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How to deal with incompetent PhD student as an undergrad
I am an undergrad who was recruited to join a lab by this PhD student and help her with her thesis, but since working with her I have come to the conclusion that she is incompetent and probably not going to finish her PhD. I often question her judgment especially related to safety and her research. This is my first research job, so sometimes I am unsure if this is normal, but at the same time I don't want to pick up bad habits. Some of the highlights include:

Lack of safety awareness. No gloves/splash goggles when working with (hot) concentrated acids and bases. Some of these experiments are run outside the fume hood, and sometimes on the floor when there is no space on the lab bench. Lab bench is a mess and when I mention cleaning up she says it'll take too much time.
When I ask her about her research proposal, she seems confused and is unable to answer basic questions about previous results. Previous experiments all seem inconclusive, need to be rerun, or she can't remember. One of the major part of her proposal is to investigate a particular mechanism, but when I ask what tests she plans on running, she has no idea.
I will talk to her about papers that I found, sometimes exactly matching the experiments we want to run, and she seems surprised. I will mention things from papers we've both read or thesis of previous students and she has no clue so most conversations about research is unproductive or she offers very superficial, obvious observations. Conversations with other group members are much more productive.
She (and I) have very little to share during group meetings because experiments are sometimes poorly designed and she does not plan them out. She will have a rough idea of what she wants to do, but no procedures or plan so lab time is spent planning the experiments out. She seems to have a very bizarre attention to some details but not others. For example, when running some high purity experiments she doesn't want us to wash the beakers with soap due to fear of contamination, but then she'll proceed to run these experiments on the dirty lab floor.
She has poor organization and samples are sometimes lost or results are not written down.
She has very rudimentary technical skills. I have watched her use the computer multiple times and instructions on how to use simple programs need to be written down step-by-step with very specific instructions on which button to press... etc. Sometimes she wants me to write a program from a paper, but she is so inept that she is unable to offer any assistance/advice, and after I'm finished writing the program she will have no clue how it works.

At times, it seems like I'm doing all the literature search, running the experiments, writing the programs, and coming up with new ideas while she grades homework. She says she is going to graduate this year.
Our PI is a very hands off person. I spend a lot of time reading literature and have ideas of other experiments we can run related to this research area in general. I would like to run these experiments myself. Since we're working in the same research area, however, sometimes when I discuss these ideas the grad student will mention wanting to include it in her thesis (even though it wasn't in her proposal). And because of how unproductive she is, I would prefer not to work with her anyways. I'm also concerned that the PI will think that these are good ideas and that I should work with this student to test them, particularly because I am an undergrad.
How can I politely distance myself with her and start doing some independent research?

Let me guess, the PhD student is not from your country, right? I am saying this because many students, who probably had great academic record back home, struggle to maintain the kind of research and academic standards demanded from a grad student abroad.

@incrediblesulk Does that goes both ways, though? Or is it usually one-way -- like someone from a "more productive" country fitting in just fine whereas someone from a "less productive" country might struggle more?

@ManRow Depends on the individual. I studied in a less production environment with little to no facilities. There are go getters who find ways to develop themselves but in general, the university system doesn't help the development. In fact they affect the development. So much emphasize is given on memorization rather than learning that...My biggest fear is that even if I get into a good grad school abroad, I will be overwhelmed by the kind of expectation the grad school would have from me.

Some thing students aren't always aware of is the politics that exist at universities. I think this is one case you could try to leverage.  Talk to some other students, find out which labs have PIs that are really strict/serious on safety. If those students mention to their PI the same safety issues, she/he may get involved at a faculty level.  This could be a way to keep yourself out of it, while making the university more aware.

Looks to me like you should be a PhD student there, and someone's taking your spot. The whole situation is ridiculous. How can you even know, at this point, that the lab environment isn't contaminated with something toxic/carcinogenic? If the enforcement of policies is so lax, then what other equally out-of-touch students have been doing their "work" in the same room? That seems like a disaster waiting to happen. You should talk to someone who deals with occupational safety at your school.

The number of issues goes beyond the need to handle this politely.   This person is recklessly endangering others, and has been counselled by environmental safety.  If they continue to do it, there might not be a way to politely say "you're going to kill someone, probably you, maybe me"  I'd take it up with occupational safety.

Use the fact that it is unsafe to back away.  Cite university OH&S policies, report dangers, and move away.

@incrediblesulk You won't know till you try. But the important part is to adapt to the local culture. I have seen Chinese (you said you were from Asia, though I realize it's bigger than China) students approach a PhD in the US with a Chinese mindset (do what you are told and if it doesn't work, do more of it) and it didn't work and I have seen other Chinese students flourish as they were finally able to pursue their own ideas at solving a problem. (Same supervisor for all of them.)

Did the laboratory explode in the meanwhile?

No gloves/splash goggles when working with (hot) concentrated acids and bases. Some of these experiments are run outside the fume hood, and sometimes on the floor when there is no space on the lab bench.

Do not work in this lab.  Do not even go in.  It could kill you.  Obvious safety problems are often accompanied by even worse, hidden problems.
Consult your university's safety policy to determine if you can/should/must report this situation.
The other problems are insignificant by comparison.  Find a new PI.

At universities I am familiar with, if the safety staff found out about this, everybody would be banned from entering the lab.

Yeah I realize it's a big deal and I always put on PPE and tell her if I think something is unsafe. I believe the lab safety guy had a talk with her after some of the incidents...

Holy cow, why wouldn't you report this? If she's been reported before, why is she still there?

If its in the UK,  there's normally a lab manager or similar - there should be notices around on who they are, or they are the person who gave you a safety demo when you joined. Go and find them, and talk to them about this. Please don't think of this as getting someone in trouble, but of protecting the lives of yourself and those around you. This is terrifying.
I'd also go and talk to the head of the department (again, assuming this is structured like a UK university)  - make your safety concerns known, and work out how this won't hurt you academically

When my mother was in college, she took a basic lower-division chemistry lab class and was paired with someone similar to the PhD student being described. One time, she had to tell him, "I don't think we're supposed to boil the sulfuric acid in that flask." He ignored her, so she stood back and repeated, "I really don't think we're supposed to boil the sulfuric acid in that flask." He ignored her again. She was ready; so when the flask exploded, she made sure he was okay. OP, you don't want to have to be responsible for someone else's safety like that. Report her, right now.

If necessary go straight to the health and safety coordinator (or whoever is in charge of health and safety) and explain the situation to them.  There is someone in the University who would have a heart attack about this and if you explain it to them they should help you immediately.

I'm going to add another plea here, not just for your safety, but for the poor soul who may come after you. You recognise the aweful safety risks being taken, the next undergrad may not, and may pay for it with blindness, permanent disability, or death. It's not a question of if someone is going to be harmed, it's a question of when.

I feel like everyone has targeted the health & safety angle. Not unreasonably so -- it is crucial to think of such things first and foremost -- but I've seen very little advice on this well-populated thread that targets anything else. Everyone seems to want to skirt the issue of how to deal with an incompetent PhD student who wants to steal one's ideas and delegate all their heavy tasks to their undergrad mentee, in favor of the obvious (if there's a chance the lab is toxic, report them immediately). I suspect the student may have exaggerated that part and it may not be the be all and end all.

@MobeusZoom When your house is burning down, you're not concerned about saving the silverware.  When someone is worrying about the silverware in a burning building, you slap them in the face, throw them over your shoulder, and get them out of danger first.  Then we can talk about details.

@MobeusZoom Backing up what J… said: If even half of what the student has said is factually accurate, we’re looking at the equivalent of a grenade rolling around the floor without a pin. Debating how best to talk to the person who threw it is not in anyone’s best interests. We need everyone to stop thinking about anything but the grenade, and to get the hell out of there. Now.

@J... you seem wilfully insistent on a literal interpretation of what the kid wrote: my guess is that the situation is simply not so dramatic, he is referring to a one-off issue that pissed him off as an stark serious malpractice, but their main question is how broadly to deal with a student who should not really be in charge of them. to take every word at face value and conclude that the situation is one of mortal danger is almost certainly over-dramatic: in most places there are checks and balances against someone like that becoming a PhD student (in particular, no PI is that "hands off").

@MobeusZoom OP said hot, concentrated acid with no goggles, no fume hood, no gloves.  That is an objective disaster waiting to happen.  Until OP clarifies that they were being grossly hyperbolic, we have to take them at their word.

