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what to do when the acceptance deadline has passed with no notification from the reviewers?
I submitted a paper for an Elsevier journal in which the acceptance deadline appears as the 5 of may. The problem is that when I enter into the author´s menu it appears that my paper is with the status Required Reviews Completed and it has been like that for more that one month. Does it mean my paper has already got rejected? what should I do in this case?

Contact the editor and ask about the status of your paper.

Does it mean my paper has already got rejected?

No, that's not what "Required Reviews Completed" means...as you probably know.  Maybe your paper has been or will be rejected and maybe it won't: there is no point in guessing.

what should I do in this case?

Do what one normally does when one's paper is rejected: take the feedback into account and decide whether to resubmit elsewhere and whether to revise your paper.


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should I put this information into the reference section or within the text?
I am making an article about Information Technology, mainly related to policies, and I have a list of some solution providers with their proposals; something like this:
Vendor1, Proposal related to...

I would like to know if the web links that are related to each proposal can be put inside the same list or should I reference them, in some cases I have only web pages and in other pdfs. So should I do this:
Vendor1, Proposal related to ... (information available at http//nosense.com
Vendor2, Proposal related to ... (information available at http//page1/document1.pdf)

or like this:
Vendor1, Proposal related to ... [1]
Vendor2, Proposal.... [2]

References
[1] ...
[2] ...

which one should be the correct way of referencing this information?

Personally, I would put them in the bibliography, but either way looks fine, to me. I don't have a strong opinion, and I suggest you to do what you consider more readable.
However, I have often encountered copy editors who did have strong opinions on matters like this, so be ready to change it if they complain.

If the list is long, you could put it in a table.  Otherwise giving the links in the text is perfectly fine.

The weblinks can be put within the text. It is not a crime.

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in this case which one would be the correct way to reference an article?
I have come across articles that follow a structure similar to the example below:
Article X:
"The disease D has been found to be practically intractable in native communities [reference to article Y]."
In this case, when referencing this information in my text, should I cite article X, article Y, or both? Is it appropriate to structure the citation like this:
"According to article X (ref) and as studied in article Y (ref), the disease D..."?
Also if I have the following scenario:
Article A mentions Article B, Article B mentions Article C, Article C mentions Article D, and so on.
Should I only reference the primary or original article, which is Article A, or should I reference Article A and the original one?
Thanks for your help.

You need to cite what you use. Beyond that, the rules are a bit murkier. If the article you cite provides a way to follow the chain of advancement back to the origin then you have done enough, ethically, but you might want to do more for the convenience of readers interested in the topic. It is often useful to cite the first work, though Euclid is seldom cited anymore in math. You might at least want to mention the name of the originator of a stream of advancement.
If you explicitly use ideas from any works in a chain of reference, then you need to cite those. Otherwise some will wonder whether you are plagiarizing.
And in some work, such as a thesis, in which page limits aren't usually an issue, you might want to cite everything in the chain, since you have (we hope) followed that as part of your literature search.
But if your work depends fundamentally on the work of someone, a citation is appropriate even if you depend explicitly on later works only. Judgement call, but be generous rather than stingy in citation to avoid any disagreements with your work.

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Coverage of Web of Science
The reason I'm asking this question is that I've never used Web of Science before. My apologies if it is silly or irrelevant.
I'm gathering materials for an application to a tenure-track job, and one of the things I have to submit is a list of my publications as indexed in WoS. This is an important thing for them, because they make it clear in the call for applications that those publications that are indexed in WoS are going to count more that those that don't (they do it this way because the call is division-wide, not department-specific, so they use WoS as a scholarship quality metric that doesn't require the members of the search committee to be experts in the specific fields of the candidates).
WoS behaves well in that, if I query my name and field, it returns all of my journal publications, including a couple of obscure book reviews I did in my first year of grad school. On the other hand, it also behaves badly in that it fails to return anything that is not a journal publication. This bothers me because I have a couple of book chapters with reputable presses (e.g., OUP) and proceedings of high-profile conferences that my peers and mentors acknowledge are as important (in terms of quality and contribution to the field) as any of my journal publications; but because they don't appear in WoS, the search committee will view them as second-rate publications.
The question is, is there a way I can make WoS index these publications?

That is a deeply regrettable scheme for evaluating applications.  I don't think Web of Science was ever intended as any kind of "quality stamp" for the sources it indexes.  I don't have a solution for you, only condolences.

I was afraid this was going to be the answer. Your condolences are gladly accepted.

Web of Science is terrible in coverage of many fields (not sure what yours is from the post), and if you're stuck with it, you're stuck with it.  Try to see if there's anywhere that you can also say, "and here are my important publications that WoS doesn't cover, and here are all of their many many citations..."

Indeed, do not "submit" to the vagaries of commercial "status arbiters"... While employers may enjoy the seeming convenience of a single number by which to rank applicants, those numbers are not seriously reflective of much... but one must both be politic about this, and yet assert that there is something beyond the for-profits' product.

To answer the question directly, No, you can't get Web of Science to index your other publications.  They only index papers from a collection of sources that they've deemed high quality and been able to negotiate access to.  If the journal you've published in isn't on their list (or if you've published in a conference proceedings volume or a book chapter) then it simply won't be indexed.  Furthermore, their citation counts won't include citations that occurred in publications that they don't index.
Other services have different policies on this.  Google Scholar is perhaps the most broad in its coverage, but this sometimes includes things like student term papers that aren't in any normal sense considered "publications."  There are also various discipline specific services (such as MathSciNet for pure mathematics) but their coverage is often quite narrow.
When comparing the publications and citation counts of two scholars in the same field, you can typically use any of these sources and assume that the two authors are on an even playing field.  However, it's a very unwise idea to do this across disciplines, since the various services have very different coverage of different fields.  For example, Web of Science does an awful job of covering computer science (particularly because of the many important conference proceedings in that discipline) but gives much more reasonable coverage of fields like chemistry and physics.
Similarly, it's unreasonable to compare citation counts across the different services because of the differences in what they index.

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How to preempt plagiarism accusations
In 2006, when I was still in grad school, I wrote a paper that went through the usual motions: I discussed it with my advisor, I presented it at a peer-reviewed conference, and then published it as a refereed chapter in an edited volume. Right before the volume came out, I was explaining the paper to a friend from another university and he went: "oh, I think Professor Bigshot said something similar in his semi-obscure 1970 dissertation!". I checked the dissertation in question and, indeed, what I wrote is essentially what Professor Bigshot wrote in 1970, give or take some minor variations in the formalism.
Something to keep in mind here is that this is not plagiarism. I came up with the idea totally on my own, and I didn't reference Professor Bigshot's dissertation because nobody (not my supervisor, not the conference audience, not the chapter referees) told me about it in time. What worries me is that other people might think I took the relevant dissertation passage and plagiarized it. So far, nobody has happened, but I'm want to preempt plagiarism claims in the future. Obviously, nothing can be done about the published chapter, so I have modified the downloadable preprints in both my website and the go-to repository of my field, adding a note that explains the situation and giving proper credit to Professor Bigshot.
Is this enough, or is there anything else I can do?

I don't see what else you can do.  I'm a little surprised that you're worried that someone will view this as plagiarism (especially after eight years).  Independent rediscovery is a fact of life in any sufficiently rich academic field.  From the fact that you didn't plagiarize, it follows that no one can prove that you did.  Anyone who doesn't take you at your word when you've given no one a good reason to believe that you've behaved dishonorably is himself not behaving honorably.

You have behaved ethically. You independently rediscovered something [obscurely] published earlier. Upon discovering the duplication of results, you have publicly noted that so-and-so worked in this area 40 years ago, with similar results. Your work was independent, so Professor Bigshot should take it as a confirmation of his work. It's certainly not plagiarism, and by drawing attention to the earlier work, you have pre-empted any such claims. Sleep peacefully.

This happens all the time: just mention the other person's work now, as it deserves to be acknowledged. It should be different enough that people won't think it is plagiarism. If there are sentences/paragraphs with identical text, well...then you plagiarized. :) But that is not the case, right?

@neuronet Strictly speaking even if OP somehow ended up writing the same text independently they did not actually plagiarise, although of course convincing somebody of this is a tough sell.

It is hard, if not impossible, to pre-empt accusations of plagiarism. The key is to be prepared to defend yourself. People rediscover stuff all the time. I would make sure that you keep all of your notes, drafts and any literature searches you may have done. I think keeping them privately would be fine, but if you really wanted to, you could make them publicly available in an archival manner to demonstrate that it is really your work.

One of things to do is to start publicly acknowledge the previous work, mentioning that your own contribution has been merely a re-discovery of a lesser known result, or maybe a result from the other research field than yours. Such things happen from time to time, and are not necessarily considered as plagiarism, unless an author continue to act in a way that justifies such a characterisation.

