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Is it too much to create a book cover for a potential book for an interview?
I have a tenure-track assistant professor interview coming up. I am proposing a monograph and wanted to include a visual to go with it. Is it too much to include a fake book cover to show interest/determination? Or do you think it would look good?

A side question: are you sure that a monograph is an appropriate project for your level / field / position?  In some fields / places, a monograph wouldn't "count" toward tenure as strongly as papers would, and wouldn't be a good use of research time for a tenure-track faculty member.  In which case, proposing to write one could work against you.  It's a fair question in the interview to ask how projects like monographs are evaluated in a tenure case, but it might not be wise to include the proposal until you know the answer.

Are you in a field where monographs have elaborate covers? In my experience, academic monographs tend to have rather bland covers, and a cover image doesn't really convey any additional information over and above just listing the title.

I might do this a little tongue in cheek  if I had already written at least a complete draft of the manuscript. Otherwise I would just say that this is something that's on my to do list.

In your question, you say that you are "proposing" a monograph. This suggests that you don't actually have a contract signed with a publisher yet. If that is the case, I think it is a little bit dangerous to prepare a cover by yourself.
The people who review your application want to see concrete results, achievements that have already taken place. If you already have a book contract signed, then at least the faculty can understand that there is a very strong likelihood of the book getting published, and therefore that is still acceptable for them.
But, if you present a fake cover for a book that you are still planning to propose in the future, this might give a misleading impression that the publication of your book is already fully decided. And if the reviewers realize after doing a closer examination that in fact you don't have a contract signed, then they might become very suspicious about your whole application. They might say "well, if this book is not guaranteed to happen, then there might be other things in the application that are presented in a misleading way."
If you already have a signed contract, then I think it's ok to have a mock cover, or you can use the logo of the publisher together with 2 or 3 example covers from other books published by the same publisher in the same book series.
Another important thing is whether you have good graphic design skills or not. A poorly-designed cover might show you in a bad light. If you still want to go with the idea of creating a cover, then you should make it clear that the cover is a mock cover. You could include a message clearly saying "mock cover" or something similar. In any case, you have to be upfront and honest about the actual status of your book so that it doesn't mislead anyone.
Personally, I think it would be better if, instead of a cover, you use 2 or 3 representative images of your research in order to give the reviewers an idea of what the book would look like and what its main theme is.
Edit: as pointed out by @JanusBahsJacquet in the comments section, having a signed contract does not guarantee in any way that the book will actually be published. Nevertheless, a signed contract is still interpreted by reviewers as a positive sign, because generally speaking, most signed contracts end up as published books.

Absolutely! One of the first things I ascertain from anyone I meet (official business or otherwise) is their ability to both grasp and faithfully and reliably articulate the difference between facts and everything else (aspirations, things one has read or hear "on the internet" or from a friend, etc.) If I even get a whiff of some conflation, deliberate or otherwise, explicit or implicit, they get an "unreliable source of information" mark in permanent marker in my "book". This is good advice - don't take any chances giving the wrong impression that you're representing fiction as facts.

Just to be clear: having a signed contract with a publisher by no means guarantees publication of the book. Publisher–author contracts are notoriously easy to get out of, for either party, and it’s not at all infrequent that they are rescinded even quite late in the process.

@JanusBahsJacquet Yes, your comment is right on the mark, I should have made my answer clearer on that aspect. I will edit the answer at the bottom.

Honestly, if I received a manuscript with a fake cover on it, I would think it was a bit goofy. It would not make me angry or decide to reject the work out of hand. But it likely would not really affect my opinion on the broader work.
Having a formal cover page is a good thing. I would expect that. But a stylized cover would be a bit odd.
Now, of course if you are proposing a monograph in something like children's literature, this advice may not hold. But generally, just a simple cover page will suffice.

Thank you for your advice :)
By cover page, do you mean just like a blank page with the title and my name?

(+1) While I don't share the views in this answer, it is a useful perspective that will represent the views of some academics, so you should be aware of it.  (And now, by upvoting this answer without substantive agreement, I've messed up the polling opportunity for the contradictory answers on this page!)

" if you are proposing a monograph in something like children's literature," what's up with children literature?

@ElleZi Yes, a simple title page would look fine in my opinion. Title, name, affiliation, date. Maybe something like that.

@EarlGrey I do not write children's lit, so who knows what the actual standards are there. But I was just pondering that perhaps a field like children's lit might find value in the more flowery presentation of a manuscript. Who knows.

Ceteris paribus, I like pretty things more than plain things
Personally, I see no problem with having a draft book cover including full visualisation --- it gives a draft impression of what the book might look like when it is finished.  I would also find it reasonable for a draft book to include a draft edition notice page containing whatever relevant publication information is already known, plus placeholders for the rest.  Just as you might reasonably have a draft of a book with a "working title", similarly you may have a draft of a book with a "working visualisation" and a "working edition notice".  Both of these things contribute to making the book look "real" while it is still in draft form.
Now an important part: if you are going to use a draft visualisation, you should generally ensure that you are using visuals that you have permission to use under relevant copyright/IP law, and you should include a copyright statement to this effect in an appropriate place in your draft.  If you are not publishing your draft (i.e., you are just circulating it internally for review) then you could probably get away with using a draft visualisation without permission, but you should still make clear the status of the relevant copyright/IP in an appropriate place in your draft.  (And obviously, if you want to go ahead with using that visualisation when you publish then you will need to get permission to use it.)
If you end up with a professional publisher, they will of course use their own house templates for the cover pages, cover art, the edition notice page, copyright notices, and other relevant information pages.  Nevertheless, having a draft placeholder for these during the writing and review stage can assist readers to see what the book might look like when it is finished.  While others might disagree, my personal view is that I would prefer to see a draft that includes these elements, since it will tend to be prettier and seem more complete than a "plain" draft.

Not all publishers have or use house templates – many make each cover independently for each title (usually with the exception of series and journals), and some smaller publishers even use any typesetting and/or cover layouts provided by the author in some cases. Apart from those minor details, I agree wholeheartedly with this answer. (And of course, the part about securing reproduction rights applies not only to cover visualisations, but also to illustrations used in the text.)

Let’s say it takes you 2 hours to mock up a nice looking cover. You could have used those 2 hours instead to actually work on the content for your book. What does it say about you that you chose to spend them doing a cover for a book that hasn’t yet been written, instead of actually writing something?
To me, if I were interviewing you I would see this as a signal that you are a person who cares more about appearances than about substance, and who wants to get credit for things before doing them; the kind of person who, say, starts a PhD in 2023 and immediately adds the line “PhD Harvard, 2028 (expected)” on their CV, or fills their publication list with vaporware “in preparation” papers, many of which will never get written. Nope. Do the work first, then claim the credit for it. You won’t get any points from me for fake book covers — even if they are only presented as part of a proposal. On the contrary, I might well interpret it as a red (or at least yellow) flag.

The 2 hours towards mock up would not be done in a vacuum, it is proposed as part of an effort to prepare for an interview. "...create a book cover for a potential book for an interview?" The proposed mock up isn't a good idea, but your answer kind of mis-directs readers as to what the OP asks.

I don't think mocking up a title page in conjunction with a book proposal is the same thing as listing unfinished papers. Even that might be okay if done right. Also, are you saying people shouldn't add in-progress degrees to their CV's?

