) and so I am a high-ranking student in my university. We do not use the four point system and as much as I would not like to compare apples with oranges, if I convert my cgpa to the 4.0 scale it is just over 3.6 although our scale is much larger and high-end grades are more difficult to attain than what is obtainable in the US system. I am also a recipient of several national awards/recognition for academic merit.
Given the aforesaid and also assuming that I ace the GRE (math especially since I'm in engineering), my questions are these:
How do you think I can improve my chances of being a good fit for top U.S. graduate schools noting the difficulty/impossibility in doing any ground-breaking research especially as an undergraduate here?

Hi and welcome to academia.SE! Your question (and in general, "what are my chances" questions) are likely to be closed here because they are too localized. If you have a question that applies outside your specific situation, please edit your question to be more general.

For example, you can change your question to something like: "How can an undergrad from a country with little 'international' research improve his chances of being accepted into a top PhD program?"

@rocinante the problem is not that it's an undergrad question, since it seems to really be about transition to graduate study (which is on-topic here). The problem is that the OP is asking us to evaluate his specific situation (not allowed on academia.SE), rather than answer a general question that can apply to others (allowed on academia.SE). If he makes the content of the question more general it should stay open.

@rocinante: As a moderator, I can say questions about how to improve one's chances of getting into grad school are on-topic, and that questions asking about how likely is it for a particular individual to get into graduate school are too specific. Undergrad questions are not prima facie off-topic; it's only if they can't be applied to higher levels of education that they become problematic.

But admission to grad school is a relevant issue, as I've already mentioned.

"What are my chances?" is a subjective/opinion question that is not good for SE sights. "How can I improve my chances?" is considered more objective, and hence more suitable.

Ok, good question, but let's eliminate the phrase, "noting the difficulty/impossibility in doing any ground-breaking research especially as an undergraduate here?"  This actually applies to almost the entirety of the undergraduate population.  Very few undergraduates work on ground-breaking research projects -- and, if they do, their role on the actual project is unlikely to be the intellectual driver.  They might have done some lower-level work under the supervision of the principal investigator (PI).
So, your question is really about how to improve your chances of acceptance in general.  That really depends on the discipline, and it really depends on the program to which you are applying.  Every program has a unique admissions committee that will review applications and assign different levels / weights to factors they consider important in making admissions decisions.  Thus, certain programs may place a lot more emphasis on GRE than other programs.  Some programs might consider letters of recommendations to be very important, which other programs may consider letters of recommendation to be of little importance (since most letters of recommendations are cherry picked from the possible letter writers).
That said, your task is to tailor every application to the programs where you are submitting an application.  A general snowball approach where you submit the same application everywhere is an alternative strategy, but one that I advise against.  Learn what those programs value most in their admissions decisions, and tailor the application accordingly.  Of course, it is hard to figure out what they value, so you have to do a lot of researching -- e.g., any published data on the current and previous cohorts?
Good luck!

I'm going to assume that you are "qualifed," that is, you have good grades from your university program, and decent marks on standardized tests such as the GRE.
You ought to understand that in your situation, your "research" potential is probably viewed differently from, say, an American's. You probably won't be evaluated for your abilities in "pure" research (adding to the existing body of (Western) knowledge, as for your ability in "applied" research; that is taking the knowledge you will be taught in the United States, and sending it back to your home country.
I'm going to assume that the U.S. admissions committee at a top university would likely see you as an "average" student, rather than a "top" student (relative to other top university students). In this case, their question will be, would we rather train another "average" student for e.g. Silicon valley, or a similar student for an African country. The answer is likely to be in favor of the latter, because even top U.S. universities have limited points of entry into most African countries.
The hottest ticket in American universities right now is a degree from Kuwait, Qatar, or one of the other Gulf countries, with Africa not far behind. In this regard, your coops and internships with a national conference will be very helpful, because they suggest that you will rise high in your government's scientific hierarchy. American universities will be evaluating you as a potential Transportation Minister or head of the National Scientific Institute.
In this regard, your competition is not with "western" students, but similarly connected and educated African students (perhaps others from your homeland). You seem to have the advantage in this group. Good luck.