You will not be able to pre-empt every possible accusation in academia.  If you were not aware of this earlier work when you wrote the paper, then don't worry about it -- at all.  It simply isn't plagiarism.  I would cite this earlier work in future papers, if it is relevant.  But, dissertations are really not the best sources to be citing (at least in the social sciences) -- and the best dissertations are spun off into articles.
Also, what is the purpose of "giving credit to Professor Bigshot?"  If the article was based on that person's work, then you give credit by citing that work accordingly.  However, if you didn't even see that work when you wrote the paper, then it isn't necessary.  Your steps to highlight this issue on your website is commendable, but I don't think it is warranted.  I suggest that you don't worry about this issue anymore.

The first paragraph is mostly on-target, except "dissertations are really not the best sources to be citing".  There is a sense in which that is true -- it is not good to cite a dissertation in the sense of relying on it because dissertations may not be publicly available and may (sadly, but it's still true) not have been refereed to professional standards: one does wonder a bit about a result that appears in a dissertation and that has not been published.   However, that's not the present sense of "cite": if the OP had read the dissertation, then of course he would have needed to cite it.

However, the second paragraph is really wrong.  If the paper had been published in a journal, then following up with an addendum / corrigendum / statement of priority would have been an appropriate thing to do given the OP's description of the situation.  I find your question about the purpose of this weird: the purpose is to acknowledge someone else's priority on a certain result, so as to....give them credit.  See for instance http://www.math.uga.edu/~pete/Baker-Schmidt81.pdf for an instance of this.  It is quite common.

@PeteL.Clark Turing's On Computable Numbers springs to mind as another example, having been pipped to the post by Church, Turing then not only acknowledged but demonstrated the equivalence of their methods.

@Ollie: Sure, there are so many examples.  I gave the one I did because I wanted to point to an actual paper and this one, having come up in a relatively recent literature search I did, was close at hand.  The more important the work, the more important this sort of thing is.  In my own field perhaps the most important instance of this is the following remarkable paper of Harold Stark: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/33039. From these examples we can see that the greats are often willing to do some intellectual work in order to demonstrate the essential priority of others.

There seems to be a difference in opinion about what citing is for. BrianP seems to take the view that you cite the sources that you use; @PeteLClark seems to take the view that you cite not only the sources you use, but also give credit to related work that predates your own - even if you didn't use it. I tend to side with the latter, since academia feels very strongly about 'who was first'.

There is absolutely no doubt that your publication constitutes plagiarism, but - importantly - of the unintentional rather than the intentional kind. It is still plagiarism however. The only proper course of action is indeed the one you have already taken; if the professor is still active, it might be a good idea to let him know directly.

It's interesting to see your "no doubt" in light of the other answers and comments, that have stood unchallenged for over five years... Maybe it'd be useful if you could provide your definition of plagiarism. The ones I've seen tend to prominently include "use of another's work, words, or ideas", which, as far as I can tell, wouldn't apply here.

There is absolutely no doubt that you don't know what plagiarism means.

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Directly contacting a referee of my paper
A few months ago, I submitted a paper to a journal, and received a "can be published if such-and-such issues are addressed properly". I know who one of the reviewers (the one that wrote the most helpful review, in fact) is, largely because he decided to reveal his name in the review. In a couple of weeks, I'll happen to be in the vicinity of his university (this is serendipitous; I had already planned this trip before I knew he would be one of the reviewers).
Is it acceptable to contact him, tell him I'm the author of that paper he reviewed, and ask him if he has time for a meeting to discuss how I am addressing his comments? I have no shame in admitting that I am considering doing this to ensure that he is happy with my amendments to the paper, which in turn should make the second round of reviewing go more smoothly.

Although the fact that the referee already revealed their identity is already strange, I think it is a bad idea to directly contact referees, even if the purpose is arguably constructive... if only for the precedent that it sets, with changing expectations on both sides, in contrast to single-blind or double-blind refereeing. Among other things, it invites others to be suspicious of your publication, I think.

@paulgarrett Not strange at all to reveal your identidy in many fields. Many journals give the option of revealing your identity to the authors. However, I do think all communication should go through the handling editor, to make the process transparent, and to make sure that the editor knows about the communication.

This should depend on the journal policy. Both you as an author and the reviewer are bound by the rules the journal has in place with respect to the publication process. While it sounds like you are meeting with the reviewer solely for the purpose of improving the paper but it may come across as going out of one's way to others. To be on the safe side, I would suggest you contact the journal editor before organizing such a meeting. With a sign-off from the editor, you can be sure that you are playing a fair game. I would also keep co-authors in the loop if any.

I think there is nothing inherently wrong with contacting the reviewer given that he has volunteered his name (and uncommon but commendable step). That said, you need to remain aware that that doesn't make her your friend and collaborator. Her duty is still to critically evaluate your paper. So, contacting or meeting her to discuss specific points of the critique seems fair game to me. But, asking how best to improve the paper, running ideas by her, asking for suggestions on how to address points best, etc, makes for an awkward conversation since you are putting the other person into a conflict of interest: helping you vs remaining impartial.
In other words, if you do end up having a longer conversation it would certainly be useful to have a frank conversation up front in which you lay out what you want to ask, and to offer right away that you don't think that she has any obligation to answer or help you with it.
If I was the reviewer, I would probably decline to meet, precisely because I'd like to avoid the conflict. But it takes a bit of experience to see a conflict of interest coming before you get yourself into it.

Why is it commendable of the reviewer to give their name? At least as long as the paper is still in review, it seems against the spirit of peer review. For instance, if the reviewer is a “big name” in the field, authors may be tempted to tailor their paper to the known tastes of the reviewer. It could also create the expectation that the reviewer wants something in return for a favorable review.

That's a pessimistic view. My view is that we give reviewers anonymity so that they can say what they really think. If someone is willing to attach their name to it, they also put their reputation in the pool, rather than hiding. You can't write a crappy review and then sign it with your name.

I agree that what I wrote represents a pessimistic view :-). Mostly I wanted to give possible negative interpretations, not to say I would personally think so in every case (as always, context matters). I am only familiar with peer-review where the referees but not the authors are anonymous. I can definitely see an argument for treating both parties the same; but as long as (or in fields where) there is a strong norm for anonymous referees, giving your name might raise eyebrows, if for no other reason than because it is unusual.

Also, you have to take into account that already the referees are not truly anonymous, since the editor knows who they are. Of course it is not the same at all, but it should still provide some incentive against a crappy review.

Maybe, but crappy reviews do happen, and from people you know. As an editor, I've solicited dozens of reviews for papers, mostly from people I know. This should guarantee good reviews, but that's not always the case.

I think communications should go through the handling editor, for two reasons:

Since you plan to resubmit the manuscript, the same reviewer will probably be used to evaluate the manuscript again, and the editor will then rely on the reviewer as an independent agent without any conflict of interest. Therefore, communications should go through the editor, so that he/she is aware of how you have discussed the manuscript.
It "shields" the reviewer at the initial stage. The reviewer's responsibilities lie with the journal/editor at the moment, and the reviewer shouldn't have to deal with author requests if he/she doesn't want to. If the reviewer chooses to contact you after initial request throught the editor, that is another thing.

Because of point 1, I think meeting in person is bad idea, even after initial contact through the editor. I also honestly do not see the point of meeting in person, considering the conflict-of-interest this can introduce - if the reviewer's comments are unclear, so that you are uncertain on how to proceed, you can request a clarification from the editor.
The journal probably has a policy on how authors and reviewers can/should interact, so you should contact the editor either way, before approaching the reviewer.


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Should non-talk slides be included in the handout?
I'm putting together a slideshow for an upcoming talk (I'm in a field where slideshows are slowly becoming common, and these colloquia are always good opportunities to get used to things like this). The talk itself only runs to slide 20 or so, but after that I'm going to have another 20-25 slides to help me deal with a number of questions that I anticipate might arise during Q&A. I'm going to make a printout of the slideshow and distribute it as a handout.
The question is, should I include the non-talk slides in the handout? The way I see it:
Pro:

helps audience members understand my answers to their questions.
provides a more detailed overview of certain areas where an efficient presentation requires simplification of the content.

Con

paper cost (ecologically, not financially): we are talking about 3-4 extra sheets of paper per handout.
people who are interested in the content of these slides will probably go and ask me for the paper instead; people who aren't interested in that level of detail will probably not even look at them.

What is this thing called paper?

I think the second bullet of Con pretty much answer your question: Give the print-out of the non-talk slides when requested. You can tell the audience who ask questions that you have print-outs ready if they are interested.

You can also ask them to give you e-mail addresses so that you can send them more info later.