@sErISaNo adding degrees in progress can be okay if done right, as you say. And talking about a book proposal can also be okay if done right. Doing a book cover is not a case of doing it right, rather I see it as a classic example of counting your chickens before they hatched (or before the eggs were even laid). Btw I understand where OP is coming from, we all know how competitive academia is and how people are driven to seek credit for any shred of progress to their research program, no matter how embryonic. Nonetheless, the book cover idea goes way beyond that and is simply a bad idea.


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Channeling bias in social science / epidemiological research?
Has anyone seen "channeling bias" in the context of epidemiological research? I'm working on a manuscript describing analysis of a workplace-based, non-medical occupational health intervention using observational survey data. The intervention is treated as an exposure and is not randomly allocated. I recently discovered the pharmacological research term "channeling bias", where individuals most in need of treatment are more likely to receive it, usually in a trial setting. This could result in the treatment's observed effects being smaller than they actually are, since sicker individuals have a lower baseline. Participants may also be channeled if researchers think they will receive greater benefit, and thus inflate observed effects. With a workplace-based intervention, I suspect employers may be frugal and, the healthier the worker is, the less likely they are to provide the intervention (despite the intervention being mandatory), thus biasing the exposure group to be in worse shape than those without the exposure.
I think the term channeling bias would apply well to epidemiological research, but have not seen it used in this context. Are there any reasons why it would be inappropriate? Note, I only discovered the term when reviewing a doctoral student's thesis in pharmacology, in which the student used "healthy worker bias" to describe this phenomenon, which sounded the opposite of what they meant, and looked into what the term would actually be. Could its use only/primarily in pharmacological research just be the result of siloing across disciplines?

Channeling bias is a major concern in epidemiology/medical research.  An entire technique has been developed to combat this bias:  propensity scores.  An example of a paper on propensity scores that explicitly discusses channeling bias is "Addressing the issue of channeling bias in observational studies with propensity scores analysis".

Thank you for the answer. This is pretty much what I thought, though I've never seen the term channeling bias in social science or epidemiology (though I'm fairly new to epidemiology). I'd seen the paper you refer previously, though it is also specific to pharmacology. The methodologies described are similar enough to the study I'm doing, so would you consider this to be a valid term for soc sci / epid?

Channeling bias isn't a term that is common in epidemiology.  But the CONCEPT is, basically biased allocation to treatment.  Propensity scores have recently moved into economics, for instance, see

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Organization tips for a newcomer to academic learning
I missed my chance to attend university when everyone else did and I'm out of school for seven years.
Now I'd like to get a degree (BA History & English) through the Open University.
I've never been good at organization, though and I do not have even the slightest idea how academic studies work. I'm looking for tips, experiences and opinions on how to organize my studies and engage in a workflow that works.
Also, if anyone here happened to attend the OU, I would much appreciate a rundown on what to expect and how learning there works, especially regarding the fact that modules do have dates to begin and end, but studies are said to be flexible for time-management. (I am aware that the OU offers contact options as well, and I will reach out to them, too)

@Buffy History and English. I edited my post.

Really, contact the OU and also look on their website - they have lots of info and stuff to help people as many of their students are returning to study.

The way to succeed doesn't depend a lot on which university you attend, nor does the field you want to study, though the specifics differ a lot. The key to it is to understand how the human brain works.
First, every learner is different and some things are easier and some are harder for different people. Hardly anyone, however, will actually learn anything by seeing or hearing or reading it just once. The brain works through repetition and requires actually physical changes. New synapses must be established between neurons and that takes reinforcement to have any chance of retaining new information and skills in long term memory. See The Art of Changing the Brain by James E Zull for the scientific explanation.
So, the key, in a field like language or history is to look at a lot of issues and write about them. It is the writing that provides the reinforcement, not the "looking". Write a lot of short papers, poems, speculations, whatever. In mathematics, you solve a lot of similar problems. In CS you write a lot of programs. But the learning has to be active - producing something - not just passively consuming it.
But, the brain can be misled. You can reinforce the wrong thing. You also need to avoid that. So, in addition to reinforcement to learn, you also need feedback. Someone has to look at whatever you produce and give you some idea about its correctness and, hopefully, its implications. This happens in most face-to-face courses, though sometimes ineffectively, if the prof focuses too much on grading rather than more effective feedback.
If my understanding of OU is still accurate, then note that it isn't just an online information broadcaster. In addition to extremely well produced material they depend (or did, at least) on students having contact with local tutors to ask questions and such. Thus, the system there is designed to give you good information, as well as to provide you a way to do the reinforcement (exercises) and get feedback (comments, questions, ...).
For a self learner who doesn't have a guide about both what and how to learn it is a bit harder. In a purely online "course" the information may be available, but there may be nothing that forces you into reinforcement mode and nothing at all to give you feedback. The self-learner has to organize those on their own. I think OU is pretty good about that, but it takes your own dedication to make it work.

Caveat. I'm not, and never was, associated with OU, but have worked with some faculty there on unrelated projects in the past. My information isn't especially current.

I have studied for a Masters degree with the OU as well as full-time residential undergraduate degree elsewhere and two masters degrees elsewhere too.
The OU is, in my experience, quite different from other universities in setting and enforcing a really strict timetable of marked assignments. Although you might think you are fitting your studies into a busy life, the OU pays no attention to that and you have to comply with its demanding timetable. I found that timetable really challenging because its demands quite often peaked when other things in my life were peaking too.
That said, I found the teaching materials to be of very high quality and I am still using, 20 years on, things I learned on my masters course.
In short, an OU degree course is not a hobby, it is a second (unpaid) job to be done when you might have hoped to be resting after your labours at your paid job.

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What should be my prime focus for the next 2 years to improve my chances in securing an academic position?
I am a 5th year PhD student in Materials Engineering in the US. My research involved simulating a 3D printing process. I was able to publish 1 paper in my field related journals (IF around 2) and 3 more are in preparation. My performance could have been lot better but I was struggling to find a definite research direction in my first 2 years. I also wanted to learn new methodologies to create better models.
My advisor did not have experience in my area of research, so I had to formulate questions and also had to look out for solutions when I got stuck.
Yes, I am ashamed about my PhD experience. I should have done many things differently. Yes, I should have worked harder. But, I really want to be in academia. And I don't have a good CV to support that. What should be my prime focus for the next 2 years and how can I make my CV attractive before I start applying for academic positions? Thanks.

Have you already graduated with a PhD?

No, I am submitting soon and will be defending by November this year.

Just a small comment: A lot of people struggle with their PhD and think they could have done better (see, for example, all the questions on this site about the topic), so your CV might not be the worst around. Of course you can always improve it, but don't beat yourself down too much; if you are motivated and manage to finish your PhD, that is already good.

@Arzooi well then congratulations! That's nothing to be ashamed of. I think the first things you have to do is getting rid of your negative attitude and start patting yourself on the shoulder more often.

