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What happens to the reviews that people write for journal articles after they're sent back to the author?
Are they almost always kept confidential? Or is there protocol for sharing them?

I'm curious about your intent... why would there be a protocol for sharing reviews about a paper you publish? Why would you care about someone's comments on a paper I wrote that hasn't been published yet?

What about reviews post-publication? I'm actually learning how to write reviews myself, so I'm curious. Plus, it's always interesting how reviews shape the direction of a paper.

@InquilineKea possibly duplicate discussion here

@CharlesMorisset: how i knew that i would screw up my first flag :)

I can imagine one context in which it would be extremely useful to share them: rejected and resubmitted papers. As an editor, if I get a second-hand submission, I'd want to know why it was sacked the first time, who did the review, and what the authors did in reply. As far as I know, currently there is no practical nor moral obligation to even inform an editor that it is a resubmission.

In my experience, the contents of the comments of other referee reports are only made indirectly available. Since the authors are normally expected to provide a response to the reviews, the relevant criticisms and comments of the other referees are typically mentioned or discussed in that document. Outside of that, however, there's often little direct sharing of referee reports. None of the eight or nine journals for which I've reviewed (physics, chemistry, chemical engineering) have allowed me to see directly the reviews submitted by the other referees.
At any rate, the results are almost always kept confidential, unless it is an "open" referee process by design. (There are a few journals now that make the refereeing process a part of the publication record for a given paper; an example is The Cryosphere.)

Added a link, although I don't know of many such journals, either.

Some journals/conferences have explicit guidelines that tell you to treat the reviews confidential. I'm not aware of any journal that makes the reviews and authors' response publically available when a paper is published.
I think publishing reviews for your papers would in general be frowned upon, even if there's no explicit rule saying that you can't. That said, I've been wondering about that myself and we had discussions about it at our school because the quality of some reviews is very bad and making them public might help improve the quality of peer reviewing in the long term.
I personally try to write reviews in a way that I wouldn't object to them being published with my name on it (although all the reviews I've done so far have been anonymous).

Regarding low-quality referee reports, you might want to look at http://recursed.blogspot.com/2012/09/bad-referee-reports.html

There are a few journals I've encountered where the written reviews are published alongside the paper itself (the BMJ's new open access journal comes to mind). Other than that, generally I've only seen them sent to the other reviewers (usually because they're BCC'd on the decision/review email sent from the journal editor) or kept entirely confidential.
Probably the most common thing that happens? The authors complaining about idiot reviewers to their colleagues.

In some subset of journals they are openly available. Who was the reviewer and what he/she wrote
BioMedCentral medical journals are often like that.
See example here
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/12/147/prepub
you click on each article's publication history

In all journals I have encountered the reviews are kept by the journal through either an electronic submission/review system (digitally) or in paper copy (if they do not have such a system). In the electronic systems it is usually possible to view ones older reviews but not view other's.
The question whether these are confidential or not is far from clear in general. I would, however, venture to state that a review is treated as confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise, i.e. clearly stated to authors, editors and reviewers (remember that the review comments received may include overruling comments by the editor). Such is obviosuly the case with some journals with open discussion formats.
To some extent the confidentiality issue is new to me because in my field everyone pretty much assume reviews are. I have not heard of anyone trying to push for publicising a review (again, in my field). It would probably not go down well if it happened without consent from the parties concerned. It seems this is a sector that is largely unregulated other than in general terms and understanding.

It varies substantially by field and journal. (As I keep saying, this is true of pretty much every question on this board.) Often they are shared not just with the author but the other reviewers, too. The author can show them to whomever they like. Beyond that, there's no formal sharing mechanism, and no real demand for one.

I agree with Charles, and IMO varies substantially is a bit of a hyperbole in this context. Just because there are some differences between fields doesn't make generalizations between different fields possible. Especially in this circumstance there are really only two or three prevalent sharing rules across most disciplines it appears by the responses.

I acknowledge that here I was exaggerating and that some general frustrations (or more charitably, worries) that I have with this SE didn't really need to be expressed in this answer. Sorry about that. I do remain concerned, however, that a very large portion of the questions to this SE require answers that either are too general to be very useful, or are very specific with respect to particular fields, countries or other such context.

A recent question on meta brings up this exact topic, http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/q/72/3, perhaps you should elaborate on your concern there. It definitely is a point of contention on the site so far, and several posts in meta have discussed it and similar issues.


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Easy way to see historical trend in keywords in publications?
Is there an easy way or existing tool to generate a historical chart with the occurrence of one or more user-specified keyword(s) (combinations) in academic publications, based on the words in the title and/or abstract of a paper?
There is a almost-what-I-was-looking-for tool called Google Scholar Trend Miner, but it seems to be not working anymore, as it reports after hitting Go: "It seems that Google found out that we are a bot and started offering its CAPTCHA. Please, wait some hours and try again"

Not enough rep to answer; but I found Constellate which does just that

If you have access to it, you can very easily do that with Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science portal. Run any query you want, probably starting with the simplest one: Topic=XXXX. Then, select “Analyze results” at the top-right bottom-left of the results list, and sort them by year of publication:

Great. I couldn't find the "Analyze results" link immediately. Seems it only appears with the "Web of Science" tab selected and not for "All databases"

@Rabarberski some of the functionality is avaible only from the "Web of Science" tab, indeed… I've never really understood why.

I've written a small Python tool for this purpose. It scrapes Google scholar for each year in a given time span, extracts the occurrences and saves them to a CSV file. The tool is located at: https://github.com/Pold87/academic-keyword-occurrence

the scraper gives an error for too many requests. This error handling is missing. Also, it would be nice to have an option to search exact results by adding quotation marks string using, " /" ".

The error handling is implemented but Google simply only allows a certain number of requests. The option to search for exact results is also implemented (see the closed issues on GitHub for an example).

Edit: I though I would update this answer with a tool I recently discovered--trends.google.com
It's not specific to peer-reviewed publications, but allows one to search keywords by country, category (e.g., science), and web/image/news/.

Google's Ngram viewer is also useful. It's quick and easy for seeing trends as far back as the 1800's.

Is there a way to restrict n-gram viewer to academic publications?

@FedericoPoloni I don't believe there is; the only corpuses they offer are specific-language or "Fiction"

See Pold's answer below.

google trend is about what peoples search on google. This tools as nothings to do with publication.

Scholar Plotr doesn't work anymore due to rate limiting by Google. An alternative easy to use and free tool for anyone without academic licences is Dimensions AI:
app.dimensions.ai
It works with it's own publications database and shows a lot of statistics e.g. publications per year, citations per year.

I wouldn't say GooSchol only shows academic research.

according to themselves they do: "Google Scholar includes journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies and university repositories, as well as scholarly articles available anywhere across the web. Google Scholar also includes court opinions and patents." from google scholar

but of course something might slip in there, that isn't of a certain standard.

I just meant that not all academic books and scholarly literature counts under research.  For instance, some course notes I've written are indexed by Google Scholar.  While they're certainly academic, most of them are not research level.

Now they recommend https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication on the top of the their webpage, since their site doesn't work reliably any more.

You can have a look at the arXiv cultoromics website at http://arxiv.culturomics.org, which however searches in articles on the arXiv. Depending on your field of interest, this may or may not be good enough.

Web of Science is a great resource for a historical review or a trend analysis of a keyword or subject. Another resource is Scopus. To use Scopus to search for a review of a phrase, word, or keyword from a controlled vocabulary keyword such as MeSH or EMTREE, enter the phrase, word or keyword in the search box and select the appropriate search filter to the right of the search box. You can search by title, abstract, keyword, or any combination of the three. Results can be filtered by a number of options and also can be exported for further analysis. The caveat to  databases such as Web of Science or Scopus is to check the date range of the materials indexed.

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Should one include irrelevant background on CV after career change?
If one changes careers/subjects dramatically,  would it be necessary in the interest of full disclosure to include irrelevant aspects of the educational background and work-experience etc. ?
For instance if somebody has an undergraduate degree in politics and 2 years of experience in PR but then goes on to an academic career in theoretical CS (essentially starting from scratch i.e. including an undergraduate degree), would it be better/necessary to clutter the CV by mentioning that earlier background ?
I guess there must be a certain degree of flexibility, as people would not include say a part-time job in the cafeteria etc. pp. but I am not sure what the academic conventions are in different scenarios. ( I am thinking about this in the context of applications for conferences, funding, workshops, travel funds etc. pp. )

Are you applying for grad school or for a professorship position? I'm not familiar with resumes being requested in grad school applications, but I can't imagine that someone working in politics could successfully apply for an academic position in anything that far outside their expertise.