I think that if you are going to prepare a handout, you might as well add all of the material in the handout, including your backup slides.  After all, you've put them in there for a reason, and since you might share them during the talk, you might as well share them in the handout as well.

If you feel the need to have a printout just include the ones you are going to use in your presentation and even those I would not give out until after your presentation.  You want your audience listening to you and watching your talk related slide not thumbing through printouts of other things you have given them.
The non talk slides will be useful if required for the question and answer part but not all people will necessarily be interested in someone else's question and therefore the slide.
I would subsequently make available all slides either via a website if possible or via emailing or dropbox or some other form of electronic modality.
Good luck with the presentation


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Can a theoretical physicist win a Nobel Prize anymore?
The background: The big news in the science world this week is that, on Thursday, it will be officially announced that LIGO has detected gravitational waves. Some people have even started talking about a Nobel Prize. I agree that this is a momentous accomplishment and these people deserve all the nerd glory the world has to offer; that said, I feel that, in a fair world, this Nobel Prize should be shared between LIGO and (posthumously) Albert Einstein. After all, he is the one that came up with the theory of physics that predicts things like gravitational waves.
The observation: Nobel Prizes can't be awarded to deceased individuals; the Nobel Committee doesn't award Prizes for theoretical work before its predictions are experimentally confirmed; and theoretical physics is churning out ideas that can't be directly tested with today's technology and resources. Put these factors together, and  I have this uneasy feeling that  Englert and Higgs might have been the last theorists to receive a Nobel Prize. It really looks like Stephen Hawking and Ed Witten, which are widely recognized as among the best theoretical physicists ever, will never get one. For practical purposes, the Nobel Prize in Physics has become the Nobel Prize in Engineering Physics.
The question: are there any theoretical physicists that are young enough, their work groundbreaking enough, and the testing technology sufficiently within our current reach, that a Nobel Prize could reasonably be awarded to them?

For once, there is much more to theoretical physics than cosmology and high energy particles. Condensed matter, quantum optics, mathematical modelling... are all hot topics of research, that can also keep a very close contact with the lab. On the other hand, if one publishes ground breaking work as a part of their PhD, the experimentalists have around 60 years to come up with a confirmation.

Witten doesn't need a Nobel prize.  He has a Fields medal.

Though there may be a reason for that. The prizes were originally intended for people who benefited humanity the most, and while discovering gravitational waves will likely be an important point in human history, it's a lot easier to see the direct impact that, say, the invention of the blue LED has had on humanity. I'm not saying which is better, but I am saying it makes more sense in the spirit of the Nobel prizes.

There have been numerous Nobels to theoreticists over the past 20 years in solid state physics. Many of the recent Nobels have also jointly gone to people who participated in developing the theoretical underpinning of what was earlier or later experimentally observed.

@WolfgangBangerth And not only in solid state physics, but also in optics, like Claude-Cohen Tannoudji e Roy J. Glauber: both are theoreticians.

Saying that Stephen Hawking is "widely recognized as among the best theoretical physicists ever" sounds like something a person outside the field would say. Hawking is certainly one of the most famous theoretical physicists! But I have not heard my colleagues in the field refer to him with the same reverence that laymen do. (Note: I am not a physicist either.)

@TomChurch Well we can always play semantics here.  "Widely recognized" makes no specifications on the "by who?" question, so must apply to everyone, be they burger flipper or Witten.  And in that sense, saying Hawking is "widely recognized..." is decidedly true.  Who can trump him globally other than Einstein?  I think Hawking beats out even Feynman and Newton in the worldwide public mind.  The general opinion of physicists on Hawking is almost certainly different from the public opinion; a quick google search on "what do physicists think of stephen hawking" produces a number of results.

you still could win a nobel prize in theroetical physics solving the 'Navier Stokes equation' see http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems the last unsolved classical physics prfoblem

We've now seen three Nobel prizes in physics awarded since the posting of this question (February 2016), and I think it's fair to say that the answer has proven to be an unequivocal 'yes'. So far, four out of nine physics Nobel laureates have been theorists.
The 2016 prize was awarded to three condensed matter theorists (Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz) "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". The 2017 prize was awarded to Weiss, Barish, and Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Of these, Kip Thorne is very much a theorist, known for his work in relativity and astrophysics, and for being one of the authors of that one thick book with an apple on the cover.

An empirical answer to a theoretical question :)

I have heard it suggested that a prize might be awarded for Density Functional Theory.  It is a very widely applied theory, unlike Hawking's black hole predictions.  The theory is relatively new and continues to evolve, so major contributors are still alive.  I will not name names.  It is possible a chemistry prize might be awarded instead of a physics prize.

But Kohn did win a Nobel Chemistry prize for DFT, back in 1998?


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How to prevent cheating on take-home exams
For certain undergrad classes, I assign a take-home exam, rather than the more familiar in-class exam. When I distribute the exam, I remind the students that this is an individual exam, and that they may not work in groups, and then I add "Believe me, I can tell when you cheat". This, however, is a bluff. Unless it is superobvious, I can't tell if students work together; I only tell them I can to scare them into honoring the rules.
Are there any ways, other than lying to the students, to prevent (or at least minimize) this type of cheating in take-home exams?

By individual exam, would using say, Mathematica, count as cheating on a problem?

No. Other than working together, they can use whatever resources they can get their hands on. I allow this because, again, answering the questions properly is effectively impossible unless they understand the relevant primary readings that I cite in the question formulation.

Any chance you can give us the general subject?

A sample question goes along the lines of: "look at this funny phenomenon! Smith 2011 has a nice idea about why things work like this. Explain how Smith's idea relates to the topic of Lecture 5".

Ask for real-world examples and applications.

I can't help but wonder if there are figures regarding how many students make money solving exams for others, and how much. I wouldn't just worry about the testees working together, I would also worry that this might be fertile soil for a sort of black market. Probably much cheaper to hire someone to solve one exam than the white market approach of hiring them to tutor you for weeks.

@BenCrowell: got any references for those legal considerations?

@Koldito: Can you explain why you decided to give a take-home exam in the first place? What do you hope to achieve with it as opposed to giving "the more familiar" exam in class?

Tell us the subject. There's a huge difference between plagiary detection in liberal arts vs history vs math. Is the exam essay, short questions, MCQ, proofs...? Do they submit it electronically or on paper?

You should not bluff.  It will be found out.  If you want to see one who is not bluffing, you might want to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4

@BenCrowell I'd guess that this means that a teacher can't punish a student with a failing mark by themselves, but needs to report the cheating to the responsible officials who (after lots of bureaucracy) can decide on a punishment.

@einpoklum a take home exam can evaluate how well you do on longer, more difficult problems, and how you deal with literature.

@BenCrowell Sounds like that's just your administration wanting to avoid drama. At my university in CA (one of the CSU's), the minimum punishment for cheating is an F.

I remember asking the same question in Sweden. The locals basically answered, "who would even consider cheating?". They apparently have a strong culture of do-on-your-own take-home exams (probably due to having to manage remote students during long, harsh winters), including an honor code. That's probably not easy to synthesize (esp. in cultures that emphasize "whatever it takes"). So, just make the exam so hard that even groups will struggle?

Another point I wanted to make, in addition to my answer, is that when you tell them "I know when you cheat" - you're really telling me "it's common practice to try to cheat in this kind of exams". I wonder if that doesn't exacerbate the problem more. Also - do people actually cheat? Do you know for a fact this actually happens? Maybe you're worried for no reason?

@BenCrowell F in the course.

Make it a practice to allocate time after the exam to go through the exam, and ask randomly-selected students to explain their answer to the class. Students who have supplied a correct answer but are unable to explain it may have copied it from somewhere without understanding it. It is not necessary to have every student explain an answer, but the risk of being called on will usually increase their fear of being caught.

One way to do it: if the assignment has many small questions, you can make it more difficult taking a random draw from a bigger pool for each student, so they are all slightly different. So, any pair of students would have just a portion of them in common. This can appear unfair, but it should even out if you do it many times.
But, if this were a fight, you would be on the losing side; for any strategy you can come up with, someone else would find the way to hack it. You should instead focus on making people not want to cheat.

Make the problems interesting challenges, not mechanical tasks. If it involves some creative thinking it is less likely that two students arrive independently to the same solution (and even less to arrive to the same solutions in each exercise).
But make them approachable. If they look impossible, it is more tempting to cheat. In a course I took recently, we had to solve an easier version of a problem, and apply it to a more difficult one. We only had to hand in the difficult version, but handing in only the easy part gave also points.

For what I have seen from a student perspective, the more advanced the course, the less likely cheating is, and the more frowned upon by the other students is.

@BenCrowell certanly, it just lowers the probabilities. I can give you my solutions, but working an extra set of problems is more difficult.