Your feeling that you could/should have done more/better in your doctoral studies is, of course, completely valid and completely misguided, as it is true for just about everyone. Of course, you could/would have done more if you hadn't started the process as a novice, but rather as an experienced researcher.
You have a different perspective now, since you have gone through an extensive learning process and have gained skills that you didn't have a few years ago. That affects your judgement about what you are capable of. Yes, you are capable of quite a lot more now, but it is a mistake (logical, psychological,...) to project that back five years.
Your sense of "failure" would really only be valid if you now have the same naive views that you had five years ago. But if that were the case, you would actually be an imposter, but wouldn't have any way to recognize it.
This is classic imposter syndrome and many people at your stage suffer from it for exactly these reasons.
However, let me try to give some guidance on your question. First realize that the range of positions as an "academic" is very broad. Some of us are primarily teachers. Some primarily researchers with only a bit of teaching - mostly of very advanced students. There is a fairly smooth gradation between those extremes. So, first look at what sort of position you would like to hold. Then explore what such people do and what is considered valuable for such a position.
With that background, work to fill in your CV (and your experiences) that give you the expertise to do those things. If you want to be a researcher (my assumption, since you list post-doc as a tag) then you should work on getting things into the publication stream and also in building collaborative arrangements with other researchers in your field. Your advisor(s) can probably help you get "connected" to the wider research community as can attendance at conferences - especially as a presenter. But you can also get connected to other researchers just by serving on conference committees in some fields.
But "academic" is probably too broad a goal. Narrow it and then work to fit that narrower definition.

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How to deal with advisor drastically changing research expectations?
Some context: I met my advisor during my undergraduate studies (I am pursuing a PhD at the same institution). I took several upper-level elective courses with this professor, and received top grades in both. Both courses were related to field A, in which I have a strong background. I decided to do my PhD at this institution due to positive interactions with this professor, alongside some other personal reasons discouraging relocation. This professor is the only one working in field A at the school.
I contacted this professor expressing interest in working together approximately 5 months before the start of the PhD program (the previous spring, soon after I was accepted to the program). He very enthusiastically accepted my application, and immediately asked me to begin working on a publication in field A with applications in field B, independent from his group's previous work, with a deadline in the next month. I scrambled to put a paper together on my own, which was ultimately rejected (I believe rightly) on the grounds of being insufficiently developed. I also did some work for this professor for a large grant proposal, which was accepted. This all happened in the summer before I began the graduate program proper.
Over the next semester, I focused on developing the work done over the summer. I was also brought into the fold about the grant project (I was not given all of the details when I contributed). This project has far more of a focus on field B, with a tenuous connection to field A. I changed the focus of my work to "strengthening" this connection, and reading textbooks related to field B for the purpose of properly integrating field A. I was told to prepare a paper for a conference entirely dedicated to field B, to demonstrate the applicability of the work. This paper would contain a high-level overview of the the field A material for a field B audience.
Fast forward another semester, and work on the paper mentioned prior has continued (I am contributing all of the material; my advisor is a coauthor). I believed work was going nicely: I was expanding upon the previously rejected paper, and personally learning a lot about both field B and field A by working through textbooks. However, I do not believe my knowledge of field B is at all sufficient (I am unable to read and understand current research; field B would fall under an entirely different undergraduate major than field A).
Right up until the paper deadline, my advisor seemed fine with all of this. I have been presenting drafts weekly for several months, and he has given me minor suggestions, helped fix phrasing, etc. However, about one week before the conference deadline he absolutely exploded at me on a teleconference, partially in front of another professor. I was told that the paper was "garbage" and that nobody in field B would understand or care about it. He implied that I had been doing nothing for the past year, despite my weekly progress reports. Further, I was told that this paper would "make or break" our grant funding, and that in its current state would likely cause all of us to lose funding. I have been told to rewrite the paper, focusing only on field B and disregarding field A entirely.
I am extremely distressed. Until today, our relationship was nothing but cordial and I thought I was having a great first year. Now, I feel humiliated and defeated. I am being asked to write a paper in one week in a field where I am completely unqualified. I am told that the quality of this paper will determine not only my future funding, but the funding of two professors as well. I love and am very passionate about field A even still, but this experience is making me despise field B, which is not helping my outlook or mood. In one day my academic life (and by extension personal life, since I spend almost all of my free time reading textbooks) has gone from being something that brings me joy and satisfaction to something very uncomfortable
What would you recommend I do in this situation? I certainly do not wish to publish subpar work (and any work I do in field B will very likely be entirely subpar). Is this just how graduate school is? I believed my advisor accepted me due to confidence in my abilities and a shared research interest; now I worry it was for other reasons (my GPA and GRE scores are much higher than the average for the school). I don't know what to do and I feel frustrated and alone.

what options are you willing to consider? The way you described the situation so far, you have no options.

I'm sorry you are being put in such a difficult situation.  Assuming your description is accurate, it sounds like your advisor has dropped the ball a bit by failing to give you negative feedback on your drafts in your weekly meetings (prior to his "explosion").  You are probably correct that it is not going to be feasible to fix major problems in your paper in one week, especially if you lack the required expertise in that field.
The fact that you have had a cordial relationship with your advisor prior to this "explosion" is a good sign, and it sounds like your advisor is also acting under the effects of extreme stress related to concerns about loss of funding.  Some of this might not be about you at all, and it is possible that you are merely bearing the brunt of stress on your supervisor in relation to his own problems with grant funding.  It is not reasonable for an advisor to put that level of pressure on a first-year PhD student in relation to grant-funding --- funding for a research team should not hinge on a paper being written by a first-year PhD candidate, and if it does, then that is a huge fuck-up by the research team.
The fact that you are in the first-year of a PhD program, and you have already submitted one paper (albeit rejected) sounds to me like good progress.  Candidature in a PhD program is a long haul, and you will have time to write and re-write your papers to try to get the accepted in journals.  It is important to understand that you are not expected to be a subject-matter expert during your candidature, and you must not attempt to hide any weaknesses from your supervisor.

Recommendation: Have a meeting with your advisor and raise all the points you have made in your post.  Most advisors are very reasonable people, even if they react badly sometimes when under their own stresses.  I suggest you give complete disclosure of how you are feeling.  In particular, you should raise the following:

Disclose to your advisor that you lack training in Field B and you feel out of your depth in this field.  Request enrollment in some courses in Field B as part of your PhD candidature, so that you can acquire the necessary training in this field.  If there are parts of the paper where you feel you don't understand the material (or necessary preliminary material) disclose this frankly.
Tell your advisor that you do not feel competent to fix your paper in one week.  Ask for detailed advice on what parts of the paper are not understandable and what is wrong with them.  Commit to attempting to revise the paper, but be realistic about the time you will need for this, or the parts you think you can't do on your own.  If this is a hard deadline, and the paper absolutely must be submitted by this time, then ask your advisor to work with you in detail through some parts.  (If he ends up doing the substantive work, you might end up having him as first author and you as co-author; negotiate changes to this as needed.)
Tell your advisor that you want to do a good job on the paper, and on your research in general, but you feel that in this early stage of your PhD you are having trouble meeting his expectations.  Ask if he can give you some advice on his expectations for your progress, and where he feels you are lagging behind.  In any areas he identifies where you are lagging, ask if you can do some courses or other practice to get up to speed.
Try to be patient and open-minded.  It is possible that your supervisor is also highly stressed.  Talk with him in the spirit of wanting to help as best you can, within the limits of your own present ability.  Try to be as thick-skinned as you can (within reasonable limits).