@eykanal I ve ammended the questions slightly to make it a bit less ambiguous. Thanks for the comment, it s made the ambiguity in the formulation clear !

You can skip minor or embarrassing work experiences, but be careful not to leave any holes in the timeline of your CV: if your bachelor degree ended in 2009 and your master started in 2011, readers of your CV will wonder what you did in between.

The context for what the CV is going to be used for is key. I have a single CV that includes "everything" since I started grad school and selected things from before then including seemingly unimportant part time jobs. Having a long CV makes it easier for me to create short CVs because it means I need to delete things instead of remember things.
For your intended context, I would not include the work experience, but might include the degree in politics. Including that degree will likely lead people looking at your CV to think you are older (which might be a pro or a con). If you are worried about age discrimination, I would drop it completely.

+1 for "it means I need to delete things instead of remember things"  On a related note, whenever I do anything that I plan to include on my CV (could be as small as referee a paper or give a talk), I try to add it to the CV on the very day I do it, or at least within the week.  This doesn't take much time, and it's so much easier to remember (and remember the exact details) just after I've done it.  That way any time I'm asked for a CV, I have one ready to go almost immediately.

Your intuition is correct; filler like that is very easily detected as filler. However, it does serve a useful purpose, in that it informs the person reading the CV what you've been doing for the past few years. If you do mention anything, I would just list the single most recent item. Any more than that would simply exaggerate the fact that you made a career shift, and doesn't provide any useful information.

If I understood you correctly, even for getting the side benefits (attending conference,travel funds) you need not include irrelevant information in your CV.
One need not clutter the CV with something that is far from the requirement  of the job. It does not matter how many things you did but rather how much of few things you did. These were my thoughts on your question.

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How appropriate is to make multiple submissions of research findings to same venue/conference?
Assuming the following scenario:
Person A is a recognized senior researcher, and Person B is an enthusiastic junior researcher. Both of them have been working more or less equally on a research project and are interested in  submit the results of the project to a particular venue. Based on the report written by Person B, Person A has written a paper (PA) to be submitted to the venue. Person B doesn’t like the style and some contents of PA, so he makes comments to Person A, who them modifies PA. Person B still doesn’t like PA, so writes a separate paper PB. Since PA and PB haven’t been published, there are citations between them.
At this point, Person A submits PA, which list authors as "Person A & Person B", and Person B submits PB, which list authors as "Person B & Person A."

Is it appropriate to submit PA and PB?
What would be your impression if you were part of the venue’s committee?
As reviewer, what would be your impression about reviewing two different papers about the same work for the same venue?
Any additional consideration?

as part of "4. Any additional consideration?": you should not be afraid to leave aside your supervisor in your work. You don't "owe" him/her a publication. If you feel like you can't solve the editing issue, you can send the paper as your own alone

sure, I was wondering if the paper PA, pre-edits by personB, could be already submittable

I made a number of grammar edits; please review and correct if necessary.

You cannot submit both papers.  As others have pointed out, most venues explicitly forbid simultaneous submission of substantially overlapping papers.  The answer to your first three questions is the same: Immediate rejection.
In fact, I would go further: Neither PA nor PB can be submitted alone.  It is unethical to submit a paper without the explicit consent of all authors, because authorship implies endorsement of and responsibility for the content of the paper.  On the other hand, it is unethical to revoke authorship from someone who has made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work.  The two authors must work out their editorial differences, like grown-up professional adults, before they can submit anything.
If they can't agree on what to submit, then tough noogies — no paper.

You cannot submit to papers on the same data and that is what this sounds like. It doesn't sound like paper A is the data and paper B is a model.
I would suggest Person B concede to the wishes of Person A and then never collaborate with Person A again.

By venue, do you mean a conference? Depending on the conference, you could certainly focus on different aspects of the same study, or different (but not contradictory) conclusions from the same data (some datasets generate dozens of papers!). There could be a bit of overlap, i.e. in the introduction, but not too much. I'd say the most important thing is to be clear and honest about what you want to present. But if you have together done a large project and are going to write a peer-reviewed paper about it, I don't see any problem in presenting different aspects of the study at the same conference.
Of course, they should not be exactly the same.


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What are the benefits of getting a PhD in statistics over a MS in statistics?
What are the benefits of getting a PhD in statistics over a MS in statistics (other than being a professor)? Do people with PhDs in statistics earn significantly more than people with MS degrees in statistics?
More generally, does a PhD in a quantitative field provide a salary advantage over a MS in a quantitative field?

What do you want to do with your statistics degree, apart from earn money?

@Dave Clarke: Work on practical and relevant problems.

Possibly of interest is this thread on the Stats SE (also possible crosspost)

Related: To work in statistics for industry and research centers, is a masters sufficient or is there a major advantage to having a PhD?

Actually, this greatly depends on where you get your degree from. Sometimes people who have done just MS are able to get to the bottom of the thing and can use their knowledge of statistics on a practical level. It depends on how solid your concepts are. Once you are in some position earned through your sound academic record you can grow quite fast.
So, if you have good record (not just grades but grasp), you may be able to get to the same level of salary as a PhD would. This is because statistics is an applied branch and is in demand.

Well, there's something different to consider. As a MS student you pay to study. As a PhD, you are paid to study. I know that depends between countries but where I am, a MS is terribly expensive.
The only reasons I see to do a MS instead of a PhD is when someone doesn't have good enough grades to get into a PhD or because they want to shift their area a lot: for example, a chemist taking a master in Biochemistry because he wants a PhD in Cell biology.

They are different tracks and pursuing one doesn't mean you failed or would fail at the other. You have to pay for an MS. But, money shouldn't be the motivation for a PhD. An MS, from my understanding, earns a comparable salary in industry and most people in industry earn more than academics. Well, "earn" in some ways. :-)

Yes. Doing a PhD for money is bound to be terrible experience indeed ;) But someone that goes to university already has some passion for learning (or should) and his question suggests that money is important at the moment. About the "earning", it's no good earning more money earlier, but start in debt. Assuming that he can get the same position after doing a MS or a PHD, unless what he earns in the 2 years difference between MS and PhD minus the cost of the MS, is more than what he gains as PhD, he still loses money in the end. And that's assuming that he can maintain a debt.

Perhaps my cynical bias and personal experience makes me think that attending college is not tightly correlated with intellectual curiosity. I imagine, then, that working in industry with an MS is the best financial option.


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How do I find similar research problems in other fields?
I have published a paper about the combinatorics of adding a mixture of chemicals to a compound and observing a number of spectral peaks for this, which allows the user to gain information about the compound involved, while keeping cross-chemical effects low.
I am pretty sure the same approach not only occurs in my field of expertise, but also elsewhere in science, as this is a pretty abstract concept. Where can i find other problems like this, so that my algorithm can be solved by simply modifying the input/output of my software? A specific journal would of course only hold articles concerning my own field/their own field.

and can someone create the tag "multiple disciplines"?

In my opinion, you should talk to a mathematician in your institute. Chances are that there is some nice mathematics behind it, if it is that general. (disclaimer: I work in mathematics).

actually it is a lot of mathematics, but applied mathematics (a software) :)

Have you tried your local library?  Google?  Other users of spectography on your campus?

i have tried looking for combinatorics problems. but of course there is too much reading for this, and only for people advancing this field. what i would need is someone having a problem and this coming to the rescue. I have not talked to other users in campus, there is not much of a network there.

Maybe you could post a link to the paper, so that people could help. Perhaps writing a question for mathoverflow might yield answers, if you can make the question sufficiently appealing (and technical).

@tarrasch Since you have some responses below that seem to answer your question, please consider marking one of them as ‘Accepted’ by clicking on the tickmark below their vote count. This shows which answer helped you most, and it assigns reputation points to the author of the answer (and to you!).

(I answer it in a general way. If you want to ask it for your specific problem, try MathOverflow or Chemistry.SE.)
You may try searching for relevant papers, but then it is easy to miss even obvious references, e.g. due to different terminology, notation, approach or motivation. (So even if you have a paper in your hand, it can take a lot of time to check if it is relevant at all; searching in all papers may be like searching for a needle in a haystack.)
On the contrary, the best idea is to ask people who are working on similar problems. They may know the direct references, or people who know them, or at least give some insight into research lines in their fields (or provide some general references which may be a good source for your own search).
Source: it happened to me quite a few times that even a long searching for papers gave me little information, but asking people doing research in related fields (and perhaps looking up references in papers they provided) has proved to be successful.