Giving the students different tests is unfair and doesn't prevent cheating.

Why is it unfair to give students different tests, if all of the problems were drawn randomly from the same pool?

@DavidRicherby I'm with Trevor here. Some questions are bound to be easier than others, but they will also cover parts of the material one student is more used to than others. When there are enough questions, the exams are statistically fair.

@TrevorWilson Being from the same pool is completely irrelevant unless every single question in that pool is of precisely the same difficulty.

@TobiasKildetoft for more or less uniform difficulty, and enough number of questions, it would  be perfectly fair. Difficulty is not uniform across students, and the variability they perceive will be much larger than the random selection effect.

@Davidmh Sure, 97.5% of the students will get a test that's within two standard deviations of the mean difficulty. And the other 2.5%...

@DavidRicherby The other 2.5% will fall asleep just before learning the material that would have helped answering that question that will be in the exam, so they would get a statistically unfair result anyway.

@DavidRicherby But the standard deviation in difficulty will be negligible when compared to all the other random factors that affect the performance on an exam.

@TobiasKildetoft I would change "precisely the same difficulty" to "approximately the same difficulty," where the requisite degree of approximation can be relaxed as the number of questions randomly selected for each exam increases.  At some point any "unfairness" created by these small deviations is dwarfed by the unfairness that results from completely different exams being given in different terms, or by different professors in the same term (as well as the random factors that others have mentioned.)

@AAA I think you may have directed your comment to the wrong person.

The solution I've observed at my Alma Mater: Take-home exams are given only with very few questions, which are non-trivial and open-ended. Now, if several students work together on this exam, but every one of them manages to come up with an answer which doesn't read like a copy of the other students' answers - then, well, that means they have some sort of command of the material, even if they didn't come up with the idea themselves.
Of course, this is mostly relevant for more advanced courses. In more basic courses, there are never any home exams.

@BenCrowell short of assigning a spy drone to each one of your students 24/7, there is no scheme that could prevent that.

@Davidmh Not using take-home exams mostly prevents ringers.

@BenCrowell: There have not been any known cases of this happening, at least in my department. Also, the hand-writing would not be the same, and the style would be different than the student's homework assignments (if you've saved copies). Now, sure, the culprit might transcribe his contractor's work, but then you just really want the 24/7 spy drone...

@einpoklum: Who handwrites anything outside of exam conditions? (I don't handwrite things in exam conditions either, but that is because I physically can't)

Well, whoever can hand-write an exam in class can hand-write it at home. If the teacher trusts you s/he might accept a typed-up solution.

Don't, maybe? They can't cheat if collaboration isn't against the rules.
Do you care what the students know, or do you care how they learn it?
Why not consider setting it as a coursework assignment, and taking away the restriction entirely? You open the door to them being able to collaborate, work together, come up with creative solutions. Tell them to declare who they worked with in a short section at the top.
Education has this strange focus on separating people: when was the last time you did an assignment, research project or similar truly alone? In the professional world I've never once done a truly solo project: finding solutions as part of a team is a vital skill, and this sounds like a perfect opportunity to encourage it.
Grading is important, of course, and there is a time for differentiating between students... that time is in the formal, controlled examinations. Everything else is a learning exercise, and if they learn it by working with a friend, fantastic.

I agree. You can't prevent people working together so rather than penalizing the honest ones it's much easier to allow working together and structure the homework appropriately.

"Tell them to declare who they worked with in a short section at the top." Even better, ask them to write down, in detail, exactly what each collaborator contributed.

Yes, and in the real world it is often very difficult to tell who has actually done the work and people tell untruths about it to gain advancement. The problem with this idealistic standpoint is that although some students will collaborate in an equitable way, there are others who are happy to copy work and not have the faintest understanding of what is going on. Yes, they will get found out in an exam, and that's fine so long as the coursework component is a minor contributor to the overall mark.

Spend 10 minutes interviewing each student on part of their answer.    You don’t tell the students in advance what part of the answer you will ask them about, and you ask students different interview questions depending on their answer.
If the student can show they understand and can expand the answer, then do you care if they cheated?
The interview is also lickly to help the student learn and provide you with good information on areas that lots of students are finding hard.

...and if there are 400 students in the class?  Even only 100 students and it makes for two full workdays conducting interviews.

@J... We use that strategy for software assignments in a class of 600.  It's expensive, but it works.  It also offers the opportunity for personalised feedback.

@J...: I announce in class that I would interview a sample of the students. In any case, a take-home exam in a 400-student class is not a very good idea.

Some of the MOOC (massively open online courses) such as  MITx 6.002x appear to give each participant slightly different parameters for exercises. That prevents students from directly copying results, though they can, of course, collaborate on the solution methods (and that is encouraged via online forums). It would probably be too much effort to do this manually, but perhaps you could have a few versions and distribute the questions randomly (or not-so-randomly if you have specific suspicions).

This is what my university does for physics homework. The traditional problems have different numbers for everybody, and the multiple choice problems have slightly different questions and answers.

I recently received a take-home exam with an interesting surprise: 50% of the credit was for a problem that required us to augment our solution to a previous homework assignment. There was no way students could work together on this problem because we had all previously turned in different solutions to that homework assignment, and our instructor graded the exam in the context of our previous homework submission. This may or may not work depending on the format of your assignments (the problems would obviously need to be open-ended).
That said, most instructors at my school only give take-home exams when they do expect students to work together.

This might be problematic if some people didn't succeed in their previous assignment – now they are punished a second time. (Assuming failing one assignment doesn't automatically fail the whole course.)

One of my professors dealt with a cheating problem during a midterm exam by putting a question on the final exam which required us to refer to our final projects ("write SQL queries of sufficient complexity to your final project database..."). That question accounted for 25% of the exam score. (Note that these were in-class exams, not take-homes.)

@PaŭloEbermann Not necessarily; it depends how the "augmentation" is graded.  Also, students should know that they are expected to learn to do the homework problems correctly even if they did them incorrectly the first time (although it wouldn't hurt to remind them of this.)

@PaŭloEbermann ... My comment assumes that the previous homework assignment has already been graded and handed back; otherwise I can see how your objection would apply.

There is no fool-proof system so the task becomes how to make something that reduces the number of cheating opportunities. In my experience, I see take home's as a tool for advanced courses with smaller number of students and the rest of my response needs to be viewed from this perspective.
A first consideration regards the type of questions asked. Simple questions with "obvious" standard answers are not generally suitable because the answers can easily be copied. Hence essay type answers where no obvious unique answer is possible is better. This hints at answers where the students understanding and knowledge has to be synthesised is the aim. In my field, I have used several images of landscapes asking students to chose one and identify and describe processes as one such type of question. It is quite difficult to cheat n this type since I would not expect two students to identify the same subset of possible observations to discuss. How this type of question can be transferred to other disciplines is a matter of imagination. another favourite is the following

Asking relevant questions is a key aspect of academia. Formulate a key scientific question within "the topic" and provide an good answer to the question.

With simpler type of questions, I believe providing a narrow time frame for replying can be part of a solution. Here there are two main ingredients, one is to provide questions in a random order to the different students so that question n is likely different for each student and then to provide a very narrow time limit for students to respond. Questions can, for example be made available through a server (of some sort) at a given time and then requesting answers to be submitted before a given deadline, either enforced strictly or by a, possibly incremental, reduction of credit by degree of lateness. An alternative is to release questions incrementally to each student and enforce a strict deadline before another question will be issued. I do not have suggestions for how to implement such an exam but it can be accomplished with simple learning platforms but may involve some work by the teacher to facilitate. I would not think it is useful for very large groups.

Tight deadlines should be broad enough to fit into students' lives; otherwise, people may feel more tempted to cheat. Also, you may run into problems with home network suddenly broken.

+1 for the idea of having students actually write something about their thinking

Lock an RFID ankle bracelet to each student, and hand them a tablet and headphones.  The tablet contains the test, and the headphones must be worn whenever they are answering test questions.  The tablet's camera can verify the face and proper headphone placement.  Further, it will determine if there are any other students from this class within visual range via the RFID ankle bracelets.  The bracelets detect tampering or covering (such as in tinfoil).  The headphones have microphones and detect if there are any nearby voices loud enough to penetrate the headphones, thus defeating using telephone or other means of vocal communication.  The face recognition on the tablet includes eye tracking, if the student looks at anything other than the tablet during the test, the question in view is graded 0.
Alternately, don't use take home tests where cooperation can alter the results.
It seems that the only reason to give a take home test when cooperation would be a problem is if the time to complete the test is longer than a single class period.  However, there are few times when this should be the case.  Break such tests up into smaller quizzes, use a testing center, or any number of other solutions that will allow you to test without sending it home with them.
So the correct answer is - you don't.  If the test depends on non-cooperation, then you must have it supervised. If you can't supervise it, you alter it so cooperation doesn't pose a problem.