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How do I protect my research algorithm and findings from being infringed or stolen by anyone, including a professor of mine?
I have been working on an NLP project (Natural Language Processing) regarding a variety of Arabic. I had to observe and look for patterns and rules in this variety as the resources are almost absent or very rare. I then started working on this module that classifies, tokenizes, stems, and returns the part-of-speech of each instance of the input. I'm afraid of the high possibility that one of my supervisors with such a history of stealing others work and labeling it as his. When I present my research, must I present the source code to the supervisor, or must I only live-experiment the model? I do not have a problem with distributing or open-sourcing the whole thing; I am willing to. But I am afraid he takes my work and make it his with no credits or rights.

Why do you mistrust your supervisor?

Closely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8278/worry-about-stealing-of-research-ideas?r=SearchResults

Why are you working with a supervisor you trust so little?

If you do not mind to open source it or GPL/MIT/Apache license it, why not make it available on Github or similar?

I think it's not really a wise action to make it available before you published it somewhere if this algorithm plays a key role in your research. At least try to publish a description + application of this algorithm in a preprint server and then make the code public and explicitly say anyone that wants to use your code should give proper reference to your repository as well as preprint.

@AloneProgrammer True, but his problem is that he will have a problem publishing it without his supervisors, especially if one of them is someone who "nostrifies" credit.

@CaptainEmacs As far as I know the owner of his work (e.g. code or algorithm) is the university not the advisor. But, it's a bit vague I guess, at least in my university guidelines. For example, if the owner is the university, am I allowed to prevent my advisor's access to the actual code? I don't think so, cause if someone is supposed to be your co-author (e.g. OP's advisor) should be able to understand and reproduce the results and it makes sense for his advisor to request an access to the code. I think it pretty much depends on advisor's ethics to not steal work of young researchers...

Yes, they can ask access (or just use it), but author's name is already there. Of course, author should take care that they do cite the supervisor in the code if they use their ideas. Some students think they invented something when it turns out that they profited from the supervisors background, direction, advice, and the context of the supervisors' group. I am afraid, while there is a downhill power gradient superviser-supervisee, the integrity gradient's direction is not always as clear.

@Buffy. I do not mistrust him. I'm just labeling some of his history with copyright infringement. It's not the first time he's even done it. Thank you.

@Bryan, I would love a supervisor who I could trust, but you could say I had no saying in that. Excluding the field of reseach criteria, we were assigned to supervisors "automatically & randomly". Thank you all for your time and help. Very appreciated.

The best way to protect your research from someone else taking credit is to publish it first. Even then, someone with a stronger reputation or more recognition can attempt to take credit for it. This is a risk you take in research and which is made worse by working with a supervisor "with such a history of stealing others work."
The more public your contributions are, the less likely someone else can steal it from you. If you have multiple supervisors make sure they are all aware of your contributions. Maybe talk with them about finding a chance for you to present at a poster session, conference, or research forum. Their names will likely be on the project (and probably deserve to be) if they are your supervisors, but yours will too.

In particular, publishing solves the copyright problem. It is yours to hold. However, if you have something that is patentable, you need to take forward action to obtain the patent. Unlike copyright, patent doesn't happen automatically.


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Postdoc without restrictions
I'm a graduate student who is finishing off this Summer. I currently have two postdoc offers that I am considering, and they are very different in nature.
(i) Postdoc at a prestigious university, without belonging to a lab/PI, and is essentially a "do whatever you want" postdoctoral fellowship. I can choose to get involved with a specific group or not.
 (ii) Government lab that is affiliated with a well-known university. I would be expected to spend 50% of my time on a project they assign me, and the other 50% could be spent on whatever I want to do.
They are both very well known places in and out of academia so I don't think there will be any advantages/disadvantages of picking one if I decide to quit academia and go into industry.
I can see that I will have a lot of freedom for (i) and I will be surrounded by brilliant postdocs so it will certainly be a stimulating experience. However, I can also see the possibility of getting absolutely lost without the supervision of a senior faculty member. The institution also happens to have no faculty members who are directly knowledgeable in what I am working on. However, said in another way, it would be a very good opportunity to learn about other projects.
On the other hand, for (ii), I will have a safety net because I will belong to a particular research group, and there will be other members to support me in finishing off the assigned project if I get lost (only if I ask for help, and I don't they will be pushing me around). There is, however, a chance that I will be spending 100% on the assigned project (because that is where the fund comes from and it is the priority) with 0 freedom. In contrast to (i), it is very likely that I will be interacting with a narrower spectrum of people in terms of science so it will be harder to broaden my horizons.
Does anyone have any experience with these kinds of postdoc jobs? How important is it to have someone senior down the corridor who is an expert in what you work on? Did you have a problem getting recommendation letters for a postdoc position like (i)?
And finally what was your overall experience?

(I don't have enough reputations to comment so I will add here)
Edit 1: (Thank you for your input AJK!)
I belong to a large collaboration and I do have opportunities to interact with notable professors regularly, but only through emails/chats. Since this is the way I have been working already, I think I will be fine (in terms of getting science done), but won't be gaining much compared to my current situation. However, I have a feeling that recommendation letters will shape very differently. If I go to (i), my recommendation letters will be coming from professors who I interact through emails and telecons. Whereas if I go to (ii), it will be from the project manager who I will be interacting with face-to-face on an almost daily basis. Of course, the content of the letter will heavily depend on the quality of my work but is this not better?
I should also clarify what I mean by "directly knowledgeable in what I am working on". There are people in the department working on the same topic, but those professors are more focused on building the instruments, whereas I am more theory/data analysis person. Granted, they are very knowledgeable and they probably know a lot about data analysis too, but I'm not sure how keen they are in discussing technical details. So yes, "if you are just saying that you work in general in a field X, and a subfield Y, and want to use technique Z, but there are no Z experts" <- this is what I meant.

what field are you in?

I am in Physics

lllynx - I'm not as confident about the effect on recommendation letters in fields with big collaborative histories (hep-x and astro in particular). Since the culture there can be so much different, your role within the project may be more important than your physical proximity. Might be better to also look at the CVs of recently hired assts, or ask someone closer to your field.

I like your question title. Unfortunately for some people that title sums up their life experience in academia...