Here are some pointers that one can start with; on the multidisciplinary aspects of Combinatorics.
See Annals of Combinatorics

Annals of Combinatorics will publish outstanding contributions to
  combinatorial mathematics in all its aspects. Special regard will be
  given to new developments which have yet to be given proper
  recognition, but which in the opinion of the editors show promise of
  eventual mathematical breakthroughs.
Papers published in Annals of Combinatorics will not be limited to the
  field of combinatorics in the strict sense. They will range over
  problems and theories that have arisen, or will arise, in applications
  to computer science, biology, statistics, probability, physics and
  chemistry, as well as over work of a combinatorial nature in
  representation theory, number theory, topology, algebraic geometry and
  the theory of special functions.

See also Journals in Combinatorics and Related Fields and Preprint Links in Combinatorics. The site also has a list of  Open Problems in Combinatorics.
From the list of journals, find those are closely related to your requirements and subscribe to their email alerts or RSS feeds using Google Reader or the likes; for latest articles.
Hope these wiki articles (and the external links there) are already looked into; Combinatorics, Combinatorial chemistry, Outline of combinatorics, Combinatorics and physics


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Postdoc position offer in mathematics.
I am aware of this post
Some questions about math postdoc offers but please let me ask a similar question.
I am currently on the math postdoc job market. Some of my friends were informed that they are on the short list but I haven't heard anything from the job market after 2/3 of January. According to the above post, the most job offers are made in the second half of January. I am afraid that all good positions are already taken and I now feel I need to apply for more positions to avoid the worst case.

My webpage counter does not say that many people visited my webpage since Nov. Is this a bad sign? Do hiring committees really visit candidates' webpages?
Are most of the good positions such as "****** assistant professorship" already taken around this time?
Should I send inquiries about my application this week? Or should I wait for another? I hesitate to ask my advisor to do this, so I think I have to do this by myself.

My webpage counter does not say that many people visited my webpage since Nov. Is this a bad sign? Do hiring committees really visit candidates' webpages?

I wouldn't worry about this, since hiring committees do not necessarily visit web pages, even if they plan to make a postdoc offer.  If your application was reasonably detailed and your papers are available elsewhere (for example on the arXiv or as part of your application), then there's no reason why someone would need to visit your web page.  Even if your papers aren't available elsewhere, the number of visits you might see is both small and unpredictable.

Are most of the good positions such as "** assistant professorship" already taken around this time?

Almost all of them will be offered to someone by the end of January, but those offers will not all be accepted (so there will be multiple rounds of offers, which may extend beyond the common deadline).  I would bet that most, but not all, of the most prestigious positions have already been offered to someone, but I don't know actual statistics.
Note that early offers tend to cluster on the most popular candidates, so substantially fewer people get first-round offers than will eventually be hired.

Should I send inquiries about my application this week? Or should I wait for another? I hesitate to ask my advisor to do this, so I think I have to do this by myself.

Inquiring this week is reasonable.  It's worth asking not just your favorite schools, but also schools you are less excited about.  (It may signal to them that they have a shot at you after all, and increase the chances that they will make an offer.  At this point, you'll presumably be happy to have any reasonable offer, and once you have one you may be able to use it to provoke other places to make offers.)  Asking this week leaves a little time for schools to act before the common deadline, although you shouldn't despair even if the deadline goes past.

I now feel I need to apply for more positions to avoid the worst case

If you applied to relatively few schools, it might be a good idea to add some more even now, but don't panic.  Unless you're in an unusual situation, your job search doesn't sound really problematic at this point.  (I can understand that it is worrisome, but there's a big difference between not getting a first round offer from a top department and not getting a job at all.  Of course I can't predict how your job search will end, but I've seen people get excellent offers after having had no signs of interest this late in January.)
Meanwhile, I highly recommend having a chat with your advisor about your job search.  If your advisor is not worried, it may help you stay calm, and if you do reach the point where your advisor really starts to worry, I hope he/she will have suggestions for what the two of you can do to make sure you get a job.

Thank you for the detailed answer. It relieved my worry (I was too stressed out). I now see how things are going in the job market.

When you say inquiring, do you mean mailing the committee or the professor that I contacted at that school?

@MathMan: If the professor you contacted is someone you know well (for example, a collaborator), then it could make sense to ask them.  The advantage of this is that they may put in a good word for you or report more information than you might otherwise get, but it's asking them to do a little work so it depends on having a personal relationship.  In other cases, I'd try to use contact information from the job advertisement, since inquiries sent there will generally make their way to someone whose job is answering them.

I am also an applicant this year, and I have heard from some places.

My webpage counter does not say that many people visited my webpage since Nov. Is this a bad sign? Do hiring committees really visit candidates' webpages?

I was able to guess that an offer was on its way (although one is never sure until you have the offer in your hands) by looking at the webpage counter for some schools. However, other offers/shortlists came as a complete surprise, as I had gotten no visits from these schools since I submitted my application. There were also schools who visited my webpage very frequently, but I heard that they offered their position to someone else. To sum up, the webpage counter is not very reliable.

Are most of the good positions such as "** assistant professorship" already taken around this time?

To nitpick, these are not necessarily the best positions. For example, Princeton's postdocs just go by the generic name of "Instructors" (except the top candidate, who is the Veblen Research Instructor). To answer your actual question, several departments have offered most of their positions. On the other hand, many departments have not had their postdoc committee meeting yet; for some, school hasn't even started yet. Also, just be aware that many candidates sit on several offers at the moment, trying to coax a better offer from their top choice etc. But I think that a lot of these positions will free up again on February 3, the common AMS deadline.

Should I send inquiries about my application this week? Or should I wait for another? I hesitate to ask my advisor to do this, so I think I have to do this by myself.

I think you are supposed to talk to your advisor about this! They are there for you, and he/she would be the best judge of your situation. Some advisors can also contact their colleagues to inquire on your behalf, which may be better.

I now feel I need to apply for more positions to avoid the worst case.

How many positions did you apply to? Many fantastic mathematicians apply to 50-60 places. In this case, it is worth applying to more places at this point.
Also, don't stress out! Breathe! As an applicant myself, I know how you feel. It will all work out in the end. You've done all you can, so sit back and relax, and be patient. No matter what happens, you are still a bright mathematician who will be very successful in your career.

My two cents:

My webpage counter does not say that many people visited my webpage since Nov. Is this a bad sign? Do hiring committees really visit candidates' webpages?

They do but rarely. The standard application file normally contains all information needed for screening and the grapevine provides the rest.

Are most of the good positions such as "** assistant professorship" already taken around this time?

You mean "named assistant professorships"?. Yes, they may well be. However, the normal (nameless workhorse) postdoc offers haven't been even considered yet in many places. The way it usually works is that the tenure track hiring is done first. Another thing is grants. Right where I am, we'll have or not have postdoc positions this year depending on whether we'll get or not get grant funding and nobody expects to hear from the NSF before the end of February (especially after the circus show by our 485 mouth goat herd in Washington D.C.; I still have a strong desire to send them all to deliver the equipment to the Antarctic research stations in small boats with no food; the only thing that would spare them if it were for me to decide is that I would hate to lose the gadgets). So, I wouldn't worry too much yet.

Should I send inquiries about my application this week? Or should I wait for another? I hesitate to ask my advisor to do this, so I think I have to do this by myself.

It never hurts to get the information. Just be careful about how exactly you phrase your request and whom you contact. The last thing I would want as a member of the hiring committee (I was on 3 within the last 5 years) is to have to write "polite and thoughtful" responses to each and every of 70+ postdoc applicants before their consideration has even started.

Thank you very much for the detailed answer. I will politely send some inquiries.


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How to set up lab rotation when commencing a PhD?
I'll be starting a science PhD program in the fall, and I'm required to do at least three lab rotations. I haven't received any instructions from the program as to when and how I should secure a spot in the labs I want to rotate in. I did contact some of the PI's I'm interested in working for while I was applying, as well as during interviews, but obviously nothing was finalized. Should I be contacting them and trying to meet with them now, or is this generally done at the beginning of the school year?

What field? Not everyone does lab rotations. Are these designed to help you find an advisor or just to get you experience?

Welcome to StackExchange! This is very much dependent on the department you're in. You should contact the director of graduate studies to inquire. I'm suggesting a close flag because of the particularity of circumstances.