The implementation of such an electronic system is left as an exercise for the interested educator.

...but I am available by the hour.  "Consulting: If you aren't part of the solution, there's a lot of money to be made prolonging the problem."

Your sense of humor is greatly needed around here buddy. LOL!

Here's my position on handling cheating on take-home exams.

Make it clear that answers must reflect independent effort. I would put this in the syllabus:

You may consult your textbook, notes, and standard Internet resources when taking take-home exams, but your work must be original and you may not solicit or obtain assistance from or provide assistance to other people for any specific content on the exam. Activities considered cheating include (but are not limited to) copying or closely paraphrasing content from websites, discussing exam questions with other students, and asking for help with specific questions on Internet forums. All exams are checked for originality and copied content and anyone found cheating will be assigned a failing score for the exam.

Make sure questions assess actual understanding of the content. Simple multiple-choice questions are easy to cheat on in a take-home exam. Free-response conceptual questions provide a more effective assessment of student understanding. They can be made more resistant to cheating by using questions that cannot be easily answered in their entirety through simple Internet research. In addition, it is easier to determine if a free-response answer is original or copied compared to multiple-choice responses (more on that in the next point).
Check exam results closely for cheating. In addition to checking for highly similar or copied answers among exams, I would check responses online to determine if they are copied from some online resource. You can use Google to do this—search for select phrases in answers in double quotes to find exact matches for the phrases. This can go a long way towards detecting cheating in take-home exams.

Take-home exams have always baffled me. I've never really understood their purpose when the material assessed could be achieved through a traditional or open-book exam, or as a time-sensitive (no extensions) class assignment.
Regardless, I did complete a few during my undergraduate career, and looking up old submissions (that yes, for some crazy reason I still have on my hard drive) they tended to be essay style take-homes. This meant that the possibility for cheating was on the lesser side, since it would be easier to detect if a student copied another student due to the subjectiveness of the task.
As others have suggested, exams that have very standard responses are perhaps not the best route to go for a take-home exam. You would be better to have a much more open-ended style that suits the subject you are teaching.
You could have the take-home exam be perhaps a broad question that students have to answer through the development of a project using the knowledge they've gained in the course. After all, it's not the core material itself that is of the uptmost value, it's the level of critical thinking students develop when using said material to attempt to solve complex problems or issues.

How do you mark the papers?
Do you mark a paper in its entirety before moving on?
If so this is wrong. You should mark everyone's questions 1's first then all the question 2's etc...
This will help you too see any patterns and also keep consistency.
What course do you teach? If it is maths/physics then it should be very obvious. I suppose it should be very obvious for essay style questions as well.

This doesn't seem like it would be an effective way to detect or deter unauthorized collaboration. It would only catch the most obvious cheating, that the student hasn't attempted to hide at all.

@ff524, in high school my math teacher told us that to be able to successfully cheat you need to know enough to pass without cheating. In my experience, this shows: cheaters are incompetent.

@vonbrand Are you suggesting that all/most cases of cheating are obvious, and trivial to detect and prove? That's the aspect of this post I was criticizing, and I really don't think that's true.

@ff524, sadly the only cases of cheating I'm reasonably sure of have been bungled cases, in one way or the other. So the sample is certainly biased. Yes, I've learnt of sophisticated cheating arrangements, but they have been far in between. Also note "I'm sure they cheated", and even "I'm quite certain they did it so and so" is certainly no "proof".


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It's been one month since the graduate advisor (also the POI) said will get back to me regarding my grad application, should I send a follow up email?
It's been one month since the graduate advisor (also the POI) said will get back to me regarding my grad application, should I send a follow up email or should I just wait? He said in the last email that he is checking something for me and will get back to me as soon as possible, but it's towards the end of March, I am little nervous and worried. I don't want to sound too pushy and impatient since he already said he'll get back to me asap...should I still follow up? if yes, any advice to ask him about the status very politely?

Have you talked to him in the past month regarding some other unrelated matters?

Thanks for your reply! No I haven't. The last time we have exchanged emails ended with he said he will get back to me asap.

A month is a lot longer than "ASAP." He may have simply forgotten (I know my "to do" items get lost if I don't actually put it on my to-do list!). I would definitely send a polite follow-up email.

Thank you for your reply! Yea, I thought so. Any advice on how to ask him politely without sounding impatient?

Reply to the last email that he/she sent and say in a line, "Hello Dr. X, I'm wondering if there is any news regarding my grad application. Thanks very much!"

It's been one month since the graduate advisor (also the POI) said will get back to me regarding my grad application, should I send a follow up email?

Yes. They have probably forgotten about the correspondence.

I don't want to sound too pushy and impatient since he already said he'll get back to me asap...should I still follow up? if yes, any advice to ask him about the status very politely?

Reply to his last mail with the same subject line (and correspondence below) and say something simple like:
Hi X,

I was wondering if there were any updates since we last spoke?

Thanks,
Y

He might have forgotten that, or the task is lagging in a big queue. The trick here and similar situations is to have something under development which you share with that person and each time you announce some  progress in that, so in this way you remind him indirectly about your case. This can be a proposal, a statement of purpose, a paper, .... So you send an email announcing some small improvements in that shared thing.
If you do not have any such thing then think of something like a conference, a ... and send an email asking "Does this help for my graduate studies?" this is an indirect way of asking about your grad application.


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How can I express "I can't find any papers written about this"?
I'm an undergraduate writing a paper for a philosophy course in logic. My paper is exploring a relationship between Leibniz' logic and graph theory. In writing the paper, I've found some material in Leibniz' work on combinatorics that (to me) strongly resembles graph theory. However, I can't find anything that seriously discusses Leibniz in relation to the history of graph theory --- everything seems to start with Euler. (Most read "Leibniz made early contributions to topology. Later on, Euler developed graph theory" and continue onward from there)
I'd like to be able to say "I looked around on Google scholar, etc, and I couldn't find anything about this topic" by way of suggesting "It's possible that the midterm paper that you're reading is bumping up against an original area of research."
What kind of evidence is appropriate in this situation? Would providing something like the number of results of a search on Google scholar be worthwhile? In general, is there a technique to demonstrate the absence of literature about a certain topic?

I looked around on Google scholar, etc — I think/hope you misspelled "library".

@JeffE why? it's very likely that Google Scholar has more papers and books indexed than the library and the search function works probably better as well.

@JeffE I mostly mean "my school's tool which searches the library and a good chunk of the literature that I have access to," but I'm not sure if such a thing is universal.

@Trylks You're joking, right? You really expect Google Scholar to include a searchable index of 19th and early 20th century philosophy, mathematics, and scientific history books describing Leibniz's contributions to graph theory?

@JeffE hahaha! yeah, that's ridiculous!

(disclaimer - I come from computer science, and the little I know about conventions in philosophy is from hearsay)

I'd like to be able to say "I looked around on Google scholar, etc, and I couldn't find anything about this topic"

The usual expression for this kind of thing in my field is "to the best of our knowledge, this topic/idea has so far not been considered in literature". It tells the reader that you think that nobody has published this idea yet, but clearly the absence of existing literature is something very difficult to be sure about. Hence the rather defensive formulation.

In general, is there a technique to demonstrate the absence of literature about a certain topic?

Nope. How would you do that? It's a bit like proving a hypothesis - you can only find counterexamples (papers that do cover the topic), but you cannot prove that in some weird journal nobody reads somebody has expressed your thoughts already.

What kind of evidence is appropriate in this situation? Would providing something like the number of results of a search on Google scholar be worthwhile?

The accepted convention in my field is to explain the methodology of how you searched for literature (you had a defined methodology, right?), and then explain / list / discuss what you found. Be specific - which keywords did you use and why? Why Google Scholar and not something else? Can you be sure that all papers that you would expect to be relevant are indexed by Scholar (some of those should be pretty old, long before the Internet was a thing)? Did you also check your library for dead-tree literature?  Number of results and or similar metrics seem pretty much useless to me and would likely not improve your paper in any way.

+1 for "To the best of our knowledge, this topic/idea has so far not been considered in literature". I am also from Computer Science and have seen and used very similar statements in published papers.

This seems like good advice. If you want to make a serious best-reasonable-effort attempt to look for such literature, I recommend asking your subject librarian's advice - only searching Google Scholar will almost certainly be considered inadequate :-)

+1 for "To the best of our knowledge". But make sure that you do your research. It would be a blow to your face if the paper that you claimed non-existent actually exists in some quite well-known journals. :)

+1 for "To the best of our knowledge..." but make sure the best of your knowledge actually represents a concerted effort, rather than "We couldn't be bothered to look very hard".