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Is this a tired phrase? -- journal article titles that start with "Towards a theory of..."
Many journal articles start with the phrase:  "Towards a theory of...", as in these real examples from diverse fields:

"Towards a theory of innovation in services" (Management)
"Towards a theory of soft terms for the supersymmetric Standard Model" (Physics)
"Towards a theory of communicative competence" (Sociology, Linguistics)
"Towards a theory of parallel programming" (Computer Science)

My literal interpretation is that a full theory is not being presented; instead, the article presents useful elements or steps.
But I wonder if this phrase is overused and tired. It seems like it could be a mask or even false modesty, perhaps to deflect criticism. My inclination is to avoid it if my article actually presents a theory, or most elements of a theory.  I would be inclined to use it only if the article was presenting a primarily a directional argument, i.e. "go this way, and not that way" to make progress on this theory.
Based on this data from Google Ngram Viewer, English books, it seem like it is declining in popularity:

Question: Do you think this phrase is tired, and therefore should be avoided when possible?  Or do you think it is valid and should not be avoided?
I'm looking for answers that are based on experience, conventions, and norms in particular fields and institutions.

I think this question can only be answered with opinions, not with facts.

I think it's a cliche - and to quote Randy Pausch, "the reason clichés are repeated so often is because they’re so often right on the money." Papers have been titled this way for centuries, (to my understanding) as a way of showing that the work is never really done.  But again - that's my opinion, not a fact.

Many issues in academic writing style are matters of opinion.  But opinions can be based on experience, conventions, and norms.  I'm looking for answers that are based on experience, conventions, and norms in particular fields and institutions.

The answer to your question can be found in my paper, "Towards a theory of pretentious paper titles."

Tired or trite?

I think this phrase should be avoided when possible: not because it's tired, but because it is hesitant and unspecific.
A title like Towards a theory of branch sprockets tells me that the author wanted to present a theory of of branch sprockets, but they didn't quite manage and they ran out of time. That's not a bad thing in itself, but it's a weak pitch for a paper. The best way to structure your paper is to think of what what you're presenting and put that in the title. Here, you're thinking of what you wanted to present, but can't.
I would prefer a title like A partial theory of branch sprockets or A fast, approximate algorithm for branch sprockets optimization. The point of a title is to let me know whether I should read this paper instead of the other 50 papers I could be reading. These titles tell me what the return will be on the investment of reading. With the Towards a theory... approach, the authors are only telling me what their long term goals are, not which step they took towards this theory, towards which theory in particular they hope to be moving, what steps still remain, and so on.

Your version "a partial theory of" sounds as hesitant and unspecific as "toward(s) a theory of". It all just a matter of style. However, I find the term "partial theory" incorrect in many cases, because it gives an impression of presence of a theory, when, in fact, a research contains only some preliminary steps with additional steps due to be performed. The former aspect is IMHO much clearer captured by the term "toward(s)".

@AleksandrBlekh Fair enough, but that's because I tried to find a general alternative, when the problem is that the title should be more specific. If the branch sprocket theory has 15 missing steps, there can be 15 papers with the "Towards" title. A title like A solution to the overlap problem in branch sprocket theory is what's really needed.

Of course, if it's difficult to find such a title, it may to more serious problems with the paper. Which is why this kind of title is such a red flag.

I think that, in a grand scheme of things, it is simply a matter of style and, thus, using that phrase is totally appropriate. Moreover, I don't find the phrase "toward(s) a theory of ..." to be tired or cliché.
In my opinion, it clearly captures the following two important aspects of a such research study: 1) what is the ultimate goal of the research; 2) that not all sufficient ingredients (elements) are present in the current study to be considered a scientific theory (or the study otherwise does not satisfy essential criteria for a theory). On the latter aspect, for more details, see, for example, the relevant Wikipedia page's section on essential criteria of a scientific theory as well as this research paper.

Nice analysis. But, you would be surprised to see many other overused idioms too in publication literature like "A novel approach to..." where in theory nearly all proposed research method should be novel. Nevertheless such papers do get accepted for publication.
In the end it is the author and the reader who is to be concerned with the titles. If you feel that the reader would tire of the idiom, then you may not include it in your articles. As stated in your question, at times the idiom do very well fit the article. In which case there would be no need to avoid the idiom. But you may regulate the overuse of the phrase if you are to review any manuscript that comes with the phrase.