Have you even shown up to orientation yet?  I think you're getting ahead of yourself.  But if you're already in the department wandering around lost then my advice is:
It obviously varies by department but there should be some sort of form you fill out with your top picks.  You have a few options:  contact your graduate advisor and ask; go talk with a perspective PI and bring it up during your conversation; or ask the other students in your program if they know what to do.  The third choice is by far the best.  It seems like you're just sitting there in a vacuum wondering what to do.  You will quickly die if you do that.  You need to meet the other students and you need to work with them to make it through.

authors: ياسر محمد صالح


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How best to format and position legend in line chart when legend text is long?
I always struggle when showing line chart with long legend title like this:

Is there any best practice to a chart with long legend title?
I try to show several alternatives below, but of course, it's not comprehensive.
(a) Stretch y-axis limit

(b) Put legend outside chart's body

(c) Shorten legend title

Update
I'm a researcher in computer science field. But, general discussions beyond research domains are also welcome.

Note that specific journals may have their own styling preferences for the legend.

@Bitwise Thanks. I'm interested especially in CS field. Unfortunately, I have no idea about style preference about this topic even in my field, and would appreciate if you could give some ideas.

When it's not too big, I recommend shrinking the legend font size and whitespace and reducing the complexity of the labels.  If it's very big, however, I recommend instead moving to a systematic coloring scheme and explaining the coloring scheme in the caption rather than a legend.


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University policy of publishing student course evaluations: Prevalence and pros and cons
These days it is very common to have some course evaluation towards the end of a course, in which students respond to standardized questions on a numerical scale (e.g. between 1 and 5) and can additionally give free-form comments.
Sometimes individual lecturers make student comments (and their responses) available to the cohort in which the survey was taken and the next cohort, to show that they are open to critique and how they respond to it.
I am, however, more interested in cases where there is a departmental/faculty/university-wide policy to consistently publish evaluation results for all of their courses (averages of numerical data only, or perhaps the free-form comments as well) to the current and future cohorts.

Is it common for universities to have a policy of publishing student course evaluations?
What are advantages and disadvantages of doing this?
Has this been looked at in the educational literature?

It's common in the US for the average results to be available to students.

It's certainly a university-wide policy where I am. I suspect it's more-or-less a national policy, but I haven't checked the details.

At my institution these are not made public in any way of which I'm aware. Actually, the whole process of student evaluations has been much reduced since we switched to online out-of-class evaluations (generally only 1-5 respondents per class).

@DanielR.Collins I also observe this reduction at my school upon the institution of online evaluations. This is actually very troubling if administration is to use percentages as red flags. You find yourself explaining what went wrong when all that went wrong was the wrong 2 students filled out the stupid thing. I'm going to start giving them in class again to guard against this.

I used to adjunct at a strong college as part of a larger university where the student government was able to get a policy in place on publishing (statistics on) evaluations.  The professor/adjunct had the choice to not publish their results; but this was uncommon since then you would be an outlier and it would seem like you had something to hide.

Pros:  Frankly, with things like "rate my professor" out there, I'd rather have everyone's evaluations take into account than just the extremes.  I think the point is that, provided we avoid the cons I will outline, there is transparency of some sort of metric of performance.  Generally I found the statistics to show something reliable about professors based on what other faculty and students said about them.  It prevents faculty from thinking they can just disregard the opinions of their students and it helps students have a consistent and official place to decide which instructor they would like to teach them (in a larger college anyway).
Cons:  You need not look far to see academics complain about this practice.  The only concern for me would be if for some reason there was some sort of plot to purposely bomb a professor's evaluations or a professor tried to game the system; these are generally not serious worries and one would hope there would be checks and balances for these concerns.

Other problem with RateMyProfessor is that it's possible to create an instructor account and remove any assessments that you don't like. Of course very few people do that, but the worst/most manipulative professors are the most incited to do so.

At my former UK university students evaluated the course (i.e., major), module (i.e., class), and teacher withat separate processes. The university published the evaluations of the course and module. The union fought against the publishing of evaluations of the teacher. The issue is that student evaluations of teaching often reveal a large degree of racism, sexism, and intolerance of the LGBT+ community. Publishing open comments that are unprofessional is unprofessional. Given the views commonly expressed in the open comments, calls into question the validity of across teacher comparisons of the numeric ratings.

Good point. I do think there's research that women and minorities are routinely given harsher ratings.

To wit: "Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.", London School of Economics: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/02/04/student-evaluations-of-teaching-gender-bias/

Where I am it is common to make the evaluations available to the course but not public. In fact, we have the evaluation in the middle of the course and the instructor is expected to discuss the result with the class and try to improve the course based on the feedback. To do so, many instructors show the aggregated results of the survey in class so that everybody can see the results. I also do so because I think it is helpful, especially when dealing with student who have extreme opinions and speak up load. So there could be one student who thinks that everything in great, and wants more or more difficult homework (I had one of these…) but the rest of the course is struggling already. Showing the average workload of the course then makes it clear that this guy is an "outlier".
Another important thing: Usually there is space for free comments on the course and at my place these comments are scanned and not transcribed. So it is usually not a problem to identify who has written a comment. I tell this to the students in advance: "The hand written comments will be scanned and I will be able to see the scans." The students can then decide if they want to use free comments or not and if they try to use a different hand writing. However, I do not show the scanned comments in class but only read some of them.

I'm not familiar with and studies conducted on this. However, in my two universities (US and non-US), the department does not publish them online but rather discuss the average rating of individual courses as well as the average of all courses in the department meeting at the end of the semester. In addition, each professor gets to see the average of the courses s/he teaches and compares it with that of the average rating of the courses offered by the department and school (not sure how f the average rating of all the courses provides in the university and is available there).
An advantage can be in terms of knowing your performance compared the other courses! Which can be also a stressful disappointed if you get low ratings (disadvantage?!)
To be honest, I have seen many evaluations that discuss in detail how a professor is "bad", unfortunately nobody seems to tale actions especially if such a professor got tenured or brings in a lot of funding!


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Are reviewers impressed by a quick response to a request to revise and resubmit?
My colleagues believe that if you submit your manuscript revisions quickly,  reviewers will be impressed by your confidence about the issues raised.
However, I think that a quick response  is not always the best option. If you consult with other people, you may submit better revisions which of course requires more time.

Are there any benefits in responding quickly to a request to revise and resubmit a manuscript?
Are reviewers impressed by a quick response to a request to revise and resubmit?

This seems like an opinion poll rather than a question allowing a factual answer. But for what it's worth, my opinion is that a quick response is of very little value in terms of "impressing the reviewers".

I've edited to hopefully make the intent clearer

Not worth a full answer, but I couldn't care less how fast the revisions come back. In fact, I probably won't remember how long it's been regardless of if it's fast or slow.

I'd be more impressed by this than seeing the paper come back to me for review from a different journal without any changes ;o)  @Koldito hits the nail on the head, however I would say don't aim to impress the reviewers, they are unlikely to be interested in your confidence, just the correctness and clarity of the paper.

I disagree that the question is opinion-based. It is not asking "Are you impressed" but "Are reviewers in general impressed". Yes, it's about people's opinions but the question is not asking the answerers to express their opinion.

Opinions might differ, but here is mine: as a regular reviewer for a bunch of journals, what impresses me is a resubmission that addresses whatever points I raise in my review in a thorough and convincing way, irrespective of whether the authors take one week or six months to write it up. The more seriously you take my review, the more seriously I will take your resubmission.

I agree with this.  I might go so far as to suggest that the opposite (somehow) of what the OP is asking might be more true: as a referee, when I get a revised version bounced back to me very quickly, I look to see how thorough and thoughtful it was.  If someone takes only a week or two (including editorial lag time) to turn in something which does not thoroughly engage with the report, then it looks bad to me.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's worse to turn in a superficial revision very quickly than to sit on it for a while...but it can be more annoying.

@PeteL.Clark, I'd suggest that (a) the repsonse time should be appropriate to the scale of the revision, and (b) it's possible that the lead author is in a position to go flat-out on the revisions (e.g. grad student, top priority). Turning it round in a week could mean they spent 40 hours or 40 minutes on it.  I am assuming that the editorial lag on a revision is small, as I've experienced (weeks with the editors for a submission, hours for a revision).

Also, as someone who's reviewed journal papers, it's hard to get a sense of time as a reviewer. By the time the editors have compiled the reviews, sent them back to the authors, and informed the reviewers of their decision, it's probably been a few weeks already. So turning around your review quickly doesn't make much of a difference.

The other answers are very good.  I'll add that a good referee should review what's submitted, and make recommendations about what's on the paper in front of them.  Let the editors worry about everything else.  I try not to let the timeliness of the resubmission impact any recommendation.
That said, I appreciate it if the authors can turn it around while the manuscript is still recallable.  I don't like it when a second review requires all the work of a first review because the authors waited until memories of the manuscript were vague for me.  I don't care how fast it comes back, but I don't like it when it's coming up on a year (unless the original review called for more studies, which can take time).  "Don't like it" of course doesn't mean that this would impact my review, just that it causes me more work.