@wsaleem (and xLeitix) "... not been covered in the literature."  To say that something has "not been covered in literature" means that nobody has written a novel about it.

When making similar statements in my own papers, reviewers have asked for evidence. So I have had to pedantically write "a Google Scholar/Web of Science search using the keywords "X" and" Y" produced Z results, all of which were assessed for relevance. We found no previous work on this topic."

The most relevant works we found are (cite the publication where the water first have been mentioned when your publication is about the invention of the submarine) however they (and say why actually not too relevant).
This will not protect from the deserved criticism if the relevant publications do exist.

I am not sure why this has received so few upvotes yet. While I have seen the wording suggested in the answer by xLeitix used in quite some papers, I have also seen the strategy suggested here in use. I think this one shows even better that the author was not "lazy" (of course, only if the claim that there is no literature about the exact topic yet is true), but instead thought thoroughly enough about the topic to point out non-obvious connections to existing works. In addition, space is usually sparse in papers, so every saved word counts. With the "To the best of our knowledge ..." ...

... version, you use up a whole line of text without really providing any productive information (it's like saying "here is no information"). With this solution, you use the same line of text, but actually provide informative links to remotely related topics, which may inspire readers, or, if nothing else, make your work more easily findable in full-text search.

@O.R.Mapper How is describing some related work that you know is not actually very relevant, and describing why it is not relevant, shorter than writing "To the best of our knowledge"?

@xLeitix: The answer says "not too relevant" (emphasis by myself), it does not say "not relevant [at all]". It may not be shorter, but about just as long as the "To the best of our knowledge" sentence, but instead of that sentence actually contains some possibly useful information.

This is not a direct answer to your actual question.  Such has been well provided above.  Rather, I humbly suggest, as someone who majored in philosophy and has been burned repeatedly by the notion of originality, that when you are tempted to think "it's possible that the midterm paper that you're [writing] is bumping up against an original area of research," refresh yourself with a jaunt to your school's library.  There you might find such gems as Benoit B. Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982) and The Philosophy of Leibniz:  Metaphysics and Language by Benson Mates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), both of which treat, at least briefly, Leibniz' historical contribution to the development of graph theory.  Your library may also have less widely distributed journals and "unpublished" works which are not yet well cataloged on them interwebs.
You might also find that some good scholarly work is done in introductions to collections of original writings. Leroy E Loemker's intro to Philosophical Papers and Letters:  A Selection, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Dordrecht, Holland; Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1976, 1969) is one such which just so happens to mention your topic.  You might also find inspiration in proximal works on such topics as Turing, computational logic, machine theory, and linguistics, to say nothing of the huge body of literature dealing with the interrelationship of analysis situs, graph theory, topology, and calculus.
At the very least, the ability to reference prior works that broach your subject will lend legitimacy to what you might build upon them.
If you're really interested in this subject, though, your best bet is probably to check your syllabus for your professor's office hours, and then drop by for a few minutes to briefly explain your topic, along with your difficulty finding references, and ask her if she has any suggestions as to where you might turn.  But I wouldn't mention google.

Purely as a point of interest -- I the idea which I believe myself to be "bumping up against" is so tenuously-supported that I'm not shocked that I can't find anything (at least in English, my impression is that most serious work on Leibniz is in German). My main source is Couturat's "Logique de Leibniz" -- Couturat describes a part of Leibniz's combinatorics as being inspired by earlier work of Ramon Llull, who calculated (9 choose 9) by counting the number of lines he could draw between pairs of 9 items (which is exactly the complete graph on 9 vertices)...

My paper is a trivial proof that propositions in Leibniz' logic can be encoded in a certain kind of graph. My background reads something like "Here is the status of Leibniz' work among some modern authors. The proof that I am about to provide you probably bears no relation to anything that Leibniz thought, since it relies on math that he did not have. Interestingly, however, this passage of Couturat {quote...} points towards some primitive graph-theoretic notions in relation to logic, suggesting that Leibniz may have had some ideas in this direction."...

(and it now reads) "However, I was unable to find any literature which discussed a link between Leibniz, this technique, and the early history of graph theory, so I am unable to evaluate the merits of this claim." I can't imagine there is any deep philosophical truth to be uncovered there, but I think it's a noteworthy remark in a throwaway undergrad midterm paper.

If I may be so bold, you might be better served to cite something as a jumping off point, even if only to then note that 'there seems to be little discussion of this link' or 'further development'...'in the existing literature' or some such, and then proceed to evaluate the merits yourself, salting your analysis with scraps by recognized scholars here and there when and if you can.  I'm not suggesting you twist or stretch others' arguments, rather, deferentially imply credit for planting the seeds.  Also, a sentence reading "...I was unable...I am unable...." implies your own failing.

I phrased a similar idea in a published paper (in a computer science conference) like this:

Although it is well known that space-filling curves can be applied to the problem of approximate nearest neighbor searching, we are not aware of any extension of space-filling curves to approximate range reporting.

I actually wrote something similar in a recent paper. I wrote "The author is not aware of any work that is directly comparable to the current paper." I'm not suggesting this is the best phrasing.
After some further details, I then added some specific publications. "Of the many publications relating to x, two representative papers with roughly similar aims to this paper are x1 and x2."

I know my answer is late, but this is for those who are recently looking into this topic:
You can claim that you couldn't find enough relevant literature, although, you need to provide proof. The best method used in this situation is systematic literature review (SLR). Using this method you should record everything about your search process such as keywords used, years covered, libraries included, inclusion/exclusion criteria, statistics of results and selected studies. You should record everything, keep in mind that it should be repeatable, meaning that if anyone tries to follow the steps that you recorded he/she will get the same outcomes. Using SLR you make sure that your claim is backed up with evidence, this way you can defend your claim with numbers and facts.
Edit: You can search for Systematic Literature Review or SLR online and you may find a lot of sources teaching you how to conduct it and the required steps.


text:
Can I pursue a new Master's in another country, while I'm pursuing one?
I am a first year Master's degree student of computer science in Northern Europe. I am paying for my living expenses and do not have any kind of assistantship or funding. I have a full funding admission for the same subject in Canada. I would like to know if it is a good idea to accept the offer and start my studies there and also continue my current degree remotely (Since the second year is about completing the thesis, and I can do it while I'm in another place) or drop my studies completely here (since I would like to move to Canada or USA later and have money issues to continue my current studies).
If I do have two MSc degrees in the same subject, would is have any negative or positive effect on applying for a phd degree later?
Thanks in advance

Some universities do not allow a 2nd similar degree in the same subject. See an example in one of the answers here: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13641/is-it-possible-for-msc-india-student-to-pursue-ms-in-us/13665#13665

As the rules are likely to differ between universities, I recommend you ask the department staff in your current program as well as the staff at the program you wish to attend.

The first question is whether you even have the option of working on both degrees at once.  I'd assume you don't, since positions with full funding are generally based on an assumption that you will be devoting full effort to them.  They may formally rule out other employment/studies, and even if they don't the department may become upset or feel tricked if they discover you are also doing something else at the same time.  (And departments can sometimes react similarly even if the position has no funding: even if you are paying your own living expenses, they probably consider themselves to be at least partially subsidizing the costs of your education.)
So you shouldn't try to do both degrees at once unless both departments officially agree to it.  Even in that case, I think it's a bad idea.  Success in graduate school is based on quality, not quantity, and this approach can't be good for quality.  You'll be writing your thesis remotely, with far less contact and advising than you would have had in person.  That alone will make it harder to do your best work, but at the same time you'll also be participating in a different full-time program.  You might not be able to do good work for both at once; if you can, then you ought to be able to do great work if you focus on just one (and doing great work at one program is much better than doing good work at two).  The same reasoning applies no matter how talented and hard-working you are: if you can do great work in both programs at once, then you ought to be able to do amazing work by focusing on one.

If I do have two MSc degrees in the same subject, would is have any negative or positive effect on applying for a phd degree later?

Having two MSc degrees might be a small negative, by making you look unfocused, but it probably won't make much of a difference either way.  Ultimately, you'll be evaluated by your academic achievements (papers, thesis, outstanding performance in courses), judged primarily by quality rather than quantity, so you should try to maximize these achievements.

Having two MSc degrees is not unusual. And it can only be positive. However, you might find it not so useful at the end of the day.
In general it is not necessary to have two degrees in the same subject, so people would rather concentrate into getting only one, with the maximal grades, as it is sufficient either for getting a job or a PhD candidate position.
On the other hand, having another degree from another university shows that you could work succesfully in another environment, maybe with a different speciality or focus. The reason why people would take a second degree is often because of this focused extra experience, and because they can use their previous credits and/or knowledge to complete their second degree quicker ("double degrees" are common wherever there is an agreement between universities).
However, my advice would be to go for this second degree only if there is some added learning value to it, as it is not necessary for the PhD itself, and you would rather use this time for preparing specifically to your future research, which will in all cases be much narrower and require much time. On a side note, once you get your PhD, as a researcher, your MSc's will not be much value anymore, especially if they are exactly in the same field.