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So what happened to Episciences?
The Episciences project was all the rage a few years ago, back in the days of the now-defunct math2.0 forum and the Cost of Knowledge boycott (ca. 2013). Its goal is to build "epijournals", which are journals trimmed down to the one essential ingredient of publishing -- peer review (as everything else, such as archival, dissemination, to some extent also formatting, is handled just as good if not better by repositories such as arXiv and HAL). Of course, this reduction of editorial (and other) overhead takes the wind out of the sails of the "who is going to pay for it" argument.
The project was supposed to be launched shortly, which I understood to mean in a matter of months. Fast forward to April 2015, there is only one epijournal running. What has happened? What type of difficulties came up? Not enough universities lending authority to the fledgling epijournals? Disagreements on the way forward? Political sabotage? Obsoletion in favor of a newer, better project? Or is it just moving on, slowly and steadily, and what is needed is just more patience? Any answers would be of interest, as other open-content initiatives might face similar problems.
EDIT: Andrew Stacey has resurrected the math2.0 archives, so I can link to the old discussion of the episciences delay there. Most relevant is the reply by Benoit Kloeckner (Mar 20th 2014):

About the lack of communication about épisciences: I understand your frustration, but since the technical team is small the development has taken some time, and I feel that keeping communicating without having much new to propose could have been counterproductive. People know it has been proposed, and communicating largely once it is up and accepting submission might be more effective.
When we launch, there should be a couple of starting titles as well as a standard way to process applications for creating new epijournal. Basically, an epicommittee (which has been gathered already long ago) will be in charge of examining the applicant titles. If you feel that a new journal is needed, or that a journal you are participating in should join, you can start gathering a editorial board or discussing the question in the journal and with us (contact@episciences.org).
Finally, I prefer not give a tentative opening date as the previous ones had to be delayed. Things are moving forward, please keep the project in mind but be patient.

EDIT2: The journals page has grown! There is now a Hardy-Ramanujan journal (the link on the Episciences page has typos, whence I'm linking to it here) and DMTCS (which, IIRC, has been something like an epijournal since before the episciences project). It looks like more is coming up...

Traditional, subscription-based publishing, with self-archival of pre-prints, works well.
That is probably the major reason why other models stay confidential, or are plagued with dishonest behavior (like author-pay, "gold" OA).
The other aspect is that such initiatives are typically pet projects driven by a few enthusiastic individuals. Sometimes their institution tells them to do what they are actually paid for. And when they leave their institution, stop their academic career for a reason or another, or retire, there is no real incentive to find someone to take over.

Side note:

Of course, this reduction of editorial (and other) overhead takes the
  wind out of the sails of the "who is going to pay for it" argument.

Not really. In the "green" OA model, somebody is obviously paying for archival. It might be invisible to most authors, but institutions have to decide to allocate a portion of their budget to maintain these databases. As for formatting, it's payed via the salary of researchers who spend time on such a task instead of on research and teaching. Highly educated scientists having to worry about font size, picture format, placement of floating objects and 'overfull hboxes'... The cost of knowledge, indeed.

"As for formatting, it's payed via the salary of researchers who spend time on such a task" - in some fields, authors are expected to provide the final version of the paper formatted down to the millimetre already with the traditional publication model, anyway.

@O.R.Mapper I know, this is what people should be complaining about.

True - though, on the other hand, when publishers do some formatting and that leads to messing up diacritic marks in cited author names, which makes me as an author seem incompetent (of handling Unicode and languages other than English) toward future readers, I am also sometimes somewhat glad that other publishers will publish exactly the document I send to them without any further modifications ;)

This isn't anyone's private pet project -- try clicking on the CCSd logo on the top left of the site. This is why things like "political sabotage" are even on my list. As for the question whether authors should be expected to deal with the technicalities of formatting their paper, this is a question worth its own thread, but I agree with @ORMapper in that they currently can rarely rely on the editors of the (subscription) journals doing this for them competently (and this is not likely to change).

@darijgrinberg the only 'political sabotage' I know about are inexperienced researchers falling for the 'open access' hype and compromising their career by publishing in dubious journals. Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/47/10643

What is political about that?

@darijgrinberg the anti-commercial publishers ideology.

I meant political sabotage as in someone slowing down the work of the CNRS through administrative channels. This is one of the things that happen when you have a state agency patronize a project and someone with political connections is either not interested in the project moving forward or wants to be positioned better inside it.

@darijgrinberg I see, Well that might be the case. Only the French can understand French academia, so I will not venture on that terrain.