At least for the journals I've refereed for, the referees don't know how long it took the authors to resubmit. Since I don't know when the other referees submitted their reports, I don't know when the authors received the reports, so I don't know how long it took them to revise. Maybe the authors took three months to revise; maybe they spent 87 days waiting for the other referees to submit their reports and revised in three days. Who knows?
Since the referees don't know how long it took the authors to resubmit, that can't have any influence.

It actually depends on the precise semantics of "revise and re-submit". In some journals i was involved with, three different responses were possible: a minor revision is of a mostly editorial nature and people expect that this can be done quickly. A major revision usually comes with a timeframe of four to six weeks and often requires more substantial changes (sometimes including addition of new results) but there is generally an expectation that these revisions are doable within this timeframe and the paper as such is broadly acceptable. A revise-and-resubmit suggests that the paper is not acceptable in its current form and needs substantial new content (new experiments, more comprehensive comparison to other work, etc). In particular, revise-and-resubmit is recommended when the editor (or the reviewers) is of the opinion that the revision requires more time than the four to six weeks timeframe for a major revision. In that case, a quick response will probably look odd.

Some journals tangle up the vocabulary even further by using "revise and re-submit" to described requests for major or even minor revisions as well.  Be sure to read the notice carefully!  I have, in the past, gotten something that looked like a rejection but was actually a request for minor revisions, simply due to oddly formatted journal templates.


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How do I motivate pursuing a PhD in Computer Science (CS) after a BSc in CS and MBA in Finance
I've developed a strong urge to pursue CS again to deepen my understanding of specific fields of interest while contributing in high-tech and R&D industry. I graduated with 3.0 and 3.7 GPA in a BSc in CS and MBA in '12 and '17. I've 6 years of experience as a software developer and manager unfortunately none of my work was research oriented. From the research I've conducted most entry requirements prefer applicants to master computer science as it's most ideal but a 2nd master's degree (in CS) is rather deterrent from a time and financial perspective. Has anyone had success getting into a decent PhD in CS with this sort of combination?

You're an excellent candidate for a PhD in Computer Science: You have a BSc in the subject, you have six years of industry experience, and you've developed a strong urge to pursue CS again to deepen [your] understanding of specific fields of interest while contributing in high-tech and R&D industry. (A desire to deepen your knowledge isn't enough, you need to be truly passionate about contributing in high-tech and R&D industry. I presume you are.) Your MBA gives you business know-how that'll focus your attention towards research problems that'll have real impact on society.

From the research I've conducted most entry requirements prefer applicants to master computer science as it's most ideal but a 2nd master's degree (in CS) is rather deterrent from a time and financial perspective.

Entry requirements are tailored towards the average entrant, which, I'll speculate, is someone that's never left university. You aren't an average applicant. You can confirm my theory by calling some admission departments. Thereafter, identify supervisors that pursue research that impacts technology. Pitch yourself to them, explain how your skill set will advance them. Establish whether they can help you on your pursuit.

I'll be sure to leave a comment once I have a word with them though that will be in a couple of years. I need to save :)

@TafadzwaGonera Save for what? The topping-up of your PhD stipend?

Save for tuition. I reckon PhD funding opportunities, grants and stipends aren't all that great here in South Africa. Glassdoor shows a national average of R160k i.e. ~4/5 times less than what I'll be earning when the program is underway. I've to consider pursuing the program part-time.

@TafadzwaGonera Part-time will be tough. Perhaps you can offer consultancy services, which would surely command more than your current hourly rate. That might allow you to focus a bit more than part-time on a PhD.

Thank you for the information. Consultancy is definitely one way of going about it, or I could go full-time then work hard to complete the program at the earliest. I'll need to speak to some PhD alumni, go back to the drawing table and start working on action plan.

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


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How to find new advisor after being let go
I'm a PhD student in US. I've been tipped by my advisor that I would be let go if I do not get results by a deadline. I am working on my options:

Switch advisors: I have seen people switching advisors and finishing their program, but I'm not sure how that works. Why would someone take another faculty member's (seemingly red-flagged) student, who is in middle of the program? How to approach with a red flag like this?

Apply elsewhere: How can I apply for another PhD position without my (potentially masters) advisor's recommendation? I want to email faculty members at other universities (as a master student, which is the potential case), but if I state that I have research experience and have submitted abstracts, that would lead to wanting to know more from my advisor. How can I represent myself as a good prospective and raise minimum question?

If there is any faculty in your current program that you believe thinks well of you, talk to them first - for advice, and maybe if they can take you in. Going through the formal process of applying elsewhere is much harder given your circumstances.

"Why would someone take another faculty member's (seemingly red-flagged) student, who is in middle of the program?"  Because the alternatives are worse.  Faculty have to compete to get good PhD students - it is not easy.

The way to find a new advisor is to ask. Whether they say yes depends on many things, including the known behavior of your current advisor. Are they reasonable or not? Is it you or is it the advisor who is the problem here?
You should also look at why you are having difficulties. Is the problem you are working on just too hard. This can happen in mathematics, for example, and it may take years to get partial results. Or the problem may even be unsolvable at the current state of knowledge, or even unresolvable in theory. If your have an impossible problem then a new advisor with a new problem would possibly work.
When you apply make the best case that you can be a success and get the best letters available to you. Your current advisor might write a good letter or not, but that depends on circumstances. Are you being let go because you aren't up to it, or because the demands of the research program of the advisor demand faster results. That might be the case in some lab sciences.
But in the end, all you can do is ask and apply and make the best case you can. Stress successes you have had, not failures.
It may well be that working harder to meet the deadline is a possibility. That would probably be the shortest path to success if you can manage it.
But any other path will take time. Be prepared for that and examine and evaluate all of your options.


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Responding to positive grant reviews?
A common way to handle grant applications seems to be to request external reviews, to which the applicant can then respond. Reviews and response together are discussed at a panel where the proposals are ranked, and the top x% then are funded.
I've found myself in a nice, but perplexing situation: I got back the reviews for my first grant proposal, and all reviewers gave top scores (and very positive comments). Now I'm wondering whether or not to use my right to respond - all information I could find about responses boil down to addressing criticism, but what do you do if there is no criticism?
Edit: The grant agency explicitly discourages using the reply to thank reviewers. The alternative option besides not replying at all could be to attempt to selectively agree with the most praising comments or something like that, but I'm not sure that is a good idea.

Beyond something generic like thanking the reviewers, not clear you need to do anything else.

Did the reviewers give specific comments, or just scores?

Thanks for the comments, I've edited the question to clarify that there were specific comments, just no criticism.

In that case you can pass on a response. While I haven't had this experience, I've been in other situations where I had a "right to respond" and when the feedback was positive I merely waived my right.

While it sounds that there would be no need to rebut against anything (I suggest to read the reports very carefully once again - some criticism can be hidden and is sometimes difficult to spot between positive comments) there may be another reason to formulate a response. It may well be that the reports contain valuable suggestions or remarks on specific points of your proposal. You can take the opportunity to pick up these suggestions and present new views or deeper explanations. However, I think that this really only makes sense if you have something new to say in view of the comments of the reviewer. I would suggest to not repeat what is already written in the proposal…

If there's no criticism to rebut, then waive the right to rebut.
If you've already received top marks with no criticisms, then you can only spoil things by saying something at this stage.
Just shut up. And enjoy the moment.


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Does ScholarOne really force you to have multiple logins?
Why can't I have a single ScholarOne login for every journal I submit or review for?  Is there some way to copy over the address, keywords & password for all my accounts so I don't have to waste time making the same stuff up every time I get involved with another journal?

The real question in my opinion is "why do I need to fill in all of this stuff?". Names and affiliations of the authors are already in the paper, so there is no need to copy them back in. Author accounts can be replaced by openid. Reviewer accounts can be replaced by special links containing a unique id (many already do it). All you need is something that lets you upload a pdf.

Elsevier just combined profiles across journals.  Let's see how long it will take ScholarOne to do this ...

Thank you for your question. My name is Jasper Simons and I work for Thomson Reuters, the organization behind ScholarOne. Our platform is configured by our publishers as they service their authors and editors. Publishers seek to maximize the value they offer to their journals, their editors and their authors through specific configurations of the ScholarOne peer-review workflow. This doesn't address your concern, but I hope that it sheds some light on the reasoning behind the multiple login requirements for authors. In short, there is one ScholarOne platform but there are many site configurations.

What is a "configuration" in your jargon? Does that word include the user database?