Congratulations! It sounds like you have two very reasonable options. A few questions for you to consider:
First, to evaluate the risk of getting lost, ask: how independent do you think you are capable of being right now? In your  graduate school projects, think about how much input you had both in developing all aspects of an idea and carrying it out. The ideal sign that you would be OK independently is that you had one paper that was in an area different than your advisor's main research, that you proposed, and that you carried out with little feedback. This is relatively rare, though. However, if you can't point to a project where you both A) developed the central idea/hypothesis, and B) wrote the paper to a near-final stage without advisor feedback along the way, you might not be ready yet.
Second, the career value of both positions. I know of several people who have been very successful in highly independent postdoc positions, e.g. Lewis-Sigler Fellows at Princeton. However, those I know of who were the most successful ended up developing close collaborations with many senior people in their broad field. This does benefit you in terms of adding letter writers, and (sadly) in getting papers into good journals. It also creates a lot of benefit in terms of doing good science, too!
What worries me about your position (i) is that it may be a prestigious school, but could not be one of the best places to work on your chosen topic. If there are no faculty members working on similar things, not only do you lose their scientific expertise and letters, you also will not gain the benefit of things like speakers from that field coming to visit, conferences organized on campus on your topic, specialized journal clubs, etc. Those things matter a lot!
How much the absence of support should affect your decision has to depend on how you mean that there are no people "directly knowledgeable in what I am working on". For instance, there are several very strong physics departments that nonetheless have no AMO or plasma physics research. If you plan to work on AMO or plasma physics, even as a theorist, I would not suggest going to one of those departments. The support structure and culture of a department matters a lot. However, if you are just saying that you work in general in a field X, and a subfield Y, and want to use technique Z, but there are no Z experts - maybe that would be OK.
Also ask yourself: how confident are you in knowing what you want to work on? If that will change, the lack of immediately relevant faculty is also not as big a stumbling block.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Underrating and overrating of student in recommendation letter for post-doc: Balancing approach
Many times in our professional career, we come across students, who had either taken our courses or were part of our research group, asking for recommendation letters for post-doc or graduate program (if the student is an undergrad).
It is also true from the point of view of human behaviour that it is practically impossible to be neutral during our assessment of the student and it also reflects when we describe their strengths and weaknesses in the recommendation letter. In most of the cases, we overrate or underrate the performance and if it is the latter, we are sometimes held accountable that we have jeopardized their opportunities. I am not sure what happens if it is the former; may be the student takes the blame as well as we, though in absentia.
Is there a way out to have a balanced approach while writing recommendations? Since I hope everybody believes that it is the not the aim to highlight only the weaknesses of the student but also strengths that can be used by the student and the host to move forward. The question is how much of these negative attributes are considered seriously and how much should we, as recommending authority, highlight them?
As a typical example, if the student is an extremely good experimentalist but is not so good, probably poor, in visualization of data, then what should be our approach if we have to address this attribute without being too harsh or too mild.

Who holds you accountable? Everyone does no that no human letter can be perfect, ¿no?

@CJR: If you don't want to write a good letter, you shoudn't agree to write a letter in the first place.

I'm perfectly happy to submit more generic 'good student, took my class' type letters for people. — I hope you're up front with those students that (a) that's what your letter will say and (b) your letter will have little value beyond ticking the "enough letters" box.

In most of the cases, we overrate or underrate the performance and if it is the latter, we are sometimes held accountable that we have jeopardized their opportunities.

Personally, I think that a good approach here is not to write a recommendation letter unless you are comfortable showing it to the student.  Unless there is some strict restriction to the contrary on the process, you can show the student the letter you have written and then let them decide whether they still want to use you as a reference.  This gives you the freedom to openly disclose negative aspects of the student's abilities, and leave it up to the student whether they still wish to use you as a reference.  This also has the secondary advantage that your student is able to see your assessment of their abilities, and if you have a negative view of some aspect of their skills/abilities/attitude, this is not a secret to them.  All you can reasonably be expected to do is to  make an assessment of the quality of the student to the best of your abilities; it is up to the student to decide whether you are a good person from whom to solicit a recommendation.  Blaming you for jeopardising their opportunities is shooting the messenger.
This idea relates to a selection problem that comes from the fact that some academics refuse to write a letter if they would say anything negative about the student.  Several of the comments to your question recommend this approach, and as a result, it is sometimes expected that all letters of recommendation will be unambiguously positive.  That is, it is expected that a good student will be able to find a given number of referees that can be unambiguously positive about their abilities.  Whatever you think of that filtering mechanism, in my view it is generally a good idea if the student knows what their professors think of them, and this is best accomplished simply by showing them the letter you have written.  For my part, in cases where I have asked my professors for recommendations for an academic program or job, most of my professors have sent me a copy of their recommendation without me asking them to do so.  (Often they have written a recommendation by email, and BCCed me into the email, even if the process says that applicants do not get to see the recommendations.)
Another related problem here is when academics (erroneously) think it is their duty to over-rate their students in order to be generous in their recommendation letters.  If enough academics do this then it becomes "normal" and other academics feel the need to follow suit so that their own unbiased ratings do not disadvantage their students relative to the prevailing norm.  So, the first rule for recommendation letters should be to give the most objective assessment of the student you can, and don't intentionally over-rate or under-rate the student.  In particular, don't feel the need to be generous to the student in order to assist them with getting a place in graduate school.  The second rule is that nothing you write in your letter should come as a surprise to the student; either you have showed them the letter, or they are otherwise aware of your views on their strengths and weaknesses.

Is there a way out to have a balanced approach while writing recommendations?

As to the substance of how to avoid over-rating or under-rating the student, I would recommend that you start by setting out basic factual information about the marks the student got in your courses, and how that compared to the cohort.  This will lead you naturally to the ability to say that the student was "in the top X% of students taking my such-and-such course" (best to compare over several years if possible), which gives some basic quantification of accomplishment in your courses.  By placing the student's mark in the context of other outcomes in their cohort, you go beyond reiterating information that is already in their transcript, and this also gives you a "jumping off" point for further discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the student.
To progress from this point, it is usual to give some information on the existing skills of the student, the speed at which they are able to learn new skills, their ability to take a task from initiation to completion, and how much guidance and encouragement they require to do this.  It is common to also comment on what it is like to work with the student; i.e., their general attitude, and whether there are any difficulties in dealing with them.  For students of sufficient quality to be applying for grad-school or post-doc positions, they are usually good on all fronts, but if there is a weakness you should feel free to disclose this.  If you want to try to be balanced to an individual student, imagine that you have to write and submit letters for all your students, and the relative quality of each student will emerge by comparison of all these letters.  Thus, if you over-rate one student, then ceteris paribus, that detracts from the recommendations to the other students.  Try to be fair to all of your students by making sure you are objective in your assessment of each individual.
Finally, one important thing to ensure that you do not over-rate or under-rate the student is to avoid commenting on things where you do not have enough information.  Thus, if a student was just one person in a sea of faces in a large lecture course, you might not have any idea of their abilities beyond their performance in the course.  In these cases you should stick to what you know, and don't speculate on what you don't know.

As a typical example, if the student is an extremely good experimentalist but is not so good, probably poor, in visualization of data, then what should be our approach if we have to address this attribute without being too harsh or too mild.

I would recommend you frame your assessment of the student in terms of your view on their potential for research in the program/position to which they are applying.  For any given skill, you can give an assessment of the present ability of the student, and also an assessment of whether the student has shown the required qualities to develop this skill to a higher level.  So if the student is poor in visualization of data, you would need to make an assessment of whether the student will be able to improve this.  Assuming your assessment is positive, you could then say something to the effect that the student has highly-developed skills as an experimentalist, but they need to develop their data visualization skills further (and you think they can do this).
This is another reason why it is generally a good idea to allow the student to read your letter.  If you inform the student of this drawback in their skills, you can also let them know that if they are able to develop that skill further, then you will be able to write them a more positive letter in the future.  This might spur the student to take an additional course on data visualization, or do some extra practice, and then come and show you that they can now do it really well.  For any identified areas of weakness, the student can see this as an opportunity to "plug the gap" and then come back to you for an even better reference at a future point.