How can I politely distance myself with her ... (emphasis added)

You can be fully honest without using judgmental terms such as "incompetent". You can also approach the situation as though having a PI who is "hands-off" does not mean that you have a PI who is unwilling to fix safety violations.
The safety concerns, as noted, can be grounds for you to leave immediately. Certainly, with any indication of an immediate, dire threat to your safety, leave the lab with no hesitation. In those cases where you feel inclined to report such violations to higher authorities, keep in mind that you have an obligation to inform the PI as the first responsible authority in the chain. By example, an emergency phone call to your campus equivalent 911 number must be followed directly by a call, text, or email to the PI. In the US, academic laboratories are now required to have those contact points visibly posted on the outside of the laboratory doors.
Should you wish otherwise to continue with the current PI, a potentially workable alternative would be to ask that you have your own workspace physically separated from the student in question. When you would want to do this, you have to address the PI in an opening request. By example:

Since I have been working in the laboratory with (student's name), I have been confronted with situations that I feel are violations of safety protocols. I no longer feel comfortable working in the same physical laboratory space as (student's name). I would like to meet with you to discuss my concerns and to understand how they should be properly addressed.

Independent of the immediate, dire safety violations, you can also decide how far you really want to get involved in the longer game to make changes to the underlying violations that you see.  When you decide that you must/will report such violations, do so in writing. Email the student. By example:

I came to the laboratory today at 9am. An open container of what appeared to be concentrated acid was sitting on the bench top. I had to leave the laboratory out of safety concerns and could not do my work. Let me know when you have cleaned up so that I can get back to my research work.

I had arranged with you yesterday that I would need to have the fume hood clear for my research work. I came to the laboratory today at 9am. The fume hood was not cleared. I had to leave the laboratory and could not do my work. Let me know when you have cleared the fume hood so that I can get back to my research work.

You can consider the balance of copying the PI or not on these emails. If the graduate student seems receptive to email as "polite" reminders, you may do better to avoid essentially spamming every complaint that you have to the PI. Alternatively, you may want to copy the PI for good reason, for example if the violation that you are reporting is extremely serious or is something that was raised in a previous group meeting and yet still remains unresolved by some agreed upon time at that meeting.
If you must report violations to the department head/chair or to the safety officers, you should do so without going around the PI as your first step. Collect your message with date stamps. Send them in bulk to the PI.

I can no longer work in the laboratory because (student's name) is not providing me with a safe, effective work space. I am enclosing a record of messages to (student's name). They show that, over the past weeks, I have been able to complete any research activities because (student's name) is not doing her job. I would like to meet with you to determine how best to proceed.

At some point, a growing collection of non-critical safety violations can become dire and immediate in their own right, especially when they go unattended despite due notices. When you would wish to raise such a case to an even higher authority beyond the PI, it helps to have the written records (emails) in order. Do the respect to give due notice also to the PI, for example

We have discussed a range of safety violations at our group meetings. Because the violations continue to happen, I can no longer continue working in the laboratory. As I leave, I am also sending the attached list of my records of reporting the numerous safety violations to the (chair / safety office) because, unless corrected, these violations can pose an inadvertent danger to anyone who might enter the laboratory without advanced notice.

... and start doing some independent research?

From the rest of your report, it sounds as though you already have a good grasp of how to start. Your obligation going forward is not to the student. It is to the PI who has given you permission to work in the laboratory with the student. Perhaps you should re-orient your research goals accordingly. To this end, your next step might be to ask for a meeting in an email to the PI. By example:

I have been working with (student's name) for the past few months. At this point, I believe that I have a strong grasp of the research goals and a good set of workable ideas in order to achieve them. I would like to present a proposal for a research project that I can undertake independently of (student's name). Are you available for this meeting?

Before you do, create what I might call a "Proposal for Independent Undergraduate Research". Outline how you will work on a topic that can be done entirely separate from the goals of the PhD student. Address how your results are truly able to be done separate from those being studied by the PhD student. Basically, structure your proposal such that, if your work is never done, the PhD student is not harmed and, if your proposed work is completed, the PhD student can REFERENCE the results but not include them as though they are also her own work. The "polite" return on this investment is likely that you may correspondingly have to REFERENCE results obtained by the PhD student to the degree that they support or enable your research to proceed.
Finally, you are not responsible for whether the PhD student does or does not complete her dissertation successfully. Your observations of her work habits, skills, aptitude, and motivation are part of lessons in life-long learning on how to cope with others who are not as organized or as able to perform in the same ways as you can. Disengage from the emotional responses these observations bring and make sound, non-judgmental, professional decisions on where you want to go next for your own success.

All good advice, though I'd suggest CCing the PI on all the emails to the grad student.

@BenS. ... I thought of this. However, on the other side, I also thought that the PI should not have to hear about every complaint. Hence, my suggestion to do a bulk email if the OP decides that the situation has reached that point. It also promotes the good old school ... talk about it first, send email as the last resort ... approach. I will add a follow up thought.

In most cases, I'd agree with you, but this is an immediate threat to the PI's ability to keep their lab open. If safety violations like this happened at my old university, the lab would be completely shut down indefinitely.

@BenS. Certainly true. Having an immediate threat does not remove the student's responsibility not to bypass the PI, purposely or inadvertently. A responsible PI should not have find out only through second hand sources (from above) that he/she had been in violation of safety protocols. I'll amend once more to respect this thought.

The word incompetent seems to be a perfect non judgmental fit here. She lacks the basic competence to do her job. No judment included

@Hakaishin The OP uses "incompetent" as a broad, conclusive, judgmental opinion about the graduate student. Defining a person as incompetent paints a broad-brush, usually if not always with deeply negative connotations. I agree that presenting specific observations on where someone demonstrates a lack of competence to do certain tasks is non-judgmental. The broad label "incompetent" does not directly follow. It does belong in a "polite" presentation, especially also not on a public forum where the person who is thereby so broadly and negatively defined has no opening to defend herself.

This is by far the best comment I found on this thread, the only one that makes a serious attempt to discuss the issues I bet the OP is really interested in (rather than just health & safety, which I have a suspicion isn't really the key thing going on here). Also some great examples. I can't think why it's not the top, but I gave it the upvote I could.

This person's incompetence is endangering the safety of themselves and others, as well as the laboratory environment and integrity of experiments being conducted there. Report these safety violations to the appropriate authority immediately, and refuse to work with this person any further out of regard for your safety.
As an academic, you have a right to be safe and an obligation to keep yourself and others safe, even from themselves, and even if doing so is liable to have negative repercussions. Someone this slapdash is unlikely to find commercial work anyway due to their lack of adherence to basic procedures, so you are actually doing them (and the world) a favour by preventing them from getting any further before their disregard for safety is addressed.
Do not feel guilty about doing the right, safe thing. Feel good about preventing harm to others.

"As an academic, you have a right to be safe and an obligation to keep yourself and others safe"  The idea of an obligation to others isn't really fair to undergraduate students.  I teach my students that if there is a fire, they are to leave (keep them selves safe) and not try to put it out (keep others safe).

@AnonymousPhysicist I took that comment to mean you have an obligation to take reasonable steps - kind of like how as a motorist you have an obligation to stop at the scene of an accident and call emergency services, but you certainly aren't expected to climb into a burning wreck, or to use your example, there's an obligation to trip the fire alarm. There truly is an obligation to report this behaviour even after you've removed yourself from harm - it borders on negligent to not report it and let others potentially come to harm

OP is lucky to be early in their career and that the unsafe scientist is a PhD student rather than a senior professor.  Unless PhD student has powerful corrupt friends, OP has only limited repercussions to fear.

That was exactly my intention, @Phill. You are obligated to be a good human being by reporting things that are wrong, not by endangering yourself trying to fix said things.

I am afraid to say that this "hands-off" PI of yours is a common type in academia. They tend to be charismatic and great at pulling in money for what is often spruced-up boilerplate research which industry has decided to outsource. They are "busily important" and smile a lot. They have droves of bushy eyed youngsters working from them. They have a lot of time available for those who deliver, and those who cannot swim are left to sink. Your unfortunate PhD student is just one of them.
If you are one of those rare ones who can swim all by themselves, and deliver the goods that will make you golden in the eyes of this PI (who, I warn you, will cop the credit), then by all means proceed. But you are low in the food chain. Any conflict with the PhD student (despite your best intentions) will play out badly for you.
All in all, I have to second what someone else said here: get out of there, get away from that PI.

This answer isn't wrong, but I find it a bit too cynical.  What you describe does happen, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Be cool. It is not the end of the world. Explain your concerns. If things don't improve, escalate it.

Simply change labs so you don't have to deal with the politics of working in a lab where you have changed mentors.