And it can only be positive. — [citation needed]


text:
What is suitable format to present a Psuedo Code in academic paper?
I'm going to include my algorithm as a pseudo-code in a double-column paper format.
However, since lines of my pseudo-code are long I don't know if is it suitable to use the width of both columns to demonstrate algorithm or not? I want to know are there any common rules for this?

This depends on the journal's author guidelines. If no specifics are stated, you can often add the pseudo-code like a figure in your text (just labeled with Algorithm 1 instead of Figure 1).

In addition, the publisher may use the set of parameters (indentations, linebreaks and line numbers, font size) to adjust the formatting of the code to match the width of a column.  The publisher equally may decide that the pseudocode spans across two columns while the text of the publication is set in two columns (like as there are figures for single column [e.g., 8.85 cm], part-page width [e.g., 12 cm] or full-page width [e.g., 18 cm]).


text:
Length of statement of objectives [mathematics / MIT]
While most other schools seem to have some recommended length (e.g. 1000 words) for the statement of purpose, MIT (maths) simply states

Please explain why you are a good candidate for graduate school. You should describe why you wish to attend graduate school, what you would like to study, and any research experience you have. Describe one or more accomplishments you are particularly proud of that suggest that you will succeed in your chosen area of research.

As a mathematician I would like to keep it short because if I was in their position the last thing I would want is another long essay. However, since there is no possibility to upload a CV (and I am afraid they won't take a very close look at my website) I am inclined to describe my research experience as well as experiences with researchers (showing that I do take initiative, am not easily discouraged, etc.) there. This rather detailed description turned out to have 995 words.
Should I try to keep it shorter at the expense of, say, descriptions how I got interested in a particular field?

Why don't you make two sections?  One would have the usual statement of purpose material, and the other would have a description of one or more accomplishments you are proud of.  Re: length, it sounds like there's no danger of writing something ridiculously long in your case -- so just write what you think addresses the instructions and don't worry about the word count.

Basically what I did - thanks for the advice!

Most statements of purpose written by applicants to math PhD programs in the US are 1-2 pages (single spaced).  So 1000 words sounds just fine to me...as does 995, of course.
If you write a statement of purpose that is any longer than two full pages, the likely outcome is that it will be read rapidly or skimmed.  Much the same will happen if your statement is shorter, by the way.  In short: what you propose is a very reasonable length for me. (It may help you to know that I am the Graduate Coordinator of the math PhD program at UGA.)  I don't see any problem here.  If you wanted to make it a little shorter or a little longer, you can, but don't worry so much about it.  This statement of purpose is probably not the most important part of the application anyway.

By the way, I interpret the more specific instructions given by MIT (as opposed to many other programs) more as helpful advice for writing an effective statement of purpose than as asking for something much different from other statements of purpose.  It is actually quite difficult to write a statement of purpose that really grabs an admissions committee.  Most commonly students seem to want to declare their ardor for mathematics and tell the narrative of how that romance began.  That is more than understandable (probably I wrote something like that myself, many years ago) but when you start to read these by the hundreds they run together pretty quickly, and I expect that most faculty essentially mod out by that part of the statement of purpose.

+1 for clever use of mathematically cognizant lingo: I expect that most faculty essentially mod out by that part of the statement of purpose


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how to handle double affiliation in a research article?
I would like to know how to handle the following situation:

I was working previously as a part time lecturer, or lecturer paid by hours, in an X university. While working there I developed a lecturing system that helped the students to cope with a subject in computer programming.
I moved for working in another university Y, in which they employed me for performing lecturing and research tasks. Actually university X did not pay for research, but only for lecturing tasks.

I have made a research paper based on the lecturing system that I implemented and tested in university X, but the place that will be paying for its actual publication, if accepted; will be my current place of work. So the question that I have is how should I handle that situation?
Should I put a double affiliation like:
Author: Layla
University Y (the place that is actually paying for the research task)
University X (my former place of work where I developed that methodology in my free time)

or should I only put University Y as my main affiliation?
I was wondering if that is possible, because if I put only as my affiliation university X (in which I am not longer working) they would not pay for the research, leaving me with financial problems to publish the article.
Any help?
Thanks

I think that the answer to your question is found here: Is it acceptable to publish a paper using an affiliation with a former employer?.  The answer, in short, is that it is fine to list the affiliation of the prior institution as well.


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CS conferences not indexed by Scopus or Web of Science?
I have read that there are some good Computer Science conferences that are not indexed by Scimago or Scopus, but instead they appear in sites like ACM DL, IEEE Xplore or DBLP. I have tried to find information about those conferences, but not success at all. For that reason, I was wondering if anybody in the field knows of some good conferences in CS that do not appear in the aforementioned sites?
Thanks

Conferences are not journals. It is to be expected that conference proceedings do not appear in journal indexes.

@JukkaSuomela thanks for your comment, so will you agree that in Computer Science other indexers such as DBLP or ACM DL should be used?

Yes, of course, I think Scimago and Scopus are completely useless for any purposes in computer science, regardless of whether your goal is to e.g. find relevant papers or to estimate the "impact" of a publication venue or to see if a researcher is publishing in "good" venues.

I'm a bit confused by the bounty: are you trying to just get a big list?  If so, this would be off-topic as a "shopping question"

@jakebeal in any case is off topic, I have been trying to get which important conferences are not indexed by some common sites

@Layla Can you maybe narrow it down a bit?  Computer science is really big, and there's lots of conferences which are important to lots of different sub-communities.

That is correct: most good computer science conferences have not been indexed by the standard journal indexes (maybe this will change someday, but it hadn't last I'd heard).
A good alternative for evaluating the quality of a conference or to search for decent conferences is to use Google Scholar's "venue metrics" function.  For example, searching for "programming" finds top programming-language conferences, such as ASPLOS, PLDI, POPL, and OOPLSA.  It is interesting to note that in these results, if one ignores the non-field "Mathematical Programming", the first journals don't show up until halfway down the list.
Three caveats:

The search isn't currently very smart; it's very literal in its use of words.  Thus, for example, searching "programming languages" doesn't find ICFP.
Only the top 20 venues for a given query are returned, and you can't look for more.
Some decent but highly-specific venues still don't appear.

I think the question was specifically asking for examples (not sure whether that's on topic or a shopping list question, though)

@xLeitix POPL is an example...

Euro-Par is an example of a conference which is great, but is not completely indexed by ISI

Similarly for ICSE, the main conference in software engineering. From the first three Google Scholar hits for ICSE 2014, only one seems to be in Scopus. No idea why some papers seem to be indexed and others not.

As it has already been said by @jakebeal here are good CS conferences not indexed by Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus. But there are even more complex issues regarding how to evaluate the quality of a CS conference using these bibliographic indexers.
For journals it is generally agreed that WoS is more restrictive than Scopus, and thus journals indexed by WoS "should be better" than the ones only indexed by Scopus. For conferences the things are less clear. I dont know the inclusion rules for conferences in WoS, but one of the reasons why conferences "that appear in WoS" are not that great is that WoS indexes the "Lecture Notes in CS" as one of its journals, and usually the conferences that publish their proceedings in the LNCS are not top of the line -they are usually regional or very focused conferences. But notice that there conferences are not themselves indexed in WoS, but their papers are!
As far as I know DBLP does not make any evaluation of the quality of a conference to include it or not in its database besides some evaluation whether it is a CS conference or not (and I dont know how they decide that). DBLP also has some bias, a lot of conferences in different subareas of CS are not in their database (originally it was an index of publications in databases (DB) and logic programming (LP) thus the name).
ACM DL and IEEE Xplore are also complex because they include the proceedings of not only conferences sponsored by the two associations, but also conferences that made publication agreements with them. In particular IEEE seems much less selective than ACM regarding these agreements and there are very likely really bad conferences indexed in IEEE Xplore.In particular, there was this paper that identified more than 100 fake/computer generated papers in the IEEE Xplore database - these papers were published in the REALLY BAD - STAY AWAY FROM IT kind of conferences and they are/were in the IEEE Xpore. I think that ACM is probably more selective but I am not 100% sure (at least no one discovered fake papers in the ACM DL yet).
Before I get to Scopus/Scimago let me discuss three reasons to ask the question you asked.
a) because you want to choose a conference to submit a paper to
b) because you want to know if you can "trust" a paper published in one of these conferences you read
c) for after-the-fact evaluation purposes - you want to argue that the paper you published in one of these conferences should still be counted even though  the conference is not indexed.
I will not expand on the c) line. As for the a) line - choosing were to submit -- there is no substitute for the experience of more senior researchers, unfortunately. There are subareas of CS that have large conferences with many topics, and the good ones among them will probably be indexed in Scopus (and IEEE Xplore or ACM DL). But there are subareas that hold very focused and small conferences and workshops and you need the experience of a senior(er) researcher to know which are the good and the not so good ones.
As for line b) "can you trust the paper for this conference" I, myself, like Scopus/Scimago (I know that Scimago uses data from Scopus but I dont know the details). If I find an interesting paper though Scopus I tend to trust it, more than if I find it only though Scholar.