That said, there is also a stretch in your jump from the anti-commercial publishers ideology to the dubious journals. The latter profit from the former to a noticeable extent, but to my knowledge their lure mainly consists in better chances of publication and significantly faster refereeing. The people who view these things positively don't usually care much for open access (indeed, some would prefer their articles to not be preyed on by too many eyes); I think the predatory publishers are OA mainly in order to stay visible.


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Returning to the US as faculty during COVID

Question: I am a non-US citizen on an H1B visa trying to return from the EU (Germany) to the US to teach face-to-face classes this Fall. What are my options to get across the border as long as the COVID-19 suspension-of-entry restrictions are in place?

Some details: I'm a tenure-track faculty at a US university that is planning to fully reopen this Fall. Classes start mid-September. I am partially vaccinated and will be fully vaccinated by August 24 (second dose on August 10).
I'm aware of at least one option, viz., to spend 2 weeks in a country that (for whatever reasons) does not appear in the restrictions, such as Israel (which is supposedly reopening travel soon), Ukraine (which is completely open to fully vaccinated Europeans), or (seriously...) Russia. I am interested in something more direct. In particularly, I am wondering if anyone here has experience with national interest exceptions. I assume these require a letter from the department head or dean; if so, what language should be on that letter?
(I am trying to avoid working through the university HR infrastructure since long-time foreign trips are an administrative minefield; but if the advantages outweigh the risks, I will probably get some support from there as well.)
EDIT: For the sake of completeness, let me record how the problem has been resolved, whether or not my experience is generalizable. First, I asked my department head for a letter confirming that I am needed to teach three face-to-face courses (confirmed by links to relevant resources like the term schedule). With this letter as an attachment, I sent an email to FrankfurtVisaInquiries@state.gov (my US consulate; yours will probably be different; Germans should currently use Berlin according to the US Embassy site) asking for a NIE (National Interest Exception). (The email was titled "X99 - OTHER NIE - [my name]", and included my full name, date of birth, country of birth, gender, country of citizenship, passport number and US visum data, as suggested by the NIE navigator.) After three days, I received an email response telling me that my request was granted. There was no attachment to it; no paperwork to show on the border. (And none was necessary.)

You need the advice of experts in this area, not general academics. The changes in regulations are too new and your question is probably too specialized for this site. Get advice from people with authority to back it up or to actually make the decisions you require.

You might also need to consider asking the university to make things work in the case when you can't show up in a timely manner.

@Buffy: My main hope here is that someone has been there and seen it. I'm not sure who the "people with authority to back it up" would be, and I'm hesitant to contact anyone in HR. That said, I'll look into the international office and the lawyer who handled my H-1B.

Not an expert, but looking at that list, it looks like you might qualify if you have a J1 Exchange visa, if your research touches on American national security or vital infrastructure, or if your university teaches students who are in the US military or government and counts as a "service provider" for them.

@nick012000: I'm fairly sure none of these is the case, alas.


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Archival of deceased academics' websites
The sad news of Vaughan Jones have reminded me of a question I've been wanting to ask for a while.
A significant part of knowledge is stored on personal websites of scientists: preprints, lecture notes, errata... Quite often this "grey literature" gets cited in papers. These sources have an unfortunate tendency to disappear even at the best of times, but things get really bad when the author dies. Universities being what they are in the 21st Century, these websites are usually regarded as cost and liability centers by the IT departments, who waste no time in removing them.
While the Internet Archive often has some parts of the website archived, this is never guaranteed. Unprovoked, its crawler often only goes one level deep in the site if not less. If it does get a copy of a file, it might not come back for updates for years. Some universities even block out the crawler via robots.txt or make the archives inaccessible a-posteriori. (This seems to be particularly widespread in Canada for some reason.)
I am looking for best practices to prevent this loss of written knowledge. From personal experience, I have a few ideas to share, but I suspect they are far from the most efficient we can get.
1. When to archive?
When is a good time to archive a website? "As often as time allows" is the trivial answer, but of course there are better and worse times. I do think that once you hear of an author's death, archiving is a no-brainer -- you certainly won't miss out on any updates, and the danger of the material disappearing is as high as never before.
Now to the more substantial question: how to archive.
The ultimate source on archiving websites is a post by gwern. What worries me is the amount of sophistication it requires. I am unable to run his archiver-bot, nor can I easily find what I need among the links. I would highly appreciate some dumbed-down version that does 80% of the job with 20% of the effort; but until then, here are my manual tricks.
Stone soup warning! The following is probably less than optimal.
2. Personal archival
The simplest form of archival is personal archival, i.e., downloading the website on one's own computer. In most cases, the wget tool (which should exist for every major OS) does the trick. For example, let's download the website of Thomas M. Liggett (1944-2020) while it is still around:
wget -r -l 0 -e robots=off -np -nc --html-extension --no-check-certificate https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tml/