A person that disregard safety so much must, even after receiving warnings, must be fired and it is almost your duty to promote such consequence.
She may became homeless, she may lose her student visa, her magnificent career's prospects will crash, whatever, at least she will be alive (and she would not put in danger the lives of others).
[disclaimer: I say this even not knowing the other side of the story, I do not care, this is much more serious than sexual harassment, which is an issue that get people fired with one-sided stories, at least in theory]
Regarding you: you are undergrad, you now have enough experience, change immmediately PI/lab/project.
Do not worry about the ideas you had now, you already demonstrate critical thinking and, when exposed to literature and state-of-art science, I can assure you will have other sparkling ideas to follow.
Plus, an idea is not a good idea if developed by only one person.
If your actual PI will "steal" your ideas, much better, 1-2 years down the road you can apply for fundings to develop the ideas with the backup of reference and citations (maybe even a reference letter) from PI's publications, providing you solid ground to further the work in the field: science is not about who is first having the idea, it's about the first that publish the idea (or the last, since science is an incremental business ;), you know, standing on the shoulder of giants and all that motivational crap that you can find in Linkedin&aphorisms from Abraham Lincoln [1]).
New research topics/ideas are 10% intuition and 90% implementation, if you had these novel ideas just by reading literature and by being exposed to that toxic (in the real meaning of the word) lab, for sure these ideas are circulating and coming to the mind of the professional of R&D (i.e. other PhDs and PostDoc working in other labs and preparing their proposals to get funded ...).
Each person is unique, but ideas are not. We often celebrate the faster person having some ideas and developing them (and we are deeply wrong in this), do not neglect that person was not the only one and his/her ideas would have nil-value if he/she was the only one working on those ideas.
[1]

not everythin' ya read in the Internet is true
(Lincoln, 1884)

why is most of this answer rambling on about ownership of ideas?

@ChrisH because ideas ownership it is the only point deeply relevant to OP: not the supervising being dangerous, but the " start doing some independent research?"
OP is worried that ideas will appear in grad thesis: ideas alone are worth (almost) nothing.

Hm, I suppose I can see how you might read it that way. By my reading OP's worry isn't about their ideas being stolen, but about being instructed to keep working under  (in terms of rank and authority, given that they say they were hired to help the PhD student) somebody they consider unproductive, incompetent and unsafe.

exactly: extending your line of thought, I see the OP is worried about the unproductive, incompetent and unsafe (UIU) claiming ownership on the ideas he has, if he goes public with them.
This is not an issue, obviously the UIU will claim ownership on the ideas and put them in the thesis, but the OP can work on them, because 3 years down the road there is no way the UIU will have any say or influence on the OP stating "these are my ideas ...".

I must admit that I did not read the whole answer. I paid attention to the safety issue. I used to work on a safety critical system. If the system crashed, there would be a headline news on every news media around the world. Safety was on my mind when I reviewed the Low Quality Posts flag against this answer. I gave it a "Looks OK". The reason is simple, if the lab is burned or blown up, you could lose lives. This is more important than anything. And this is mentioned in the first paragraph. Therefore, it looks ok. You can say I am biased. So be it..

I am sorry, but I find it very hard to believe the above.
Getting payed as a PhD candidate involves grants, and thus great effort by PIs or postdocs to get funding etc. If your candidates do not graduate, you can not get grants easily, your reputation as professor is a bit damaged, so it is not something to be taken lightly.
I find it hard to believe someone so incompetent is hired, let alone continue 3 years without anyone noticing or doing something about it, and all of a sudden an undergrad reveals this.
If that was the case, statistically some accident/ other catastrophe would have happened.
Does she have any results under her belt already or something?
PIs have great experience on this (literally decades), you can address to them for this.
Well if the situation and chaos is that bad all across this lab, you made a poor choice.
Either continue for a bit together with the shenanigans and graduate and never look back, or get the big decision and restart all over.
However, again, rethink on the whole situation a bit. It reminds me of when I see a footballer on tv and comment that I would do better.

While I agree that an undergrad is likely to be much less able to judge the many factors at play than a PI, points 1 and 5 listed by OP are very serious indicators that this PhD candidate is unqualified to work in a lab. They are certainly sufficient reason to refuse to work with the PhD candidate, and it would be wise for the undergrad to document these instances and bring them to the attention of whomever they report to.

I totally agree with you. However, we are hearing only one part of the story here.
I find it better thought to discuss it with people if you have an issue with them, than posting it on stackexchange.
My guess is that either the lab is left in the mercy of God, or the undergrad does not really know what they talk about.

@Paramar we may only be getting one side of the story, but refusing to clean the lab bench after use and then running experiments on the floor is hardly open to multiple interpretations. Frankly it's hard to read the opening of your answer as anything other than accusing OP of lying.

"I find it hard to believe someone so incompetent is hired, let alone continue 3 years without anyone noticing or doing something about it, and all of a sudden an undergrad reveals this." -- you don't know in which country this happened (this is very relevant because different countries have different policies regarding grants and hiring PhDs), in which institutions nor who were the people involved. Therefore your conclusions are far-fetched.

@ChrisH what is clear from my answer is that the claims here seem (and are) outrageous, both in magnitude/extent and frequency. Being a phd myself, behavior like that would strike out immediately. I definitively believe the description here is exaggerated. If that is not the case, as I also stated in my comment above, maybe the lab is left for dead and it was a very bad choice to start with

@Blazej "you don't know in which country this happened, in which institutions nor who were the people involved". So you believe that such outrageous things look common everyday routine in some institutions? Do you have a lot in mind? "people involved" You mean getting special treatment due to connections with the PI? Maybe. Still your claims are far more far-fetched than mine

@Paramar If you this hard to believe, you haven't spent enough time in academia. I've been in research departments at seven different universities (Tier 1 and Tier 2) over 35 years and, while not common (for which I give thanks), it certainly happens from time to time. Certain researchers had the reputation of being careless to the point of being a danger to themselves; certain ones were just plain not going to make it. Either of these will end a career and most of them end in their 3rd year. The courses of action recommended above are both prudent and rational.

This answer is basically "The system is not wrong, because if the system was wrong, it wasn't the system at place. But the system is the system, therefore the system cannot be wrong".


text:
Are we mere facilitators of glorifed correspondence courses?
Recently, I’ve noticed a few popular comments that got me thinking. The first were left on this question, asking:
What are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?
One comment reads:

I think you're asking the wrong question. The right question is "How do I help struggling students better learn the material?" The answer might involve increasing attendance, but it might not.

As of this writing, this comment was upvoted 33 times¹.
Another highly-upvoted comment (more than 20 upvotes), is found a little further down; it says:

If missing your lectures does not mean that students don't learn the material, then what's the problem? Maybe the student just learns better from reading on their own.

I found similar sentiments in comments beneath an answer to this question:
Why do professors want to make sure that their notes … will not be published?
One particular answer suggested:

There are good reasons for this: .. if students have access to the lecture notes from previous years, they might decide not to come to class (or come and not pay attention)

That answer received half a dozen downvotes, along with some upvoted comments below, saying:

Professors do not need to have a reason, but .. the reasons you gave are bad.
“There are good reasons for this” — Maybe so, but you haven't given any

In one sense, I get what these comments are driving at (at least, I think I do). We live in a changing world – some might say in the midst of a revolution. Today's students have a wealth of information at their fingertips, so we are moving away from the “sage on the stage” model of learning. Shame on us if we play little games to coerce students into attending lectures that fail to contribute significantly to their learning.
On the other hand, though, I find myself wrestling with this. Taken to an extreme, it's almost as if we're encouraging professors to structure their courses so that students who choose to skip lectures could still learn the material equally well. We could give traditional lectures to those enjoy lectures (or learn better from them), while at the same time providing the same information in alternative forms for those who would rather take a course heavy on self-study, and light on mandatory attendance in the classroom or lecture hall.
I've taught in both the online and face-to-face environments, so I understand that both approaches can be effective. Up until now, though, I've taught my face-to-face sections differently. I try to leverage the advantages that each modality offers; in the case of face-to-face courses, that means relying heavily on in-class discussions using the Socratic method.
Consequently, many of my PowerPoint slides steer clear of bullets, favoring pictures instead. (A picture will prompt me to launch into a particular discussion, but prevent me from reading aloud
to the class – in other words, using pictures instead of words will force me to speak more extemporaneously). If I do have a slide with bullets, I often add an extra text box with a question, such as, "Why is this important?". Such prompts remind me to stop talking and yield the floor back to the class regularly. The goal is to get their brains out of a passive listening mode and into an active thinking mode.
I've found this to be rather effective, yet past students have told me, "Your slides are good for lectures, but they don't make good study aids for exams." I've told them that's true, and that it's also by design – which brings me back to my conundrum. Based on observations and overheard comments, I think more than a handful of today's students get into the habit of skipping classes because they've found lectures to be unhelpful and a waste of their time. I try very hard to make sure this isn't the case in my class, but sometimes I sense that students have made up their minds before we've even gotten underway, to the point where these students happy-go-luckily convince themselves that, by and large, college lectures are strictly optional.
I guess my question is this: Should I cater to such students? That is, should I invest more time into developing additional materials that would make it easier for a student to do well in my class, even if that student decides to skip half my lectures? Or is the onus on the student to be more selective about which lectures should be attended, and which can be considered more optional?