Sorry about that. Configurations refer to the specific peer-review workflow set up for a particular journal site or group of journal sites. Those are defined by the editorial office of the publisher or association. This includes choices such as "double-blind review" or not, and whether to assign manuscripts to an associate editor or directly to the editor-in-chief etc.

@Federico: ScholarOne is pursuing collaborations with ORCID to allow direct ingestion of user/author data through the ORCID. I'll separately look into why we wouldn't take such data points directly from an author submitted PDF. I suspect that there might be issues with validation of data that limit the use of such a solution but I am not sure.

Follow Up: Authors can already utilize ResearcherID or upload manuscripts through EndNote which will automatically pull your author data into ScholarOne, reducing the step to add your details manually.

This does not answer the question, in my opinion. Journal decisions about associate editors and double-blind review are orthogonal to requiring authors to set up independent profiles for each journal.

@JasperSimons Elsevier has consolidated author profiles across their journals. It has made reviewing and submitting for these journals much more pleasant.  Are you saying that it isn't possible for ScholarOne given the current technology used by your organization?

@Jasper Simons Is it possible to access my journal dashboard using two different email. For example, in edas I can access to my profile using more than email.

@JasperSimons I am wondering if you are underestimating the hassle researchers go through to use ScholarOne because of login issues. I am a reviewer and author for at least 3-4 journals using ScholarOne. Each journal requires a different login/password. When changing institution, I get a new email address and receive invitations to review to the new email address. This creates a duplicate account that I cannot merge with the older ones. My login manager has currently 15 entries for various ScholarOne logins. My submissions/reviews even for the same journal cannot be found in the same place.

The ScholarOne platform is very capable of allowing a user to have a single login across all journals. Unfortunately, each journal (or in some cases publishers) has required their user accounts to not be shared with other journals or publishers. @aeismail answer pretty much sums up the reason (its not impossible however). At ScholarOne, we realize this is probably the most frustrating parts of the system, and are always looking for ways to help reduce the pain associated with this.
Disclaimer: I am an employee at ScholarOne, but my posts and opinions are my own!

There can be author and referee databases separated from user accounts: I log in with the same username and password, and then the server can restrict which of my user data are shared among different journals (including referee feedback scores). Does your platform allow this separation? It sounds like you are trying to shift the blame on the journals for what is really a design problem in your website.

@FedericoPoloni , The S1M system can effectively do what you describe. If you decide to submit a manuscript to IEEE, for instance, the account data is shared across  the IEEE portfolio of journals. This allows you to have the same account data with all IEEE journals, but separate author and reviewer datasets per IEEE journal. However, if you then want to submit a manuscript to an IOP journal, we are contractually (IEEE owns your original account data) and legally (think GDPR) prevented from sharing your IEEE account information with IOP. Hope this explains the situation a bit better.

I understand there is a reson for keeping it separate, but ScholarOne allows to connect to ORCID to get information from it (sadly only gets name and few other bits, not a real help).

Thanks, I don't think I knew about ORCID when I asked this question!

I think the primary issue is the fact that because different publishers are responsible for maintaining the different author and referee databases, it's impractical (or perhaps even impossible) to share them between different journals. If you had the ability to get somebody else's database, it would be a potentially tempting target. So I think that everything is locked to a specific journal, without the ability to transfer between them. You can probably use the same login information for all of the different journals, but you'll need to register for each one separately.


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Should I include a publication where I'm only acknowledged (and not one of the authors) in my CV?
Suppose that I've helped other researchers with the statistical analyses for an epidemiological study and therefore I am acknowledged for that in the "Acknowledgments" section of the paper (something like "We thank andrea for his statistical support").
Obviously, this doesn't count as a publication for me, as I am not one of the authors. But if I include it in my CV, how much "weight" would a professor (or someone within the academia) give to that? I also have other publications where I am either the first author or one of the co-authors.
I am not thinking of a particular situation here (like applying for a grant or for a PhD position). I am just curious to know if it could be useful to put it into my CV or if it would just be irrelevant.

No, you shouldn't.

I've never seen anything like this on a CV.
If you have other publications, I certainly wouldn't include this. It would look like you are trying too hard to find something to put on your CV, which could do more harm than good. Let your publications stand for themselves.
One thing you could do when describing the various jobs you've had, is to include the statistical analysis work in the description of the activities you performed in that job. You could also mention it in the cover letter, if it is relevant for the job. Finally, do bring it up in the interview as an example of how you work in a collaboration.

I agree.  It may even be harmful to list an acknowledgement on your CV, quite aside from the issue of looking like padding.  It could look like nobody else has ever acknowledged your help on a paper, or it could look like you are claiming your help on this paper was particularly noteworthy (which could offend the actual authors).  Either way, there's almost no upside, but some downside risk.

You all seem to agree that I shouldn't do it and since you've certainly more experience than I have, I'll follow your suggestions.

I think it might be appropriate to put this on your CV is you are very early in your career, and facing the "There's nothing but coursework on my CV" problem. If that's the case, it might be worth doing just to show that you're in the early stages of your research career, but that you are engaging in collaborative research work.
That being said, the moment you have something more substantial to put on your CV, I'd expect it to drop away in favor of those things.

You can ask these researchers to give you a recommendation letter. This may help you even more than another publication.


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Who all are considered authors of papers written on behalf of a research group?
In epidemiology it is not uncommon to see papers written by a bunch of authors on behalf of a research group (say "the X research group"). See, for example, this paper (randomly chosen from pubmed):

Moreira L, Pellisé M, Carballal S, Bessa X, Ocaña T, Serradesanferm A, Grau J, Macià F, Andreu M, Castells A, Balaguer F; on behalf of the PROCOLON research group.
  High prevalence of serrated polyposis syndrome in FIT-based colorectal cancer screening programmes. Gut. 2012 Sep 14.

My question is: are the members of the research group X (whose names and affiliations are usually reported in the Appendix at the end of the paper) considered as authors of the paper?
Edit: I am particularly interested to receive answers that apply specifically to epidemiology, but of course experiences from other fields are very welcome!

Considered authors by whom?  Hiring committees?  Funding agencies?  Other researchers?

I didn't know that different subjects had different definitions of authorship. I thought that one either is an author of a paper or is not, at least in epidemiology. Anyway, for example, do these publications count when calculating bibliometric indexes?

If I saw that citation in the wild, I would assume that the eleven explicit names are the only authors.  In computer science, all authors are named on the front page, very few papers have more than 10 coauthors, and not every member of a research group is a coauthor of every paper that the group generates.

@JeffE http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2012.08.020, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2012.08.021...

I'll give my perspective, as an Epidemiologist:
It depends. Helpful, I know.
Often the reason there's a "on behalf of the X group" is that some small analysis has been pulled out of a larger study, and the named authors on the paper want to acknowledge that their results are the byproduct of a larger effort. A large clinical trial, or cohort trial for example, can spawn dozens of papers and secondary analysis done by doctoral students, small component research groups, etc.
For example, this paper is (I think) the result of the "Epi proColon" clinical trial currently being conducted by the manufacturer. It's a head to head comparison with 'FIT' - fecal immunochemical testing - to detect colon cancer. The paper you linked is an ancillary analysis of that, noting a particular finding that, while of interest to the field and clearly enough for a short paper, wouldn't ever make the "main" paper cut when the results of the clinical trial are published.
@Raphael has asserted that he thinks there should be a difference between "I turned a skrew" and "I wrote the paper". The problem for Epidemiology studies is that's often somewhat ambiguous. For example, many clinical sites are directed by people who don't really care about publications, being professional clinicians, but are still instrumental enough in the conducting of the study that they could arguably be included as authors. If you only had one of these, sure, toss it in as authorship. But what if you're running a multi-site clinical trial at ten sites? Do you include all ten? After all, they saw patients.
The "group" authorship is a useful way to acknowledge that. They can cite those papers on grant applications, "why should we continue to support your diagnostic lab" progress reports, etc. It's a compromise position for trying to tighten up who is an author while at the same time supporting large, collaborative science.
Those authorship acknowledgements also serve to make something "the official position of X study group". You often see that in vaccine trials and the like.
That being said, unless I was a named author on the paper, I likely wouldn't include it on my CV if I was anything but a very new investigator. But part of the point of these papers is that who is a named author is a rotating list. The Epidemiologists write their epidemiology papers, the clinicians write clinical papers, the lab people write lab papers, the biostatisticians write...you get the idea. So everyone publishes named in their niche, but the group effort is acknowledged for the entire productive output of the study.