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Is it unethical for a professor to demand students buy their book then force autographing it before they can submit any work for the semester?
I realize that it is really not unethical or illegal for a university professor to assign their own book that they have published as the textbook for a class. However, is it unethical for a professor to assign an expensive book, then require the students to get the book personally autograph to the student, by the professor prior to the professor accepting any work from the student? This creates several issues for me:

Textbooks personally signed can not be sold back to bookstores.
Used books can be sold to other students but when they reach the class, they are penalized for not getting their own book to meet the requirement of "personal autograph" to that student, which forces them to purchase the book again.
Without getting the book signed, the professor will not accept work which results in a "0".
The professor would not allow students to take pictures of notes in other students books but MUST PURCHASE the book, explaining "because you are not paying me".
Essentially, this appears to be a "FOR PROFIT OF THE PROFESSOR" class. It isn't about the education of the student at all.

I feel it is unethical. Do you? What should a student do about this?

Where are you in the world? Not that it affects the ethics, but it does likely affect what a student can/should do...

As absurd as this sounds, this is blatantly, openly and shamelessly unethical that it fits perfectly our time; as much as I wouldn't like to, I do actually believe that. Either this professor or this university should be fired.

I realize that it is really not unethical or illegal for a university professor to assign their own book that they have published as the textbook for a class. — Well, that depends.

This is not unethical or something, its blatantly criminal. The legal term for such behaviour is coercion. Dont bother complaining to university officials, just call up your district attorney, and have that prof dragged out of his office into a courtroom.

@Karl: Do you have experience with this approach? The district attorney in my country would probably lough and fine me for calling them for such a silly reason.

@user112604 No experience. In my country, he would act, not least because he could be forced by a court order. Which is why no sane prof would ever try such a harebraided scheme in the first place. Advantages of living in a society with a working judicary system.

@Karl: Then please write your country such that the OP has more information on whether they should "just call up" them. I think in most countries no action would follow (or just worse consequences for OP), therefore it's important for them to know your country.

@user112604 No. The OP should know by himself wether he can trust into the law and justice of his home. We are talking among adults here. Academia, not kindergarten. Sorry.

Yes, some aspects of this are unethical. I'm surprised that a university would permit it to happen. They would, I hope, object if they learn of it. Especially if they learn of it from complaints to higher authorities.
In my personal view as a professor and author, I can, certainly, assign one of my own books in a course I teach. But I believe that ethically, I should return to the student any royalty payment that I receive from the publisher. To avoid student cheating, I can purchase their receipt for the book from them so that they can't simply return it to be sold again as new.
I think that the professor in question is trying to do something similar in part of this (autographing the book), but in an unethical way.
I would think that autographed copies can be sold back to the bookstore, but not simply returned as new. Some autographed works are worth more, actually. The professor doesn't profit from the sale of used copies, of course. Only the "first sale" results in any royalties.
I don't know how the professor "verifies" the purchase. Does he keep a list, or just ask to see an autographed copy?
But, the issue of profiting from students when you require a purchase in such a way as to guarantee a profit is clearly a breach. As you describe it, it sounds like a clear form of coercion that should not occur and actually can pollute the relationship between student and professor.
And obviously, most professor-authors think their own books are the best.

I dont get your scheme with buying the receipt from the students. You will have to give a substancial fraction of the full price (?), but that way they can still sell the book to next years students, and end up with a profit in total. And which bookshop would take back a book after months?

An author gets something like 5% of the selling price of a book. I'd buy the receipt for that amount. The student can't return the book to the bookstore without the receipt. But, yes, they can always sell the book on the used market. So  I just adjust the price to them so that my net is zero.

very commendable! +1

But you actually buy the receipt from the students so that you dont pay multiple times for books that are circulating on the second hand market, right?

@Karl, Actually, I would only buy it for new book purchases since those are the only ones from which I would profit otherwise. Used book sales give nothing back to the author.

At this university, a personally signed copy ... “John Taylor, I hope you enjoy the class”, can not be sold back.  The instructor logs a grade in his grade book for each person that he signs a book for.  That’s how he knows who didn’t get the book signed.  Also he self published and the bookstore gets a fee for each book sold and he gets the bulk.  Sometimes you can get people to talk.

This was not so uncommon in my era to avoid students photocopying a professor's book. In some courses a common strategy was the following: a student, or a small group, would buy an expensive book which was then brought to a copy shop which would then mass-copy it for the other students at less than half of the price. The student who had bought the book would then lend it to the other students for the day of the oral exam, so that they could show it to the professor as a proof of purchase. From time to time, police would shut down this kind of fraudulent copy shops, but others would pop up.

So, some professors started to sign each copy.

Yes I think it is unethical. If your university has an ombudsman or similar office, go to them and ask their opinion. You may be able to report this anonymously.


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Can I upload a national report which I reference in a paper to a preprint server so it has a permanent location and/or DOI rather than a URL?
I recently wrote an editorial article which referenced several national (UK) reports. These are typically freely available as pdf files online via institutions like the British Medical Association, the General Medical Council and so on. They are not published articles in peer reviewed journals but are major and important pieces of work. When I referenced these reports in my editorial, I initially referenced them as online sources (with date accessed, date published and the URL where they are available from).
During the course of peer review and submitting to journals, one of the national reports (from 2015) disappeared from its URL which was not permanent. The organisation probably removed it as it was old. I had saved a pdf copy of the report. It was no longer easy to find a copy online and the one place I found it was not a professional website URL (just some person's blogging site or something like that).
My question is, to future-proof my article from reports like this disappearing from non-permanent URL, can (and should) I load my "hard copy" pdf into a repository and provide a permanent location to the report. This can be done with OSF, Zenodo etc and it would then be permanently available with a DOI.
Otherwise any URL cited can just be changed or the report can be made unavailable any time.
Alternatively, should I just leave the "date accessed" as an old date (from a time when the report could be accessed) and readers would understand than the reports might not be there in future?

Check the copyright. I don't know anything about UK copyright. In the US, you could put a national report anywhere because all US Gov't works are in the public domain and not subject to copyright.

@Richard Erickson. The copyright is with the BMA as marked on the report. There is no licence (eg CC BY-NC-ND) marked on the report but as far as I know it was freely distributed and no money had to paid for it at any point.

@ Daniel Hatton. I did not know the Wayback Machine but I tried it and the URL is not found there and the Wayback Machine states that it "has not archived that URL".

It would be very good to upload the reports in a repository, for the reasons you give. You can do it provided this is not explicitly forbidden by a copyright statement on the reports. If the copyright status is absent or unclear, do it anyway, the worst that can happen is that you are asked to remove a report. (This once happened to me after I posted financial data on journal subscriptions on my blog, but these data had never been made public before.)
Asking the authors may not succeed, why would they do it now if they did not do it previously? On the other hand, it would be nice to inform them after you post the reports.

So as far as I know, it would be impossible (or very difficult) to remove as the doi which is assigned (e.g.) by Zenodo as a data repository upload (or as a preprint upload) would be permanent and non-editable. I do agree though, I think it would be desirable to put this into a data repository as permanently available "data" associated with my published editorial. Once a national report is out there online, it should continue to be accessible, unless the people publishing it online took steps to control this - which they did not and there is no reason I can see why they would.