¹ I am one of the 33 upvoters, so I have no problem with the sentiments expressed in that comment.

What do you mean by "should I"? A contractual duty? A moral obligation? Or is it another way to ask "Do I want to?"

Skipping lectures is not the only thing you can do with notes. A lecture will usually go to fast for one set of students, who will be left behind, and too slow for another, who will (barring exceptional self-discipline) get bored and stop paying attention. Notes are a good way to get both groups to follow.

@DmitryS et al. - Not contractually, not morally. Perhaps pedagogically? Put another way, would such an approach be considered a "best practice?"

We live in a changing world — No, no, no.  Students have had a wealth of information at their fingertips for decades, if not centuries, in those funny buildings you never go into, called "libraries", which are full of those things you never read, called "books".  And instructors have been providing photocopied/mimeographed lecture notes for decades as well, either in class, in a department office, or at local bookstores/copy shops.  And instructors have been flipping classrooms since Socrates.  Ain't nothing new under the sun.

@JeffE - Yes, I realize libraries have been around for a long time, but you must admit: what used to take a good hour or two in a microfiche room might now take a few minutes using a phone that fits in your pocket; what used to be far too many books to cram into your overloaded backpack can now get loaded on your Kindle; downloading a set of .pdfs from the LMS is a snap compared to mimeographing lecture notes. Libraries weren't usually open 24/7/365, either. Information may have always been available to those willing to do the work – but it hasn't always been this easy to get that information.

I think it is important to note that good material which supports students learning for an exam is also very valuable to the students who actually came to the course! Especially if you drive very interactive classes, taking detailed notes might be difficult for students. So it could well be that at the end of the course when people try to study for your exams, they don't have much more to fall back to than your slides.

"structure their courses so that students who choose to skip lectures could still learn the material equally well." - yes, essentially, that is exactly what is meant when one takes the statement "Attendance of lectures is not obligatory." (which was completely normal during my studies) at face-value.

To answer your question: No, you shouldn't. Yes, it'll be nice if you have time to invest into it.
Ensuring that your lectures provoke in-class discussions with your students and using a Socratic method is a very good thing, and you have my praise. It will, without doubt, encourage students to come to your lectures. However, there will be those who a) orders of magnitude better in learning through reading than through listening, b) who slack and skip lectures, c) who work part-time (depending on the country you're in, this might be acceptable or not). So, do your best to deliver thought-provoking, bright and inspiring lectures, and first cater to those who come to your lectures. There are some ways to help those who don't come; I can think of two.
Personal experience: I've been a TA on a graduate-level physics course. While the professor slides were exactly as you describe (images to seed the conversation) and I liked it, I also felt that the slides will not be enough for me and for the students to retain the content of the lecture. I started writing down the lecture notes (in an electronic format, to be corrected and shared with ease). So, if you are willing to cater to such students but have limited time, the first option is to ask someone to scribe for you.
Another option, which required substantial effort but might be beneficial in the long run, is video recording the lectures. Learn if your university has some kind of video recording initiative; if they do, there will be people who deal with the technical side of recording, and you'll just have to wear a mic. I recall our university did it for a class of 10 people; the recordings were useful when I was preparing for an exam, even for the lectures I attended.

Video recording the lectures just allows those who wanted to be at the lecture but couldn't to get the next best thing.  It doesn't really help those who learn better from books and notes.  Having someone transcribe the lecture is much better in that respect.

I think you've missed the point.
It is not the responsibility of the instructor to provide ways for the student to learn without coming to class.  But there will always be the possibility that one of the students has access to better external resources.
Consider if one of the students is the nephew of the textbook author (or, if you wrote the textbook, the sister of your recent PhD student who extended your work in significant ways after the book was written).  It's entirely possible for that student to be mentored outside of class, and become more knowledgeable and practiced than any of the other students, even if the class is taught exceptionally well.
In such a case, you shouldn't consider the student's absence from your lecture a problem that needs to be solved.  And a grading system that penalizes this student for poor attendance, rather than assigning a mark based on competence and ability to apply the material, would be a failure.
Some students will use outside resources.  It's the instructor's responsibility to devise a grading system that properly evaluates the student's performance, but not to provide the outside resources.  Spending your effort on alternative resources dilutes preparation for the class, which harms the students who take the traditional approach.
Focus on handouts, notes, and problem sets that aid in understanding your lectures, and any student who chooses a different approach also has to take responsibility for it.

+1 The students who learn best outside of class have developed or found their own learning methodology. All the lecturer needs to do is make sure that information presented in class is available in some form (e.g. lecture notes, or the textbook if you stick to that).

While I agree that the context you describe makes sense, my experience is that increasingly the view of students, and sometimes also of university staff, is that it is the responsibility of the instructor to cater for the students who don't come to lectures.

@JessicaB This is probably country-specific. In Finland, the general trend is the opposite. People used to say that university is not a school. Instructors provided pointers to textbooks and other material, and students were expected to take responsibility for learning. They could study in any way they liked, as only the results mattered. The situation has changed significantly in the last 10-15 years. Students are now often expected to attend the lectures and/or to study in the way the instructor prefers.

I mostly agree, but I would say the lecturer should at least make clear what content would have to be looked at if you did not attend a lecture. There are many courses where you can look at all the slides and still not know what is important to look at more in-depth and what just a fun fact

Are we mere facilitators of glorifed correspondence courses?

Unfortunately in the current environment probably yes.
The “chalk and talk” or “sage on a stage” model of instruction is a minimalistic model. That does not mean it is ineffective or old-fashioned. We call it “traditional” because traditionally teachers have to cover a lot of material for a lot of students in a little time, with copious extracurricular responsibilities. Without additional faculty and programme support, what other choice do instructors have?
It is a method we select for efficiency. But if the benefits of being face-to-face are lost when the number of students in the class/lecture exceeds 10–30, then maybe what we have is not even a glorified correspondence course, but a stunted correspondence course. A single lecture is given on a fixed day at a fixed time in a fixed place with fixed seating capacity. In an online environment, any number of students can watch lecture videos in their own time, watch them again as many times as required, pause to check other sources, talk to friends or classmates, take coffee breaks and breathers, and move between effortlessly (depending on the quality of the technology) between different class materials and media.

should I invest more time into developing additional materials that would make it easier for a student to do well in my class, even if that student decides to skip half my lectures?

Ideally, yes. Practically, no.
Three people are responsible for a students’ learning: the student, the teacher, and the teaching institution. Without a institution that supports progressive approaches to teaching and learning, it’s impossible to truly tailor your student-teacher interaction times for individual students’ needs.
If I were a university academic (I am not, I am a secondary mathematics teacher), I imagine it would be wonderful if I could post amazing notes and videos publicly online. If others were doing the same, I wouldn’t even have to produce all the necessary resources myself. Then I could use lecture time as an open communication forum – probably using some kind of technology for students to submit talk items to an agenda. This is probably a bit too progressive (or prematurely progressive) for most tertiary institutions today.
P.S. I very much appreciate your approach to PPT!

Personally I think there are arguments on both sides of this, and the controlling factor may be priorities/policies at your institution.
I would say your first priority is to give good lectures. It sounds like you are already doing that.
If you still have time, creating extra resources may be important for students who have good reasons for not being able to attend lectures (personally I don't consider being too busy to be a good reason, but I've found that more students than I would have expected have health problems, family emergencies, or similar), and also students with disabilities. To a greater or lesser degree you do have some responsibility for helping those students. If those resources also help students who can't be bothered, then that's the way it is.
However, making things too easy for students can actually be harmful. Students will need to learn to behave responsibly if they're going to get on well in the real world, and university is a good time to do so. Also, without digging up references now, there is research, in maths at least, showing that explaining things too well can result in less effective learning, presumably because there's no need to do the fighting with the material that builds a proper understanding of the underlying ideas.
What I've read suggests the best thing is to provide resources (within your time constraints), but to also make it clear to the students what the purpose of each resource is (and what it isn't). For example, in your shoes I would plan to tell the students right from the start that the lecture slides are not intended to act as a study guide for exams. The chances are they will still complain about it, but you can point to where you told them (write it down somewhere in the notes/syllabus). But you should also tell them what you do expect them to use as a study guide.

RE: creating extra resources may be important for students who have good reasons for not being able to attend lectures - I agree with what you're saying in theory, but I've found that, more often than not, students who habitually skip lectures tend to strike me as lackadaisical students with flippant attitudes, not the ones with disabilities or family hardships. More than once I've thought, "This student has lulled themselves into a mindset where they think they can coast by, skim over some slides at the last minute, and glean enough knowledge to get by."