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What are the rules for surname and pseudonymous for US and/or UK?
Given some deep personal issues I don't use my father's surname and aren't usually reconized or even cited by it. Although, in my country it's almost impossible to change your name or drop a surname. Neverthless, you can have more than one way of being cited registered in our national databese of researchers. I would like to know if in countries like US and UK it is possible to use one mother's surname or a pseudonymous when trying to get published at a journal.


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Dropping out of grad school with F's: how will this affect job prospects?
I am currently getting ready to finish my first semester of a graduate program (was on track for Ph.D but that does not matter anymore). I made the decision to quit half way through the semester due to some family issues that came up. Anyway, ever since that, I pretty much lost all motivation to study with the persistence that I had before - up to the point where on a subconscious level my brain refuses to absorb any more information. I will likely be receiving at least 1 F for the semester. My question is this - after I leave the program I will be looking for job in industry - I am a Civil Engineer as an undergraduate. How will having an F on a 1 semester transcript in graduate school affect my job prospects?

Please change the title to express your specific question.

Did you continue your graduate studies at the same institution where you did your undergraduate studies? If not, then I would assume you could get by without even giving your grad transcript to prospective employers.

Did you try seeing if you could formally withdraw, rather than do so "de facto"? A withdrawal means that you normally don't receive grades for courses (although some schools note a withdrawal while having a failing grade in a course).
The likelihood that a future employer will overlook this depends largely on who's doing the applicant screening. If your "direct boss" is handling the process, you have a chance of convincing them that the grades aren't reflective of your true abilities. On the other hand, if a human resources "specialist" is handling the screening process, a grade of F will unfortunately mean your application will probably end up in the "circular file."

You will be looking for a job in industry. I don't think your job prospects are completely determined by the F's on the transcript of your first semester of the graduate program. Of course, those F's hurt your chances. Your resume could be filtered out by the human resources when they see the F's on your graduate school transcript if they ask to see that transcript. But, they usually pay attention to your undergraduate transcript and your skills set. If your undergrad transcript is fine and you have the skills/experience they are looking for, you still have reasonably good job prospects.
On the other hand, if it is not too late to withdraw from the class, do it to avoid the permanent bad record. If it's too late, try your best to not to fail the class. I know it's hard after you have gone through the personal issues. But, you don't want to ask yourself the question "What if I tried?" years later.
Wish you good luck!

Some larger employers have strict GPA cutoffs. The F would be disastrous.

@aeismail I agree. The OP does not have to limit himself to those top large companies.

Also, not every job requires graduate school level knowledge. Sometimes, graduate school grades are neglected by industry employers, large or small.


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What is the legal status of an open access academic publication?
I'm interested in the legal status of a published academic open access product. Is it considered a commercial product or not, even if published by a company that usually earns money (in one way or another) with academic publications?
I'm asking regarding the use of images that are free to use in a noncommercial context but would not be available for commercial products.
I'm aware that it would be appropiate to contact the creators of the images and get relevant permissions but specifically I would like to know what the legal status of an open access academic publication is. Is it still considered to be a commercial product?

Well, what about closed-access journals? They are almost certainly for-profit (or at least they earn a profit off of the contributions). Yet it would be considered fair use to use a non-commercial restricted image in such a publication, so long as its source is referenced.

As the reading of "non-commercial only" images is that they cannot be used in blog posts on ad-supported websites, I'd recommend being careful. This does not apply to fair use of the image (e.g. for scientific criticism as opposed to using the image for illustration of something) which would not be a use of the non-commercial license but of a "fair use for scientific purposes" right. My guess is that the open access product will be commercial like the openly accessible blog on the web site of a company is.

The level of ambiguity around what "non-commercial" means in various contexts is so broad that I would always recommend asking the creators/rightsholders in this situation.

Qualifying a paper as open-access only indicates that the paper can be legally accessed free of charge by anyone. It does not make any further implication regarding its license. E.g., some license will allow the use of images in a commercial context, some will not. More details: Gratis versus libre.


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Is there any reference management software that supports hierarchical tagging?
At the moment I'm using Zotero to organize my paper collection and for my current work I'm very happy with it's possobilities to organize content (folders and tags).
However, working on bigger projects a hierarchical tag structure would come in handy where subtags can be assigned to lead-tags (or something similar). Is there any reference program that can do that?

Welcome to AC.SE. I am inclined to think that this is a "big list" question that will be filled with answers about the way people deal with this for every piece of reference management software. Can you edit the question to elaborate on what other software you have tried and why they fail.

I agree with @DanielE.Shub. I'm betting there is a way to do this in Zotero (by hook or by crook) and a focused question about it might find the person who knows how to do it. As it stands, it looks like a list generator and will probably be closed.

@boo2060 Why do you need hierarchical tags? Isn't in enough to a) have folders with subfolders  OR b) always use some tags, de facto making them hierarchical (e.g. put always physics for all topics with physics)?

JabRef is a reference manager using the BibTeX format. It uses the concept of groups, i.e. papers can be put into groups, and it allows to create a hierarchical group structure. Since one paper can be put into any number of groups, it is essentially hierarchical tagging.
With JabRef, one can even configure for individual groups whether a group will automatically include the content of any subgroups (analog to tagging), or will include the content of any supergroup (refining), or just include the papers assigned exactly to this group (as in a classical folder structure).

Zotero allows this as well.

It seems that in the current version of standalone Zotero (4.0.28), you can nest folders in the left pane, and add a document or reference to several such folders.

Check out Citavi.
It supports keywords, categories, and groups. Categories can be organized hierarchically.
Among many other features, Citavi also allows you to save quotations, comments, summaries, and your own ideas, and to organize and structure them before you start writing.
Citavi is Windows-only at the moment, but a web version is being developped.
The video "Citavi 5 in a nutshell" explains the main features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbWIcljDQ
(I work for Citavi)

This is a question which has often come up on the webz.
I am not really sure of your exact requirements but Mendeley has some of the functions or you could develop a workaround. See this and this. I have also heard good things about Sente but I have not used it.
These are solutions for Macs though. I am not sure about Windows and do not know if that is a constraint which you have. Personally, I use a hierarchical folder system in Mendeley and export to BibTeX and add tags - which, so far, seems to work well enough.
Are you seeking more, in general of optimizing your academic workflow? In case you haven't heard of it, I suggest visiting this blog. It updates sporadically but most of the good stuff is in there. I hope this helps.


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Which journals are indexed by Web of Science, Google Scholar etc?
Is there any known criteria on which journals or articles are included within databases listing scientific articles (e.g. Web of Science, Google Scholar)? Of course the traditional scientific journals are but sometimes I find articles, reports and so on that do not seem to have been peer-reviewed. Recently I also wondered why articles from the Journal of Emerging Investigators (https://emerginginvestigators.org/articles), a peer-reviewed journal for studies conducted by school children, do not seem to be indexed by Google Scholar. Does anybody know about inclusion and exclusion criteria?

Getting indexed in Google Scholar is simple - it's based on inclusivity and will index pretty much anything that looks like an academic article, as long as it meets the technical requirements. These should be straightforward, e.g. the first page or the abstract must be available for free, it must have the necessary metadata, etc. For many publishers this process is automatic since Google crawls anything that uses the well-established publishing platforms, like Atypon.
Web of Science is different and uses a list of 28 criteria (24 'quality criteria' and 4 'impact criteria'). These include:

Your journal must publish regularly, without missing issues, for at least a couple of years.
Your journal's articles must generate citations from papers that are already in the database. (Easily the toughest hurdle.)
Your journal's articles must generate enough citations - otherwise you either get delisted if you're already indexed. If you aren't already indexed, you could be put into a less prestigious index instead, like ESCI.
Your journal must have policies, an editorial board with international representation, etc.

For the journal you linked, it seems to me like the publisher simply have not really tried to get the journal indexed by Google Scholar. I don't see why Google Scholar would not index it if they're crawling the website.

Thanks so much for the detailed explanations and especially checking what the problem with this journal could be!