It would depend on the policies of the preprint server, but I'm not aware of any that would accept a "preprint" submission from someone other than the reports' authors.
A better long-term approach would be to contact the British Medical Association and ask them to register their own DOIs for these repots. They already register DOIs for their journal articles, so it's not such a huge stretch to think they could do it for reports or other less-formal publications.  Of course, that would mean they would have to commit to making the reports persistently available, which it seems like they don't want to do.
In the short-term, using the "date accessed" format for your citation should be sufficient.

-1: You do not need to be an author to submit to Arxiv. Even journals and robots can submit to Arxiv. I do not know about other preprint servers, but I do not find an explicit ban on submission by non-authors to Biorxiv or Medrxiv.

@SylvainRibault bioRxiv and medRxiv both require that "all its authors have consented to its deposition"; arXiv only allows proxies in very specific circumstances and also requires an original author to have approved the metadata. None of these services would allow submitting a third-party report without the involvement of the authors.

The relevant guidelines for third party submissions to Arxiv are here: https://arxiv.org/help/third_party_submission . In practice Arxiv seems quite tolerant with special cases that fall outside the guidelines, such as dead authors.

So the way preprints are used and processed is actually quite complex (or at least varied) depending on several factors. For instance, in maths, they are very much accepted but they are an emerging trend in the biomedical sciences. Each preprint server has different rules. Zenodo allows upload of preprints and data with only the uploader being responsible for what they upload. As the user anpami pointed out, I should really have said "data repository" rather than preprint server. Some will accept data, supplementary materials, preprints (pre peer review), postprints (accepted version) etc.

Even if Arxiv is flexible, and you could use this as a workaround, that doesn't mean you should. Preprint servers aren't archives.  They're not intended to persistently maintain content that the original publisher doesn't want to steward.  It's misleading to call something a preprint that's not a preprint, which is what the metadata that accompanies the DOI will say it is.   A more general repository (especially one that accepts postprints) would be more suitable.

Online sources are "liquid". Some have thus suggested to "freeze" them as durable PDFs and to make them available in a repository as supplementary material (I might have seen this suggestion here). This ensures transparency and replicabilty.
So, I would say: Yes, the approach you think about seems fine. There should not be any legal issues if the documents were publicly shared from an official organ.
(Here is one example of a Dataverse which contains "frozen PDFs" to support the findings of a research article that relied on many web sources.)

By the way, there is a terminological issue here: I would not call it a preprint. This label would indicate that it was an original manuscript written by you that has not yet made it to the publication stage at a scholarly journal. But you mention data repositories, and this is correct. To be sure, some of them also allow you to post pre-prints. But for the present context, it is their function as data repositories that counts here.

This is a good point. Especially about the "preprint" vs data repository. In fact, each pre-print / repository server has specific rules about this. For example, preprints.org will accept only a preprint manuscript (the author's version before peer review) and will not accept this if it has already been accepted by a journal (i.e. they won't accept anything else). Zenodo will accept preprints and "data" and one can have a doi for the uploaded raw data (e.g. for a scientific article). So it's better thinking of this national report as my article's "data" and putting it in a permanent repository


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How to teach an undergraduate course without having taken that course formally before?
I am in the final year of my PhD. My work was on using Finite element method to study tribology. It was completely modeling based. I developed various models and have gained quite expertise in modeling with the commercially available finite element code.
However, I come from materials engineering background and I don't have any formal education on statics, dynamics, continuum mechanics or finite element method. I had taken some advanced courses on mechanics. But, they did not cover the undergrad stuff and straightaway went for the modeling part or some applied stuff.
Whatever theoretical I have learnt during my PhD, I have done that myself. So, it's neither structured or formalized. I read books, online videos, and I only concentrated on portions applicable for my research. As a result, I know how to model my problem statement which involves dynamic and transient behaviors. But know nothing about statics or quasi-static behaviors.
Now, I am asked to teach a short summer finite element analysis course to mechanical engineering undergrads from July to September (8 lectures ~ 12 hours). and I have no idea what and how to teach them. I have to teach theory and introduce modeling. How do I teach students who have more formal education than me on topics like statics, dynamics, continuum mechanics?

There is a somewhat more general question at CSEducators: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/4379/1293. It will give general advice for how to attack the problem of teaching something you don't know yourself. It is a fairly common problem, actually.

FYI, the question in the title is not quite the same as what you are asking. Maybe "without previous formal training in the subject" is a better fit for what you are asking. (I've never taken a calculus course, high school or college, and yet I've taught over 30 calculus courses and never had an "expertise problem" with it. Of course, teaching calculus is quite a bit different from your situation, as lower level math is very hierarchical and the content is generally very structured and standardized.)

Maybe having some of these books at your fingertips will help?

Whatever you do, don't lowball the time commitment.  For me, a new course can easily mean 60 hours/week.  Personally, I don't think this is a fair ask for a final year student, unless you're effectively done.

From the other question, Don't be dishonest with your students or try to hide your lack of background. -- this is important; don't hide it with "just read the textbook again" or "you are expected research this on your own" if you don't really know if they're going down the right path; one particular math professor I had consistently failed to answer questions and gave up trying to solve his own examples ("you can finish this one at home"); at the very least try to come prepared. Also saying "I have to look into this and get back to you" isn't a bad response.

For me, job #1: get a good book.

Will you have a TA?

This is hard. Have you taught a course before? Has this course been taught by someone else before, with this format, at your institution?

Your first attempt at teaching a topic will generally be a disaster anyway. Get a syllabus from someone else at the very least. Ideally a whole set of slides too.

The more I think about this, the less I like it.  A summer course is SUPER ACCELERATED.  You blink, and the course is half over.  The opportunity to fix problems that arise is tiny.
I hope this is a low-credit course, as I really encourage you to stick to a workshop-style approach.  Teach by example.  This will essentially be a "getting started" guided tour.  Pick a problem, and walk the students through that problem during the summer session using a number of the tools you're trying to teach.
If you can find somebody that's taught this before, make that person your best friend.

I agree, teaching summer courses can be especially problematic. Besides the compressed global time scale, local time scales are extended, so if you have an off day it's likely that 2+ hours are blown (rather than 45 or 50 minutes). Also, depending on the type of course, you might get stuck with a fairly high percentage of students thinking the class will be easier in summer and students who have to retake the class for academic reasons. I taught a statistics class one fall semester with no statistics background, and I spent more time on that single course than my other two courses combined.

"The opportunity to fix problems that arise is tiny." This.

I think the main problem that you are going to have is that you will not know what your students know or don't know right before they take the course you will be teaching.  (That is, you have not been "in their shoes" before.)
I strongly suggest that you find out what courses the students have already taken (and what they haven't taken) then look at the syllabi for those courses.  This will prevent you from wasting time and effort teaching them things they already know, as well as inform you about what necessary skills and understanding you need to introduce to them.
Of course, if the course you will be teaching has been taught before, then look at the previous syllabi (notes, exams, textbooks).