@J.R. I quite agree. My point is that there will be a small number of students who do have good reasons for needing the additional resources, and they deserve them. Having created resources for those who need them, it's hard to justify not also providing those same resources to the students who don't deserve it, even though it is potentially frustrating for the lecturer and detrimental to the students' learning.

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Is the ability to follow online presentations now a must-have academic skill?
I was never a big fan of live online (research and technical) presentations, lectures or seminars. I'd use pre-recorded online materials when looking into a topic myself, but I was never able to immerse myself to a live online lecture anywhere close to the level of an live in-person lecture.
And this was never a problem. One course during my graduate programme became online-only last minute as the Lecturer decided to go for an academic visit to a different University. I dropped it (wasn't my top choice anyway) and replaced it with something else. On conferences, it was very rare, and every time a talk was delivered online, I could usually find an almost word-by-word pre-recorded version somewhere, and just go through it at my own pace and time.
For the above reasons, I never really considered "following online presentations" as a crucial skill in my academic career. (And my progress reflected that.) I think I can passably give a presentation online myself, but I lose my concentration way faster trying to follow an online presentation than an in-person one. I can identify several reasons for why I find this to be difficult for me:

I can not put my computer away as I'm using it to watch the presentation.

There's no "setting change" between my "work space" and the space where I listen to a talk.

Even with the most comfortable and quality headphones, prolonged listening to presenters (people talking rather than music) on headphones gives me at least a mild headache.

I'm already self-conscious about asking questions, and I don't think I can get them across half as well in writing: they either sound clunky or unclear to me, so I'll avoid asking questions.

And then, enter the global pandemic. Everything shifted online for over a year now, with some very mixed reactions from the community. Some think that online and hybrid approachers "work well".
But they really really don't, for me. Up until this point, my attitude was grin and bear it while we have no other choice, and then jump right back into the real, in-person thing when we can (maybe, jump really slowly and carefully at first, through small local events etc...). I think that it was the best possible stop-gap solution, but that it lacks the most valuable part of in-person meetings, which is the unstructured mingling before and after the talks. But more and more people are lauding the great success of hybrid events. So the title question: is the ability to follow online presentations now an essential skill in academia?
While I list the reasons I would find this difficult, I did many difficult things in my life already, especially when I set my mind to it. Note that I'm not looking for advice on how to concentrate during online events -- advice on that has proliferated since the start of the pandemic. I'm not asking if it's "just" useful either -- the ability to do long sums in your head can sure be useful if you're working in maths, but probably not crucial. To avoid sounding like I'm asking for an opinion, I am interested in whether there's any evidence that progress in one's academic career might be severely impacted or impossible without this ability in the post-pandemic research landscape..

"I am interested in whether there's any evidence that progress in one's academic career might be severely impacted or impossible without this ability in the post-pandemic research landscape."
At the moment you may find empirical evidences ---> https://xkcd.com/1827/
I had a quite succesful academic career (I left after a couple of year of professorship, for personal life choice and I moved to industry) but I stopped attending lessons, just studying on books&co. starting in my 2nd year of uni. I attended seminars, yes, but not anymore courses'lessons.

Do you have the ability to record them? Download a saved version? It is probably too early to make predictions about your main question, but I'd guess there are alternatives that can be made to work. I'd also guess that "severely" is too strong.

I'd guess that the inability to ask questions is more of a career killer than this, to be honest.

Yes, there are alternatives, and they work as stop-gap measures and while online talks are treated as stop-gap measures. The inability to ask questions (on the spot) has never been a big problem: there'd always be a coffee break, or a social, or a whatever, and I'd be able to get a discussion in. And asking questions after a live talk somehow seems easier: a written word is much harder to change, and it's certainly much easier to correct yourself (and have a "mini-discussion" almost) when there isn't 2 other people facilitating that a question at a hybrid or online talk reaches the presenter.

I'm with an engineering program, and our corporate stakeholders are asking us to make sure that are students are capable of interacting and collaborating in ANY environment.
It's a brave new world.  Though face-to-face interactions are very nice, we now see that they can be an impediment to communication.  My own opinion is that we've been forced into a new way of doing things, some of these ways will stick.
I won't go so far as to say to ability to follow online presentations is an essential skill, but getting information from any source you need to in order to enable your work is.

There are a lot of skills that contribute to a career, but those skills aren't binary - you have it or you don't. Instead people exhibit various levels of ability with any given skill. To list a few: writing, listening, speaking, collaboration, explaining.
One problem we have now with the pandemic is that there has been a vast change in how things are done, and, frankly, not everyone has the skill to do them well yet. Hopefully we will learn to do better in the future, but long, uninterrupted videos that can only be experienced in real time are a problem. Short videos are much better; no more than 15 minutes. Feedback and questions possible. For courses, a way to give assignments and give feedback on answers.
But, for a skill that is now needed you can start to obtain it by just trying. In the situation you mention, trying to get a stable copy (downloaded, perhaps, or recorded) so that you can listen in smaller chunks and watch important parts more than once. Take a lot of notes, especially noting questions (and the place in the recording where the question occurs. Creating a feedback to the speaker if none is offered.
Skill comes from practice, just like swimming. No one swims well when they first jump in the pool (worse, the ocean).
People with disabilities of various kinds can become successful, but they usually need to make accommodations to standard practice and seek the help of others to accomplish it. It can be difficult, but not impossible.
And, for the actual question, it is too early to make judgements about how disruptive current practice will be for careers going forward. But, I'll predict that the worse it is the more pressure there will be to fix the problems. And improve any skill that might be useful.
In NYC, people sometimes get asked "How do I get to Carnegie Hall"? The answer is, of course, "Practice. Practice. Practice."

I get that skills come with practice. As I wrote -- I find this difficult, but I've done many difficult things in the past when I've set my mind to it. However, I find that with transitioning to a new role (permanent academic position), there is a large number of skills I now have to learn, and I only have a finite amount of time and capacity. I don't necessarily have time to learn even all the skills I find useful, so it's always a "pick and chose" situation. So while I'm not denying this would be a useful skill, I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the effort and really needed.

Yes and yes. It is worth the effort. It is really needed. But you don't need to be an expert practitioner to get started. Evaluate you trials and correct as needed. Avoiding learning some skill is no path to success.

And trying to learn every skill is a path to burnout. The skills you list above (reading, writing, collaboration, explaining...) are crucial: you need to be able to do them to a certain minimum standard at least. You might be better at some then others, and work to improve your weaknesses. Not being able to follow online presentations never before seemed like a weakness - it occurred so rarely that just "not doing it" had an almost negligible effect. I guess you're saying that it's now here to stay.

You aren't fixed in carbonite. If you don't need the skill don't put much effort in to it. If you find it more important as time goes on, put in more. If you don't prepare for the future, it is likely to leave you behind.  I know extremely introverted academics who have taught themselves over time to be brilliant public speakers. Your future is "what you do", as much as "what you are".  Learn to cope with the world you face, not the one you would like.

I'm just trying to figure out whether we're facing a world where online/hybrid formats are becoming the norm, or a temporary situation with a tendency to revert back to largely in-person presentations when it seems possible again. But then again, I guess I'm not the only one having difficulties trying to understand what is "the world we are facing" right now.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst. But improving current practice should be a goal for every academic. We didn't choose to undergo this disruption. And is unlikely that a few years in the future will be "just like" a few years in the past. At best there is likely to be overhang. Learn to adapt to changing conditions (or go extinct).

@penelope you are asking us to predict the future. Divination is a discipline in Hogwarts, but not in any university I know. So there is no definite answer (unless you wait till the future has become the past). However, one consideration could be that "the time after the pandemic" may never happen if the group of people who refuse to get vaccinated remains as large as it is now.

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How to assess the proportion of post docs in a lab that go on to become PIs?
Is there any good resource to figure out the track record of academic success of research lab’s alumni (e.g. how many of postdocs became a PI)?
I'm a grad student in the US who will finish PhD next spring, and I've just started to find a postdoc position. I realized it's crucial to find an postdoc advisor who has a good track record of alumni's getting job in academia, since I want to be a PI in the future.
It looks like many famous labs with big papers actually have too many postdocs and grad students so that not many of them have successful career. Productivity per person is diluted too much in those labs. I also doubt one's publication record is the only factor for success in getting a PI position as far as I hear from people around me. (Of course, I know that if you have a big paper in a big lab, that is the best way to get a position)
I am open to go to any country for work if the working environment is good. My field is biophysics with some flavor of materials science.

To my knowledge, there isn't a centralized resource which ranks PIs according postdoc success. Many PIs list lab alumni on their sites and what they are doing now. I suspect you'll just have to just go one-by-one and determine whether a given lab's postdocs have been successful based on looking each of them up.