A few words about the litany of options in this command (I am no expert; see the full wget doc): "-r -l 0" means "download recursively (i.e., follow links as long as they don't lead away from the website you gave)"; "-e robots=off" is to ignore the robots.txt (you are downloading for yourself; usually unnecessary anyway); "--html-extension" is to avoid occasional HTML files being downloaded without the .html extension (not sure why this happens); "--no-check-certificate" is telling wget not to be pedantic about SSL certificates.
This doesn't always work. Some website confuse wget by hiding links in javascript. Some websites span several servers. Some have 500MB videos. Some have different files whose names only differ in capitalization, so when you download them on a windows system they will overwrite one another. But the above simple wget incantation works well enough often enough that I find it worth mentioning.
3. Internet Archive
So let's say the Internet Archive is unaware of a website, or has only partial or obsolete copies of it. Can we poke it to wake it up?
Yes, most of the time. It might be necessary to have an account at the Archive (not sure about it, but not a big hurdle anyway). Once you do so, you take the website you want to archive -- let's say this set of errata from the above-mentioned website:
https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tml/bookcorrections2.pdf

and put its URL into the Internet Archive Save site.
[EDIT: For the following paragraph, you need to be logged in with an account on the Internet Archive. I can recommend signing up.] But wait -- before you click "Save Page", you should check the "Save outlinks" checkmark (yes, even PDF files can have outlinks!). This will tell the Archive to capture and save not just the URL you are giving it, but also every URL linked from it. (I think it won't go deeper down the recursion tree.) So if you do this with a course page, you won't have to do this again with every single homework set in it. Thus, if you want the whole site, you only need to throw the Archive on a dominating set. (Make sure you get the order right: Don't do the start page before the course pages, or the Archive will save the course pages without the PDFs and you won't be able to throw it at those course pages for the next 20 minutes because it will think it has already archived them.)
You can close the window once it starts saving; you don't need to wait until it finishes.
I have just done this with Liggett's website as I was writing this post. I had to manually enter each of his course pages (and a couple more pages) and finally the start page into the Archive's Save page, but everything else was pulled in automatically. It took me about 3 minutes in total. Don't go too fast, as the Archive will block you if it gets too many requests from you in a short time; but the block doesn't last long. (I have personally only managed to trigger this block when I was rabidly cycling through a dozen open tabs and pressing the "Save" button on each.)
Incidentally, you can easily get in the habit of saving every of your own preprints on the Archive this way. If you created the hyperlinks in a reasonable way (i.e., using the "hyperref" package) and didn't forget to check "Save outlinks", this will have the effect that every source you hyperlink in that preprint will also be saved.
4. Contacting the universities
Possibly the lowest-tech option for preserving/resurrecting universities websites that were taken down is by nicely asking the (IT service of the maths department of the) university that used to host them. I've tried this 3 times so far, and have been successful twice (Dan Laksov and Jean-Louis Loday -- props to the University of Strasbourg and to KTH). The third time (Rudolf Fritsch's website, partly on the Archive), I was told they did not have the data anymore. Note that all these universities were European; your mileage will likely vary with American ones. (I would fear the latter would be more bureaucratic about it.) The upshot is "worth trying but don't rely on it to work". Either way, if the site has been restored, make sure to save it using the two methods above to prevent its loss when it re-disappears.

Question. What is missing here; what is improvable?

PS. I am specifically talking about mathematicians' websites, since those are the ones that I am most familiar with. If your first reaction at seeing this question is "why would one want to save anything from a personal homepage?" or "no one I know has a homepage", this is most likely because websites are less widespread in your discipline. If it is "who would care about a preprint from 30 years ago?", that's another place where subjects can be fairly different.
I am also not very interested in the legal or ethical side of archiving websites; in my experience, there has never been any controversy in what I am describing, and the worst externalities that can occur are on the level of "a university server gets more traffic than usual" and "future generations get to sneer at Professor Bigshot's messy website". Meanwhile the upsides of saving even the unpolished ideas of mildly known researchers can be substantial. If you feel there is more to these issues, please start a new question.