In particle physics (and we have some very long author lists) they are.
Authorship rules are generally set out in the collaboration's Memorandum of Understanding (whatever it is called) and can sometimes call for odd things such as a paper being credited to someone who didn't even know it was being written but whose work calibrating some systematic effect of a minor subsystem a decade ago was used in the paper. That happened to me once, I checked inSPIRE and discovered I had a new paper out. Turned out to be a nice one, too.
To avoid that many of these documents have a "recent membership" type of clause so that you have to have been an active member of the collaboration in the last (typically) year to be credited. "Active" is defined by things like sitting shifts, attending collaboration meetings, contributing institutional funds to the general pool or hardware to the experiment and so on.

Do particle physicists explicitly list all the authors at the beginning of the paper?  Or are there different grades of authorship (mentioned on the first page vs. in an appendix, for example), and if so do people make these distinctions or is everyone considered an author on a equal footing?

@AnonymousMathematician They generally either list all authors at the front or sign it with the collaboration's name. When they use the collaboration name, there is generally some other resource you can use to figure out who was a member at the time of that paper--a web page or some such. Order in the list is rarely significant, but I have been part of groups where a few authors might be listed ahead of the usual list to indicate that they were especially involved in that paper. That is more common among smaller collaborations (say under 100 members).

smaller collaborations (say under 100 members) — Yikes!

@JeffE see e.g. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931200857X. I have even seen examples where the list of authors is longer than the paper! (Sometimes the entire list is given after the paper proper, but I haven't seen a case where some authors are named on the front page and others in an appendix.)

I think there should be a notable difference between "I turned a skrew on that machine we used in the experiment" and "I interpreted the results and wrote two sections of the paper.". :/ In CS, the former would get "only" an acknowledgement with the reasoning that turning a skrew or holding a pipette is not an academic contribution.

@Raphael Well, of course there is, but when you have hundreds of people involved in the experiment there is neither a reasonable way to represent that in the author list nor a way to manage the political difficulties that would arise from trying to formally evaluate it. Even in that large a group, however, people notice who contributes and you won't get on the next experiment if you aren't worth having around.

@Raphael You're assuming the people who contributed this weren't both important and instrumental to the project and the paper. This assumption may be, and often is, incorrect.

@EpiGrad I guess I just can't imagine that many people being of that much import to a 10 page paper. I may be wrong, given that my intuition for this things is formed by (T)CS, but maybe there is also a difference in what "important" and "instrumental" means. Of course skrews have to be turned -- otherwise there is no experiment -- but is it an intellectual task? Depends on the skrew, I guess.

@Raphael I guess the thing is this - it's not a 10 page paper. It's one of a series of papers. The data from those papers needs clinical staff, on the ground, seeing patients. WIthout that, there is no study, and its hard to claim that isn't an intellectual task, or one that requires no specialized expertise. Those people often also have input on the study design as a whole. The objection isn't supposed to be a strong one as much as I find it common with theoretical CS/Math folks that if they can't imagine needing a 25 person research team, there must not be a need.

@Rapael I find that many people don't real comprehend how many person hours and how many specialized skills and analysis go into a particle physics experiment. It is worth noting that while our results papers are often three to ten pages long, most experiments will eventually release a instrumentation paper that may be fifty to a hundred pages long. There really is a need for scores or hundreds of people to get the work done.

I asked the guys at the library of my university about this issue and here is their reply. It looks like if I am member of the research group X, even if I am not among the names on the front page, it counts as a publication for me:

According to the ICMJE guidelines on authorship and contributorship (http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html) you count as an author and will have the same rights and responsibilities regardless of your place in the author list.
Therefore, you also have the right to verify the publication as yours in the bibliometric system.

Again, we are talking about epidemiological research here.
Edit: To me, Anonymous Mathematician is right and the answer I got was meant to be read as: "If you fulfil the 3 ICMJE conditions, it does not matter if your name is written only in the appendix and not on the front page. You're an author just the same".
Edit 2: This is the answer from the library guys after I asked for clarifications

The part of the recommendations that you quote[*] concern who should be considered to be the author on a paper when it's sent to the journal. All the persons in the author list, even the ones that are in a group listed in an appendix, should fulfill all three requirements. If they don't they should be listed in the acknowledgement instead of the author list.
If this is not the case for your article, the responsible authors have not followed the guidelines.

[*] This is what I quoted:

"Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3."

My reading of the ICMJE link is exactly the opposite, that being a member of research group X who is not individually listed as an author means you are not an author.  In particular, it distinguishes between "members of the group who are named as authors" and other members, and it says all individual authors should be identified in the submission.  Being an author means accepting direct responsibility for the manuscript and giving approval for the version to be published; other group members may be mentioned in the acknowledgements as collaborators but aren't authors by ICMJE's definition.

Maybe I have misunderstood, or common practice doesn't exactly follow the ICMJE guidelines, though.

Yes, I have read again (and again and again) the ICMJE site and I share your skepticism. I'll try to contact the library again...


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Can the ethics committee of a university do something about reuse of exam questions?
I thought that it will be huge achievement to get diploma from well ranked university. However, at the end of my studies, as a foreign student I realized that the questions in exams I passed were repeating from past exams. Those past exams were not available in the database, but finding the screenshots from many students led me to believe that many exams are not credential. I'm afraid that this information will diminish the achievement I did by obtaining diploma from this university and hinder the opportunities for finding the job in the market if this information is publicised. I thought to raise this question with the Ethics committee but afraid that it will be David contra Goliath knowing that this practice is accepted as general for so many years. There are so few reusable exam question that actually the same exams are repeating every second year. There is no systematical way offered by the university to access the old exam. So the students communicate them via screenshots.
There is wonderful answer by @ Dan Romik below, how it is possible that he understood the  question and you put on hold as unclear?!

What's your question?

Can the Ethics commity of the university do something to prevent this practice to happen in the future? "I thought to raise this question with the Ethics commity but affraid that it will be David contra Golliath knowing that this practice is accepted as general for so many years."

The practice of reusing exam questions is so widely accepted that I don't understand why you think it is an ethical violation.

The problem is that it is not made available to all students, I agree if it is in the archive, here only some have access to them, It is clear that the intention is to make sure that some students will answer the questions in their proper way creating unauthorized advance knowledge of questions on an examination.

@mak_ec: Are there so few reusable exam questions from previous years that actually memorizing them along with their answers is a viable tactic? Also, please elaborate on what you mean by "It is clear that the intention is to make sure that some students" - whose intention? Are you saying someone is intentionally giving an intentionally chosen subset of students advance knowledge that has an actual, positive effect on their exam results? Also, is passing on information on the questions among students explicitly forbidden (which is what I personally would find a very questionable move by ...

... the university), or is there just no systematical way offered by the university to access the old exams (thus leaving circulation and retrieval of old questions up to the responsibility of each student)? It would be helpful if you could edit all of this information into your question.

Answer to the first quetion is yes, There are so few reusable exam question that actually the same exams are repeating every second year..

Answer to the second question is: They are intentionally given because the subjects are considered as the most difficult in the programme

Answer to the last question is: There is no systematical way offered by the university to access the old exam. So the students communicate them via screenshots.

How do you know that the reason for reusing the questions is to help more students pass by memorizing them?  This would be problematic if it is true, but given the number of potential (and legitimate) reasons for reusing questions, I am not sure how you can be certain of this, much less prove it.  Is your claim based on evidence, or speculation?

@mak_ec: You forgot to answer O.R. Mapper’s most important question: “ Is passing on information on the questions among students explicitly forbidden?” — Also: How do students obtain screenshots of exam questions? Are exams held on your own computer?

No, because reusing exam questions is not unethical. If the exam questions are not publicly available, then getting unauthorized access to them (or distributing them without authorization) is likely to be a violation of academic integrity policies.
There are good reasons for recycling exam questions. In some cases, it's quite difficult to develop an exam that gets a good distribution of scores, tests all the important parts of the curriculum, and is worded clearly. Standardized testing companies have entire teams that validate questions, but individual professors have to get there on their own. If one has an exam that works particularly well, then it may be tempting to reuse it with only minor changes (or even no changes at all).
There is always going to be some cheating, no matter the precautions. As long as it's not systemic (and going well beyond this particular class), it will not affect the reputation of your degree.
If you do want to take some action, you could contact the professor teaching the class. He may well be interested in learning that his questions are being circulated, so he can design a new exam for the next iteration of the class. You should, however, be prepared to explain how you came across the questions (screenshots from other students?).

Reusing exam questions may be unethical, or at least highly inappropriate and unprofessional, depending on how it is done. As an example, in my institution's Code of Academic Conduct, under "Responsibility of the Faculty" we find listed the requirement that the faculty "Use examination formats that discourage academic misconduct." Moreover, as a member of my university's judicial board I saw cases where an instructor's practice of giving the same exam every year led to a major cheating scandal, so the instructor was clearly very negligent.