I'd upvoted this question earlier, since I'm also looking forward to an answer, i.e. would like to know if there is any such database/search site for other branches as well. I mean, this is possible to some extent in High-Energy Physics, using SPIRES/INSPIRE, but obviously that doesn't cover biophysics. I hope this question doesn't go unanswered. :)

One approach is to simply ask the potential post doc supervisors. That said, if I received a random email from someone asking how many of my post docs have gone on to get academic positions, I would probably ignore it. If however, that email came from someone I had previously talked to about doing a post doc with me, I would be happy to tell them about my past post docs and where they went. You should then talk to former members of the lab and see if the PI's view of the world matches their views. While a single descriptive statistic like percentage of students who went on to get academic positions might seem like it is easier to interpret, it likely only provides a portion of the story.

This is not an answer to your question, so feel free to downvote me.  But I'm going to answer the question you should have asked rather than the one you did ask.  The implicit question here is

Should I use a lab's track record of getting academic positions for its postdocs as a surrogate for what my own chances will be (if I take a postdoc in that lab)?

In other words, the implied assumption is that if 50% of the postdocs from a given lab go on to get faculty positions, and if you go to that lab, then you will have a 50% chance of getting a faculty position.  I believe this is poor statistical reasoning:

Averages are not very useful in predicting the outcome of a single realization.
Some postdocs may not desire an academic position.  Therefore, their failure to get one has no bearing on what you are trying to assess -- but it will skew the measure you are using.
Labs may not have had enough postdocs to provide a statistically significant sample.  For every PI, there was a first postdoc who got an academic position.  Unless she was the first postdoc that PI ever had, she went in with 0% odds by your measure.

In deciding where to go, I think talking to the PI and to current and former postdocs will be much more useful to you than computing this statistic.

Perhaps you should ask that question in a new post, then answer it there instead. I, for one, disagree with the assumption that the OP must be using the lab's track record uncritically as a surrogate for his own probability of landing a PI position.

I'm responding to the OP's statement "I realized it's crucial to find an postdoc advisor who has a good track record of alumni's getting job in academia, since I want to be a PI in the future."

I don't think that necessarily implies he's only using that statistic, or that he wouldn't realize that statistic is not meaningful in many cases. I think a question asking how one should/shouldn't use such a statistic would be a good question, and a better home for this answer.

Regarding point 3: If that post-doc was the PIs first post-doc ever, the odds would have been undefined.

@silvado Good point! I've corrected my answer.

I have a suggestion regarding the assessment (the actual question), not saying if this is a good or bad idea, along the lines of what was done here.
Write some code that:

From a certain paper database, say, pubmed - gets all the papers in which your prospective PI is the last author. This is a pretty good estimate of all the papers from his lab (he might have joint work with other PIs in which he's not last, but let's ignore these).
Gets all first-third authors as prospective graduate students from his lab. We can't really tell (automatically) if they were postdocs, and let's assume that papers in which you weren't on the first three authors don't mean much to your chances of becoming a PI. You also want to limit those papers to be a few years old (so we can assume that they finished their time in said lab).
Look for papers in which those prospective graduate students are last authors. This suggests that they've become PIs.

Now you can get an estimate of the number of PIs out of number of students that published papers for each lab.
There are APIs to pubmed in many programming languages, and the researchers from the first link I posted have their code in github

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What can cause a delay of several weeks between an editor receiving reviews and you receiving a response from the editor?
I had submitted research paper to a journal two and half months ago. It was under review for two months and now the status is showing that the paper is with editor from last ten days. If the paper has got reviewed why I am not getting any response from the editor.

related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16624/10643

possible duplicate of Paper with editor for longer than two and a half months

@JukkaSuomela I think that the "Paper with editor" question you mention is distinct given that in that question there are no explicit signs that the editor has sent the paper out to review.

@JeromyAnglim: In essence, it is still the same question: "the journal submission system shows that the status of my paper is X and it has been like this for Y days, what should I do". The answer is always the same: stop worrying, ignore the information in the journal submission system, just wait for the response from the editor.

There are a number of possibilities. Off the top of my head:

The editor is traveling or otherwise occupied. In my experience, this is particularly likely if you are dealing with a journal that employs professional editors rather than relying upon academic editors.
The reviews are mixed and the editor has decided to careful assess the manuscript himself or herself--which may take as long as writing a review would take.
The reviews are mixed and the editor has decided to seek additional reviews, but this is not yet reflected in the manuscript management system.
The editor wishes to speak in person to one of the referees to clarify something that the referee wrote, but has not yet been able to reach the referee.

You could go on and on and imagine any number of other possible scenarios. I agree it is not optimal for this to happen, but nor is it unusual. As an editor, I try very hard to return a decision within 2 or 3 days of receiving all reviews, but as an author I have found that waits of a week or two are not unusual.

First, editors take decisions seriously and will not rush decisions unnecessarily, however, neither does anyone want unnecessary delays, long turnover times is not good for the journal in that authors find the venue less attractive for publishing. In "my" journal we have set a three week period to make decisions based on the reviews. This period is by no means a law but it appears reasonable and to some extent normal based on experiences from other journals. So 10 days is, from this perspective, not something worrisome.
What has to be remembered is that many, I would say most, editors perform their duties outside of regular academic jobs. They handle more manuscripts than yours at the same time and which are at various stages of the review process.
So, about three weeks seems like a reasonable limit after which one can consider checking up on the status. That decisions can take longer is not uncommon for a variety of reasons but to some extent, no new is usually good news since rejections are usually easier to decide than providing recommendations for revisions.

I only want to amplify on the answer by Corvus, based on my own experience as editor. First, editors usually have other full-time jobs as teachers and researchers. In my field, there are no editors who are employees of publishing companies rather than academicians. Other overwhelming demands are the main cause of lag between receipt of review and making a decision. Second, an editor ought to be more than a mechanical bean-counter who plugs 3-value accept-meh-reject reviews into a formula, and it can quite some time to absorb the intellectual content of a submission and 2-5 reviews, and then frame the decision in a way that is optimal for the journal (specifically, be encouraging if there is promise in the paper). Third, while this is rare, sometimes the existing reviews are patently inadequate, i.e. every reviewer missed a flaw that the editor saw.


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How to split two papers that Google Scholar incorrectly thinks are the same paper?
For some reason I don't understand, Google Scholar thinks two of my papers are the same, despite different titles, co-authors, and publication years. When I click on one ("Resonant absorption as mode conversion?") it lists 27 versions, most of which are the completely different paper ("Three Dimensional MHD Wave Propagation and Conversion to Alfvén Waves near the Solar Surface. I"). It therefore combines the citations for the two. How can I split them? I even tried deleting both papers and adding them manually from scratch, but without success.

Why don't you contact google scholar directly?

@Memming: Because no identifiable human beings work at Google?  Could that be why?

Has anyone tried to delete articles from Google Scholar and add them again - as suggested above ? - What about the titles - in my friend's case these are identical but all the other details are different. Moreover, the 2017 paper is a review in a monograph/book and the 2014 paper is a standard journal paper. Unfortunately, both have been published - someone has asked about it.
The review paper (2017) has no citations yet, but the research/journal paper (2014) has already got 5 citations. On the Google Scholar list the papers are listed one after the other with the same number of citations but

This does not really answer the question. If you have a different question, you can ask it by clicking Ask Question. You can also add a bounty to draw more attention to this question once you have enough reputation. - From Review

If you have a new question, please ask it by clicking the Ask Question button. Include a link to this question if it helps provide context. - From Review

By now, there is an option when editing the merged GoogleScholar article's version as shown in the example below. Ensure you are logged in as the article's author.

Open the "edit your article" e.g., via clicking on the asterisk right to the number of citations in the list of your articles. Alternatively, open your article's page on GoogleScholar, where you press the edit button.

The option is called "Unmerge this article and add it to my profile as a separate entry."

Usually, there is a star on the right hand side of a merged article. If there is not, just add a new entry.

At least when I tried unmerging, I could not correctly separate the "versions" that were a different paper, nor do I think this effected anything but a temporary change, and possibly that only in my personal profile.  Have you had better luck with unmerging?

@Kimball: With this I have no experience but if others did, please tell...

@Kimball did you manage to fix this? I'm facing the same problem

@Khaledvic unfortunately, no

I don't see thin unmerging option in my case, unfortunately.

@QuestionEverything I hope my latest change helps you find the edit window.

You can report the error at the following link:
https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general

FYI I reported a similar issue some time ago, which was never addressed.  But perhaps if enough people start reporting these, then they'll start fixing them...

This link no longer works.

"unmerge" in GoogleScholar is not possible.
SOLUTION: delete the [merged articles] noted with *, then add them separately ;-)
it worked for me..
Good luck!!

You are aware that the question is three years old and states: I even tried deleting both papers and adding them manually from scratch, but without success.

@skymnigen The former is not an issue; in fact, this website encourages users to address old questions with improved answers. The latter is the dealbreaker here, indeed.