A very good question. And I myself would also worry about findability of archived versions if the archiving is done privately, even if at the former home university. E.g., a newly-created archive at an odd address, especially if blocked from robots, will be nearly invisible to search engines, if only because of being masked by older one-item hits for the author, etc., I'd fear.

Sort of a secondary "big data" issue: how to find needles in haystacks...

What is the question you’re actually asking, here?

@nick012000nick See the third-to-last paragraph if my post. I am fairly sure my methods are significantly improvable.

I would recommend the long-term solution of having authors publish public content at persistent repositories like arxiv.org, osf.io, etc. This kind of scraped information will be a nightmare of unclear licensing.

A general solution to this problem is probably not easy. However, in case there is a specific professor whose webpage you are following, it would be a nice idea to use httrack to archive it for yourself at least. And you should be doing it every two or three months to keep an updated copy of the website.

This is good practice for personal use, but something public would be better.


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Do I need to cite a chemical formula?
I want to include the chemical change that occurs when calcium carbonate is heated within the background section of the thesis I'm writing. I've seen it included in other's work on the topic, but I don't see any formal citations of the formula. Do I need to cite it or is it more akin to general knowledge? If I do need to cite it, where would be a good place to do that from?

Not a chemist, so won't answer, but I seriously doubt you would need to cite something as simple as heating calcium carbonate. Complicated, propriety drugs maybe, but this seems like something that's covered in a general chemistry class. If there is a non-trivial "algorithm" by which this is performed, you might find a citation for that algorithm as your source for the entire paragraph, including the chemical formulas.


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What is a European Doctorate Programme?
I am currently a PhD student in a EU country and recently I was advised to pursue a European Doctorate Programme.
I thought that, being "European", it was some kind of regulated, inter-country program with specific rules, but I cannot find any "official" documentation from any European institution. The only things I can find by searching on google are doctorate programs from various universities that claim to be "European".
I am aware that some EU students are encouraged to do 3-6 months of their PhD (or more) abroad, but I don't know if by doing this their PhD qualifies to be a European Doctorate.
So, what is a European Doctorate Program? Is there any regulation for it by a European institution? How does it relate with doctorate programs where students decide to spend some months abroad?

If am I not wrong (I lack official sources), its a thing to get a PhD "internationally", so people get out of their home countries and get some experience in different countries. The requisite you need to get it is spending a period of more than 6 months of your PhD in a country other than your university's doing research. Ironically, I moved to another European country to obtain my whole PhD and that doesn't give me a EDP. Aaah bureaucrazy

In my (limited) experience, the EDP is a tiny highlight in someones CV if they never moved from their hometown/country, because it shows that they can also work with international people. For someone that has no problem with mobility and that can prove that has been living/working/studying in a foreign country, then the EDP will add little to the CV itself. But hey, its always a good opportunity for travelling.  If I am not wrong it has some other minor requirements, like writing your thesis in English. Note that all this information is not  sourced officially.

I am curious to understand if there is a tangible difference between a national degree (of an EU country) and the European degree.
As for the rules for qualifying for the European degree, I found these rules to apply:

The doctorate must, in part, have been prepared during a research internship period of at least three months in another European country.
Oral thesis presentation authorisation is granted on the basis of reports submitted by at least three professors comprising at least two from higher education institutions from two European countries other than the country in which the oral thesis presentation is to be held. The host laboratory representative cannot submit this report.
At least one member of the jury should belong to a European higher education institution from a different country to that in which the oral thesis presentation is held.
Part of the oral thesis presentation should be conducted in an official language of the European Community which is not the language of the country in which the presentation is held.

Edit (because I still cannot leave comments):

Some universities might require a 4 month stay abroad for acquiring this title.
As for the difference in the value between the two degrees, there seems to be none. The European Doctorate seems to be a label added to the normal doctoral degree of an EU academic institution as a proof that the abovementioned requirements are accomplished. This seems to be a way to promote cooperation among EU universities from different countries, PhD student mobility and the writing of the dissertations in English, as in many EU countries they can still be written in the official language of the country.