Thank you for your comment, it is really at the point that I raised in the question. I don't know why I'm criticized for not being clear in my question above, but your opinion is really what I expected and probably a direction to follow. Thank you.


text:
What the difference in CVs between "submitted to" and "to appear in"?
For those papers that have not been accepted, some people write "submitted to" in their CV and some others use "to appear in". I want to know the difference of "submitted to" and "to appear in". Thank you.

Two small additions to the other answers:
First, I have rarely seen "submitted to", but more often simply seen "submitted," with no journal or conference listed. The reason is simple: where you've submitted to makes no difference, since anybody can get any sort of trash rejected by a top journal.  For a "to appear," however, the venue should always be included, since it means you've passed the standards of peer review for that publication.
Second, there is a third category that I have occasionally seen, "in revision."  For areas that have a very slow review process, this can be useful for distinguishing that a publication has passed at least one round of peer review, even though it is not yet "to appear."  It's still a pretty weak distinction from "submitted," however, so I wouldn't advise using it except for occasional edge cases with high-visibility journals.

For those papers that have not been accepted, some people write "submitted to" in their CV and some others use "to appear in".

Does anyone really use "to appear in" to refer to papers that have not been accepted yet?  In my experience (mathematics in the U.S.), "to appear in" means "accepted, but not yet published", and it would be unethical to use it to describe papers that have not yet been accepted.  It might occasionally happen, since not everyone acts ethically, but you wouldn't want to get caught doing that.
I can't rule out the possibility that other fields use these terms differently, but I'd strongly recommend sticking with "submitted to".  It describes an objective fact, while "to appear in" is at best a prediction and could be viewed as an intentionally misleading statement.

This is definitely true for the areas of computer science and biology that I am familiar with as well.

I have never seen "to appear in" in a CV or a grant application. Presumably equivalent to any of these: "Accepted", "Accepted for publication", "in press", or the very formal "in the press" and quite distinct from "submitted" or "in revision".

"Accepted by..." is not uncommon.

This is somewhat implicit in the other answer, but to spell it out: "Submitted" means that it has been submitted to the cited venue, but has not been reviewed and accepted yet. "To appear" or "in press" means that it has been accepted and is working its way through the rest of the publication process. If you know the exact edition of the journal or conference proceedings that it will be published in, "to appear" with a precise citation is probably more useful than "in press" since it points the reader to the exact place it will be findable and at what point in the future.

Another important case is when a paper has been accepted and published online but not yet compiled into an issue of the journal.  You can't give a complete citation because the volume, issue, and page numbers aren't known yet, but you can provide a link to the published online version of the paper.  In that case, "To Appear In...", together with a link to the online publication is appropriate.


text:
Is Scientometrics a scientific discipline?
This question is not about the politics of scientometrics, nor is it on the role of scientometrics in governmental research programs, nor is it about the use of scientometric indices: these questions have been already addressed and debated somewhere else on academia.SE., for instance

Which bibliometrics index to trust more?
Scientifically meaningful sources of bibliometrics
Which is the most accepted measure for an individual's academic productivity?

The following question is about scientific method(s).
After these few words to avoid any debate, I would like to naively ask about the scientific rigor of scientometrics. Is there any kind of rigor/general method/scientific concept behind this field of research? Or maybe a more aggressive question: is scientometry a science?

This just seems to be an insulting question to anyone in or related to the fields of scientometry.

Scientometrics is a science to the extent that it applies the scientific method to a field of inquiry. Researchers in this area formulate questions and conceptualize existing problems (e.g., “in these times of scarcity, the public wants research to be efficient: how can we measure this?”), they make hypotheses, make predictions, gather data to test them, analyze the data and prove or disprove their hypotheses.
Regarding “what do we scientifically learn from scientometrics?”, well, there are plenty of established results (you can find some on wikipedia), but I'll use one recent paper from Scientometrics which highlights what this field can bring us:

Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries
  D. Fanelli, Scientometrics 2012, 90, 891–904

This one was really an eye-opener for me, on a phenomenon which I always supposed existed, but it was nice to see it backed by hard data. Other examples include:

Physical and economic bias in climate change research: a scientometric study of IPCC Third Assessment Report
  A. Bjurström and M. Polk, Climatic Change 2011, 108, 1–22

Language biases in the coverage of the Science Citation Index and its consequences for international comparisons of national research performance
  T. N. van Leeuwen, H. F. Moed, R. J. W. Tijssen, M. S. Visser, A. F. J. van Raan, Scientometrics 2001, 51, 335–346

I'll finish with a personal opinion: while I am annoyed, as most people, with the emphasis currently given on bibliometrics in the evaluation of research and research projects, I think scientometrics in general has an important role to play, just like related fields such as studies on ethics of research: better understanding the positive and negative implications of the way we currently do science is healthy (the meta-level of research).

Thanks a lot for answering this naive question. Thanks also for giving so good examples of applications of scientometrics. Thanks finally for your last remark regarding the difference between bibliometrics and scientometrics. I nevertheless wonder if it exactly answers my question. Your three examples are for sure much more interesting use of the statistical methods than the simple, almost stupid counting of papers I usually heard about in bilbiometrics (h-index, impact factor, ...). Did you really mention that one can make predictions ? Could you please tell me more about that ?

(cont.) If I try to compare scientometrics (with the few knowledge I have about it) with an other (naive) topic where I hope to find statistic and social studies both together, say economics (what a big word, isn't it ?), I have the feeling scientometrics still misses the point, there is no description there, in the scientific sense. Let me put an other naive picture: if I want to compare scientometrics and weather forecast, I would say that they are almost identical, except scientometrics has nothing like the fluid equations at its disposal. My question is: am I missing the point or not ?

@Oaoa have you read the PNAS paper defining the H-index?

@DanielE.Shub Thanks for the link. This one http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025 is for free. Well, when I discuss this paper with colleagues (I'm physicist), we usually do not understand why people uses the h-factor and not the m-one, as discussed by Hirsch.

@F'x +1 for such a nice answer.

@Oaoa There is a difference between proposal of a metric or any kind of a measurement system and the adoption of one. Adoption of a metric is socio-political in nature and rather subjective.

@Oaoa Your previous comment betrays an almost contemptuous disdain of mere "counting" as you put it. Why is counting "lower" in the scientific method than "predictions?" The scientific method makes no such distinctions and thus, your statement would be an opinion against the scientific method and not a fact towards it.

@Shion I then urge you to understand what science is about. Sure counting and predictions are at the same level, in the sense that when counting predicts nothing, it is instantaneously abandoned. Usually it means you have to change your investigation method(s). When a prediction is not verified by counting, it has to be abandoned as well. Of course, I merely replaced here counting=experiment and prediction=theory, which is a kind of abuse, since nobody here can tell me to what extend scientometric is a science, whereas the comparison seems to follow this line.

Regarding the naive-counting (h-factor, impact-factor, ...), of course I hate it ! As the nice F'x's answer shows us, there are clearly more interesting results when you need nice methods of extracting the relevant infos from a mass of data. The usual counting factors can be computed in mass by any computer, they require almost no effort, and they mean nothing. At least, it's the same for me as saying a scientific publication is a piece of paper.

(cont.) I believe they are much more than a single piece of paper that you pile up somewhere, and I would like here to understand how people working in scientometrics see them at the moment. I also believe scientometrics is not only about papers, but also on the long, laborious intellectual process(es) done before publishing. The first example of F'x (about the disappearance of negative result) clearly goes along this line, since it clearly say that, before publishing, researchers exclude they negative results. That's an interesting way of saying this result I believe. Thanks for your comment.

when counting predicts nothing, it is instantaneously abandoned. — False.  Not all science is predictive, or even claims to be.  Also: some true Scotsmen despise haggis.

@JeffE Well, I think I'll make no more comment, since it's totally despairing. Note nevertheless, the first sentence of Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science ], Science entry: Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

@Oaoa I won't go into a didactic argument with you on the definition of science since JeffE gets at its heart in his previous comment. The wikipedia definition of science you link to is limited. It ignores inductive, data driven compilation of knowledge as opposed to the traditional, deductive, hypothesis driven approach which that definition alludes to.

I just want to comment that bibliometrics isn't merely "evaluation of research and research projects" (not sure if this is what you meant though), but more fundamentally it is analysis (statistical, systematic) of publications. As such, it is (sort of) a subfield of Scientometrics (or a method used in scientometrics). It often uses citations, citation relationships, or other bibliometric connections, but it can also overlap with linguistics, information retrieval and other fields.