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Pros and cons of including mathematical equations in presentation slides
As a researcher in CS, I give often presentations, where I always ask about the feedback from my colleagues. I personally don't like to put equations in my slides because I believe that nobody will have enough time to read the understand the equation (especially because in CS the equation is a tool to solve the problem and not the heart of the topic). Instead, I enrich the slides with intuitive figures and demonstrations. I've heard some professors encouraging the same approach, but in my current group, my professor and my colleagues believe that equations illustrate the complexity of the method and we should put them.
I don't think this is a question of preference, therefore, I would like to have more opinions about putting or not putting equations in presentation slides and why.

Your professor and colleagues seem to think that complexity of the method is something to be proud of. I would call that a debatable standpoint at the very least.

What a strange question, and one that reinforces my experience that CS is different in not-so-subtle ways from other hard sciences and engineering. I assume your equations convey something relevant / important in a concise fashion? If yes, include them. If no, omit them. Also, the suggestion that you include equations just to make your work look deep / complex to your audience is a terrible one.

You are starting from the wrong point if you are asking the question of whether to use formulas in isolation.
When you write a presentation, a paper, a proposal, an expose, or anything else, here are two questions you should ask yourself:

Who is my audience? What is their prior knowledge? Why are they there and what are their motivations for attending/reading? What do they want to take away from you provide them with?
What is my own motivation? Do I want to teach them something new? Do I want to illustrate how smart I am? Do I want to give an overview of a field that everyone in the audience should understand, or do I want to impress a few key people?

If you have answers to these questions, then (and only then) should you start writing. You will find that, maybe unsurprisingly, the question of whether to use formulas will have different answers depending on your audience and what you want to achieve. If you are giving a job talk and you want to provide depth to your talk, then formulas are probably a fine approach. If you are giving a department colloquium that should have broad appeal to grad students and professors alike, then maybe using words instead of formulas is the better approach.
The point is: It all depends -- on the audience and what you want to achieve.

Some more possible motivations: Do I want to illustrate how interesting my result is? Do I want to make them read the full paper?

Ultimately, it boils down to a question why people do presentations. In your text I see two reasons:

presentation is the way to explain your research and results to others;
presentation is the way to show other how complex is your research and how difficult was it to obtain and understand the results.

People who are mostly inspired by the latter tend to show how much they know about the subject.
People who have mostly the first motivation think about how much their audience will learn about the subject.
I personally believe that the success of the presentation (or a class) is measured not by how much you told, but how much the audience received from you. So I side with your approach — keep long formulas to papers and only use short equations and a lot of visuals in your slides.

I teach in a mathematical field (statistics) and I always encourage my students to minimise equations in their presentations, and never present equations that they are not going to go through and explain clearly to the audience.  Sometimes basic equations showing your model form are useful, but sometimes you can give an explanation without the aid of mathematics.  In any case, you should only show equations if they assist the audience in understanding your work, and if you are willing to take time in your presentation to go through each equation and explain it.
Including mathematical equations in a presentation solely to "show the complexity of the research" (i.e., show off) is academic masturbation.  It bamboozles the audience for the purpose of aggrandising the speaker.  Don't do it --- push back on their suggestion to the contrary.

Should that be "never present equations that they aren't going to..."?

@Anyon: Nicely spotted -edited.

I find that in addition to other concerns, the time spent per slide is a significant factor. For example, some people zip through a slide every minute or two: obviously that's two fast for anyone to digest a complicated equation. On the other end of the spectrum, conceivably one could give a presentation with one fixed slide showing for the entire talk, and this would be a fine strategy for highlighting one particular equation which is the focus.
Using slides in my lecture courses, the ideal situation is to have a theorem/equation on a slide and then also some exercises, so that everyone is viewing/reflecting on it for an extended time. In college algebra and below, I use just a single slide every 30 minutes, and that works out fine. That's not exactly your use case, but it highlights my point: the more time you're willing to spend on a particular slide, the more reasonable it is to be considering an equation on it.

I struggle with this question myself. This is not a philosophical answer, but two practical tips that might be of use for making presentations in LaTeX:

It is quite easy to make buttons that link to another slide (for Beamer, see end of this page; I believe also possible in PowerPoint). So, you can make high-level slides and add a button called "details" that links to an equation slide. That way, if someone wants the technical background, it is easy to reference and pull up. I think this is a way to show you are prepared for detailed questions without having to cover all the math.
When I do include equations, I like to use \underbrace and \overbrace to write in words what the different parts of the equation mean like so. This could make it easier to follow, particularly if people get confused by the notation.


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How to balance project tasks with finishing old work and how many publications should one have as an early career PostDoc?
I recently finished my dissertation, and now have a PostDoc position in a relatively large project for the next two years, with good chances of being extended into the next phase. The position is fairly technical (simulation method development), and I am trying to find time "on the side" to finish publishing the studies that went into my dissertation, in order to demonstrate that I wish to remain in active research, rather than just model development.
I was curious if I could gain some advice or insight on the following problems:

How can I balance new project tasks with finishing old work?
How many papers would be considered "normal" shortly after finishing a PhD?

I'm aware that this question is likely to be difficult to generalize, as publication count and time are very field-specific (I work as a climate modeller), but I'd nevertheless welcome some hints.


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What are some strategies to deal with perfectionism?
In my writing, teaching and research, I always do much more than I should. I produce excellent work, but it's always late because I seem to be incapable of scaling back my (unrealistically high) expectations due to time constraints. I am exhausted and demoralized. I know this isn't group therapy, but has anyone had success with concrete strategies to delimit themselves when a "good enough" job really is good enough? (ADHD + perfectionism is a bad combination.)

I just edited the title to actually ask the question that you are asking in the body. If you disagree, then please change it back!

Get counselling. Really.
There is no shame in that, and you don't need to have full-blown burnout to get support from a therapist.
Aside from that, what has worked for me is to schedule private things I like to do (including simple and "obvious" things, such as spending time with my family, watching TV, playing video games, etc.) in exactly the same manner as work tasks. At the very least this makes it explicit that you are actually making a trade-off when you burn the midnight candle at work. Keep in mind that, hopefully, other non-work things are important to you as well, so if you decide to burn 20 more hours on a paper that's basically done you are effectively trading off one thing you want to do for another. If you look at it this way it basically becomes an optimization problem - do I really want to proof-read this paper three more times to make sure that there are no typos in it, or do I rather want to spend this time on something else that is also important to me?
A second thing I do is rigorous time keeping and time budgeting. I actually learned this during the teacher's seminar that our university mandates for all tenure-track faculty, but it's actually applicable to all aspects of academic work. Basically, one can always invest an infinite amount of time into every activity, so it is important to assign a budget of how much time one practically has for a specific activity (say "I can only spend 6 hours to prepare a single lecture"), and then do the best that is possible in that time. This may mean that you can't make the fancy flipped classroom work that you had in mind, or it may mean that this really interesting data analysis will need to wait for the next paper, but time is finite and ultimately a great paper that is never submitted is worse than a good paper that is.
But, again - if you feel like you can't bring yourself to make these trade-offs on your own, get professional help before you burn out completely and/or drop out of academia.

Great answer, but I think sometimes family (or friends) can help more.

@BalazsToth Yes, with reservations. I think for people who are just feeling a "normal" amount of stress family support works well, but if you start to cross over into clinical mental health issues (which may or may not be true for OP, obviously) you really, really need professional support, not the advise of family (or random strangers on the Internet). "Common sense advise" is really dangerous when dealing with clinical levels of stress.

Speaking as an undergrad that likes to 'perfect' all these long projects assigned to me... I have gotten to the point where I no longer laser-in one one item and get it perfectly done, then move to the next. Rather. I find it more beneficial to simply get a (in my mind) "rough draft" of anything I need to turn in, then when all is done, I go back and perfect it until out of time. This way, I can somewhat satisfy perfectionist tendancies, and not be caught without a submission by the deadline, should perfecting take a long time.
It does take some adjusting, to force yourself to work differently, but I recommend it.

So, in other words, get everything done at the same time, with increments of quality across the board at the same time instead of sequentially.

Something like that. Getting all items done and then tweaking to your liking seems most beneficial to me.