I cannot cite any official documentation either, but I have a few recollections from our PhD program committee meetings. Take them with a grain of salt because I've never been involved in the European Doctorate Program bureaucracy, and we no longer adhere to it, probably for the reasons given in the last paragraph.
The European Doctorate Program is essentially a label that certifies that during the PhD years you did essentially two things (I'm not aware of other requirements):

You have written the PhD dissertation in English.
You have spent some time abroad, not necessarily in Europe (in our program the minimum period was of 6 months, but I don't know if it is a universal rule).

As far as I know, this program was born in a time (probably around 15-20 years ago) where many people around Europe, even in STEM fields, still wrote their PhD dissertation in the local language (I'm one of them) and wasn't used to visit foreign laboratories for a significant amount of time. Nowadays, many European PhD programs already require students to write their dissertations in English, some require anyway the students to spend some time abroad (or the advisors strongly encourage this), and the European Doctorate Program somehow lost its main purpose of fostering the internationalization of the PhD programs.

Does it require an English dissertation? I would hope the requirement is to not write in the local language, and thus Brits and Irish would need to write in a different language. Based on debthebee13's answer, there is no written language requirement, only the language of the oral presentation is stipulated


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Mention of open problems in statement of purpose
I graduated with a first class honors in dual degrees (bachelor of electrical engineering and mathematics) from Australia and would like to study for a PhD in the USA.
One of my dreams is to work on a specific open problem in control theory for my PhD. I got a WAM (weighted average mark) of 95 (out of 100) for my dual degree.
Is it unrealistic to state in my statement of purpose that I like to work on a specific open problem in control theory? and would it have any negative effect on my admission?

In math departments, if you put in your statement of purpose that you are interested in working on a specific open problem, it might help you. But if that problem is the Riemann hypothesis or P ≠ NP, you may have killed any chance you had of getting in. I don't know what the control theory equivalent of these problems are, but you should figure this out before writing your statement.

@PeterShor: Thanks for your comment. You said that "if that problem is the Riemann hypothesis or P ≠ NP, you may have killed any chance you had of getting in". Can I ask why? Is it because they are too hard and it would take someone more than 20 years to solve them?

Countless excellent mathematicians have been working very hard on proving the Riemann hypothesis over the last 150 years. Thinking you are going to waltz into graduate school and solve it for your PhD thesis reveals—something—naivety? insanity? egotism?

It is a GREAT idea to list some specific problem.  I got a national scholarship and one reason was I wrote about a specific problem I wanted to work on (even with a couple citations to literature).
A little real meat on the bone content helps differentiate from hordes of people who just say how great they are.
I would maybe just give yourself a little flexibility to say that you will look at other topics of interest when accepted into school and choosing a lab group.

Definitely give yourself some flexibility in graduate school applications (probably more than "a little"). If you're applying to a EE department, and from your statement it looks like you are only interested in working on problem X, if nobody on the faculty is interested in problem X, you have just made it much harder for them to accept you. For national scholarships, on the other hand, you don't need as much flexibility.

You should have at least one dude working on something in the region of that problem or not have it on your list of schools to apply to.  Write that you are interested in that one problem and then leave an opening so you can look at other faculty (don't name the 1-3 who are in your immediate problem interest, they'll recognize it well enough).


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In a paragraph about a paper, where do I put the citation?
I have a paragraph about a specific method used by an author and I am wondering where in that paragraph I should put my inline citation.
The paragraph in question goes something like this, where steps to complete the method is several sentences summarizing the paper.

The Harman method was devised by T. C. Harman ....
  steps to complete the method ....
  Harman showed that ZT could be computed from eq. (2.1)

Where should I put the citation?  I see three options:

at the beginning (right after the name)
at the end of the first sentence
at the end of the paragraph

Or some combination of the three options above. I am using IEEE citation format.

I feel that it is best to cite once for each unique referent. In your case, you are referring first to a set of methods, and later to a result. Thus I would write

The Harman method (Harman, DATE) was devised by T. C. Harman .... steps to complete
  the method .... Harman showed that ZT could be computed from eq. (2.1) (Harman, DATE)

Do you mean that "methods was" is intentional?

No, I just copied the OP's text. Fixed.

It might be better to fix it the other way round, afaik there is only one Harman method for the determination of the figure of merit ZT of a thermoelectric material. I'm not sure however whether there are more papers to be cited.