A few tips:
Wait until the afternoon or evening before class (or even morning right before class) to prepare a class. Can be a bit risky because of ninja meetings being sprung on you. But if the time constraint forces you to  just G.I.D. without putting in the effort you really wanted to, that's a success.
Intentionally set out to write "ok" papers that only cover the unpublished results you are sure about and perhaps bored of by now (not necessarily the super-awesome-but-not-quite-completely-clear new result that you are on the edge of having ready). Revise the paper to improve it with the hot new stuff if you can, but do not completely iterate from one set of results to the next, that's the next paper. Also the usual advice: write according to a writing schedule and into an outline. The process must be a job, completely devoid of any reliance on inspiration or enthusiasm.
If you are spending too much time reading, stop trying to learn new things from the readings and just focus on understanding what's been done and why. If you aren't spending much time reading, read more papers. It helps you keep on top of the line for what's good enough to publish despite obvious shortcomings.
I left out research because it's probably too variable between fields and to be honest it's what make the job fun for me, so I try keep as much fun there as possible (as opposed to making it just a job too)

Perfectionism is really something that a mental health counselor, therapist or psychiatrist should be helping with. That said, some things that I've found to be useful based on my own experience and that of others:

Deliberately set a goal to complete a task in a flawed way. You have to exercise judgement to make sure you actually perform it to an adequate level, but if you have a problem with perfectionism, most likely you are aiming for much more than is expected. Take a moment to identify the least you can get away with doing, and then try to do not only no less than that, but also no more. As soon as you notice yourself "polishing up" something that is pretty much done, force yourself to stop and call it a day.
Set deadlines for yourself and follow them. To be fair, I haven't had much success with this - I just don't have the discipline to follow my own deadlines. But setting and attempting to respect limits in terms of calendar time as well as actual work time can help, especially if you are cognizant of the time limit throughout the task (as opposed to just when it's about to run out) and plan accordingly. It also gives you space to come to terms with the fact that you don't have enough time to do a perfect job.
Set out to fail. I've heard others get good results from setting a personal goal like "fail one time everyday". This will help you get used to the idea of occasionally not succeeding, and hopefully reduce anxiety over the fear of doing an imperfect job.

In my experience, the whole process of dealing with your perfectionism is a bit like training a muscle. You will never truly "cure it", but there are certain techniques that you can apply over and over, and gradually teach yourself effective skills to mitigate it.


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How to enter graduate school in a social science discipline from a computer science background?
I am a senior computer science major at a state school in the US. I have done internships at "Big 4" companies in my field as well as CS research with NSF grants.
I am interested in getting a Master's degree in a social science (history, English, or something related) but am not sure how I could get a school to look at my application. They are looking for students who have extensive experience and internships in related fields, which I don't have.
For what it's worth, I write very well and read copiously in my free time. My standardized test scores bear this out; when I took the SAT in high school, I got perfect scores on the reading and writing sections. Professors have also been very impressed with my analyses in humanities classes, though I haven't taken very many of them.
I understand that it probably wouldn't be so hard to get into a state school, but it would be nice to be accepted to a top 10 or so university. Is there a good way to get these schools to consider my application?

"State school" and "top 10" are not distinct categories and probably have a large overlap.  (e.g. in my field Berkeley, Michigan, and UCLA are certainly top 10.)

Social science or humanities? Many social science disciplines would be great places to leverage a more analytical background. For the humanities it might be more of a stretch.

If you are interested in applying your CS background to social science, or even humanities, you will find many programs consider this a plus because there is a direct connection and they often take students with such a background. If you want to leave all the computing behind, its a tougher sell as you end up being unable to claim any specific background, only a general education. Still doable - especially if you are willing and able to shell out tuition for the masters degree - its just tougher to be seen as a good fit.

@BrianH What are ways that computing can be applied to history or English?

That's actually a hot area currently - topic analysis and natural language processing methods for linguistic analysis especially is finding a use in both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_history has a few useful references. Most Information departments are full of people using computational methods for social science, or using social science/humanities methods applied to technology (ethnography applied to social media is big, for example). Deep Learning applied to gender studies in film, computational linguistic analysis of newspaper headlines, big data + linguistics, etc.

As far as humanities go, the history of science would readily accept your background

You should google "digital humanities". It's a hot topic.


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Affiliation when I have already resigned and am currently unemployed
What should I use as author address for my paper when I have already resigned from my job and am currently unemployed? Also, my previous supervisor and I did not part in good terms, so I am hesitant to use my previous employer as address.

I would still use the affiliation of the institution which paid you during the time you worked on this paper. If however, the majority of the work was done after you resigned, I see no problem in using "Independent Researcher" or "Freelance".
I faced this problem when switching institutions. Typically papers published during the transition were written by the old institution and paid for by the new. I use the new affiliation as my first and include the old as the second affiliation.

I've also seen footnotes on the affiliation reading "Portions of this work were undertaken at < different institute >" if you want to acknowledge the place without claiming the affiliation currently.

Thank you for your help. It was very useful. I think I have an idea now on how to address this.


text:
Underscore in place of author in references
I have recently seen author’s names being replaced with underscores in the references of two different works. For instance in Andrew Wiles’ Modular elliptic curves and Fermat’s last theorem:

In this case Ralph Greenberg is the author of On the structure of certain Galois groups. Why has his name been omitted?

This is a fairly common style, especially for longer bibliographies in math survey papers/books or in math historical papers/books, and probably also for for other fields as well. I have no idea how common the style is percentage-wise, but it's certainly common enough that I hardly notice it when I see it.

Some citation styles allow you to use a long dash in place of an author name if the work you're citing has the same author as the preceding one. It's stylistic choice.

Wow, that's not confusing at all! ... :-(

@einpoklum when the references are done with hanging indents, it actually is really nice.  In my field, we frequently will cite several works from a single author, and it's visually very clear from the get go that all the works are from the same author.

This is the standard for MLA format, used by most of the humanities in the US (and virtually all US high schools, too), so most folks who attend school in the US, secondary or post-secondary, will probably run across it at some point (though it's easy to overlook).

@einpoklum It's quite common to write ditto marks as --------- " -----------, with the length of the dashes indicating the extent of the repeated text, rather than putting a ditto mark under each word.

That is a really weird style... my immediate impression was that the author is unknown... (that's how it looks to me anyway). Yes, I have never seen something like this used anywhere. - Then again, I find the habit or shortening journal names to unintelligible gibberish equally bad... (Especially given that modern journals aren't by default printed on paper any more...)

@DetlevCM: In this particular case I think the use of [E1], [E2] and [Gre1], [Gre2] pretty much eliminates the "author is unknown" possibility. Even when using something like [7], [8] and [12], [13], I would think the alphabetization would be strongly suggestive. In any event, when the author is not known this is usually indicated as such in some way (and almost always this only comes up, at least in math, in an occasional really old publication---such as 1800s---or in uncredited book reviews).

To the people that are confused and have not seen it before: I suspect it is way more common in fields that have many single author publications. With multiple authors it would be confusing (is only the first author the same, or all?) as rarely the full list of authors will be exactly the same.

@DavidRicherby: That I actually know. But the quotation marks give away that something is being quoted. The line seems like there's something missing. Anyway, my comment was half tongue-in-cheeck.

There is a good example of what this looks like in MLA on Purdue OWL's site (scroll down to see the second entry by Nordhaus). And here is an example bibliography in Chicago Style, also from Purdue OWL. I find this perfectly easy to read; of course, like many style conventions you need to know what it means (the first time you saw something like 107(3) in a citation you probably didn't know what that meant, either).


text:
Emailing professor for help with (non class related) project
I am involved in an extracurricular university-affiliated activity for which I want to do an analysis involving computational fluid dynamics (CFD). There is a professor at my university who has much experience in this area and I would like to reach out to them to ask for suggestions on learning more about using CFD, and hopefully discuss it with them to get feedback on this particular project. I would also like to get involved in this professor’s research, however, this project would be a priority for me, so I would like to express that I would like help on this particular project as well as my interest in research.
I know the basic pointers for reaching out to a professor about research, but how can I express both of my requests at once? Would it be more effective to only request some guidance on the project? Would it come across rude asking for guidance as well as ask to get involved in their research?

Visit in office hours or make an appointment.  Describe your project and broach your desire for guidance when you meet.

Some of my most fulfilling work with students came from those who were not in my classes.  One of my teachers' treasures is a note that came with a small gift: "Thank you for helping me when I was not in your classes... when I need help the most."

I want to do an analysis involving computational fluid dynamics (CFD)...and I would like to reach out to [a professor] to ask for suggestions on learning more about using CFD, and hopefully discuss it with them to get feedback on this particular project.

As mentioned already, "Visit in office hours or make an appointment." Once you have demonstrated your abilities to the professor, you'll be in a stronger position to:

get involved in this professor’s research

Although you won't express "both of [your] requests at once," you can present both of your requests in a short time frame. If this isn't an option, then start by discussing CFD and mention that you'd be interested in working with the professor at the end.

Would it be more effective to only request some guidance on the project?

If you ask for both at the same time, then the professor mightn't know your strengths. Whereas, asking later lets you demonstrate yourself first.

Would it come across rude asking for guidance as well as ask to get involved in their research?

It isn't rude. You can ask for guidance and the professor can say "no." You can offer to be involved in their research and they can again say "no."