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Asking my advisor for doing an unconventional joint PhD
I started a PhD program in the US, which is a standard 5-year US grad program, and soon after starting it (recently), I received an offer for a PhD position I'd applied for in Europe (in Germany), which is a standard 3-year thesis-only European PhD.
My questions:
How should I ask my advisor in Europe to allow me to do a "joint PhD" with my current university in the US? He told me before I get the offer in my early contacts with him that if I decide to start the PhD later (say, for completing a project, coursework, etc. elsewhere) he's ok with that and flexible regarding the start date of my contract (there's a default start date in the current contract though). But to wait until I get to candidacy in the US and then go to work with him, I'd need to ask him to freeze my offer for almost 2 years. That sounds too long of a deferral to me and I don't want to make him change his mind and tell me something like "Stay there then and apply again two years later if you want"! What is a good way of sharing my thoughts with him, explaining what I think the ideal path is for me, and asking him to help me walk that path? I also have the option to go to Europe for a couple of months, start working with him and while I'm there either make arrangements for returning to the US until I get to candidacy or just withdraw from my current program and finish my PhD there. Would it be a better idea to leave this conversation for soon after starting the PhD in Europe or is it better to have it now?
The issue is that there is no on-going collaboration between the two groups and, as far as I know, not even the two departments. Moreover, a joint PhD is not defined in any of the programs, so it'd be an odd procedure. I know that the European institution is very open to outside collaborations, it actually actively encourages that, and it's not at all uncommon for PhD students there to find external collaborators on their own and even get financial and administrative assistance to go and spend some time in the corresponding institution and work with them.

Further explanation about the situation:
Since I prefer the advisor in European, I'd strongly prefer to do my thesis there, especially because I don't have an advisor in the US yet and I may not be able to work with the professor I'd like to work within my US department as he already has reached his usual limit for PhD students and won't have any graduated for a few years My advisor in Europe knows that I've already started a PhD program in the US and I've told him that I'm ready to go there and start the PhD in his group instead.
Now, given the structures of the programs, and the facts that the two departments (my US PhD, and the European one) are actually working in areas that are closely related, there is a lot of shared interests, and their approach could be very productively combined with each other, I'm thinking of the possibility of doing my PhD in both of the institutions through a joint arrangement. That would be the ideal option for my academic (and even personal) well-being. That way, I hope that I'd get to complete the coursework and other aspects of the doctoral training (such as TAship) at my US institution, but do the major part of my thesis in the group of the advisor in Europe, while being co-advised with my preferred advisor at my current (US) institution. In that case, the US professor may be more likely to work with me too as he'd have to spend less time on advising me. Also, the issues regarding the distance with my significant other will be solved significantly more smoothly (this is the personal aspect).

P.S. I actually don't care about an official "joint PhD" with a degree from both institutions. I'm ok with a regular PhD degree from either one of the institutions. My main purpose for doing this is to complement the research I'd be doing in the European group while working on my thesis, with the training I'll receive in the US, and also take advantage of the enrichment the work with the faculty in the US would bring to my research. So, I don't mind just dropping out of the US department after 2-3 years as long as there's some guarantee I'll have the position in Europe, or possibly, doing most of my thesis work in Europe in an informal setting but getting the degree from my current department in the US.
P.P.S. My department in the US has no idea about this yet and I'm not worried about that since I think their role becomes important when I reach candidacy. Am I wrong about that?

Please simplify the question.

@AnonymousPhysicist In what way? Do you mean the length, or should I split it into sections more clearly, or is there something else that's not simple enough? (Sorry for the poor structure and the long explanation)

You don't really mention the possibility of simply resigning your position in the US, and taking the European offer. Why?

@nabla That is an option. I meant to clarify in the P.S. that just dropping out of the program in the US after finishing the important part of the training is one of the ideal options. The possibility to drop out now and just go to the Europe is the natural alternative for me if this "joint" arrangement doesn't work out.

Some universities offer courtesy appointments in these cases, though that will only happen if your European advisor is respected in your US institution and really wants to advise you

I don't think a true joint PhD, with both universities appearing on your diploma(s), is a viable option here.  When these exist, it is normally as part of an ongoing program which has been negotiated between the universities and formally approved at high levels of their administrations.  It's not something that would be created for the benefit of one student.
One approach that's sometimes used could look like this: you remain enrolled at the American university, but do some or all of your research under the guidance of the European professor.  You continue to have Prof. America as your advisor "on paper", but maybe he doesn't do much more than check in with you occasionally, and sign the forms when you're ready to graduate.  Prof. Europe might officially be a "co-advisor" or "dissertation committee member" or something.  However, this requires that Prof. Europe be willing to dedicate time to work with you in exchange for little or no "credit" from her home university.  After all, she gets paid to advise the graduate students of their own university, not those of the rest of the world.  It could happen if Profs America and Europe have a close professional relationship, but probably not if they're strangers to each other.
I think you just need to have an open-ended talk with Prof. Europe.  Explain your options, and ask for her advice.  Make clear what you'd expect from her in each case, so that she can evaluate whether she's willing.  You're going to have to become comfortable having conversations like this if you want a successful experience in grad school.  And if Prof. Europe doesn't react well to this conversation, or isn't willing to offer any flexibility, then maybe you'll learn that you don't want her as an advisor after all.


text:
A name for the subsection about the paper structure
If one wants to have a separate name for the subsection which goes like, 'Section 2 is dedicated to... In Section 3, we discuss... Finally, in Section 4...', then what is the best option? "Outline of the paper"? "Paper structure"? Anything else?

isn't this part of the Introduction?

@JonCuster it is. But what if the introduction has its own subsections? This is the case for this question.

Have you read papers that use this format and name this section? If so, what did they name it? If not, why do you think your paper is different from all the others and should have this section?

@BryanKrause with due respect, I won't answer your questions. Not only such a subsection is logically possible, I have read such papers but not in English.

They're rhetorical questions so they aren't meant to be answered, at least not for my benefit. My point is to suggest that it's most important to follow conventions in your field; I would not recommend writing a paper in English in a field where you haven't read papers in English, and I wouldn't recommend using a structure that isn't common unless there's a special reason to do so.

Since this is not a standard (sub)section in the english language journals I'm familiar with, you can probably call it whatever you like. I don't think there is a "best" option, other than to follow whatever the existing conventions are for structure.

Overview, outline, battleplan, etc. Most papers in my field have it as a paragraph of the introduction, possibly with a sentence such as "This work is divided into n sections." or a bolded "Sections overview" at the beginning of the paragraph.


text:
What makes a paper publishable?
I wonder what makes a paper publishable?
Is it because it provides a better solution to an existing problem?
Or is it because it identified a new problem that no one has found?
Thanks.
UPDATE:
My field is electronic engineering.

If it is submitted and accepted it will be published. Depending on field and journal that could mean almost anything...

Regarding the close votes ("too broad"): We do have a couple of questions where a somewhat broad question is answered from multiple perspectives. An example is Assistant professor vs Associate professor, which includes one answer per country. We could easily see the question at hand as provoking one answer per research area, and I think that these answers would actually be insightful.

In my area, software engineering, the criteria for having a paper accepted (which implies later publication) are usually listed in the call for papers of the publication venue (conference or journal). They typically include the following:

Novelty. The paper should contribute to the knowledge in its field. This could either include a new problem formulation, and a new idea to approach an existing problem.
Relevance. The paper should make a point in why the presented work is relevant.
Soundness. The work presented in the paper should apply a sound methodology. The argumentation presented in the paper (in particular, technical reasoning) should withstand scrutiny and be reproducible by experts in the field.
Presentation Quality. The paper should be logically organized, self-contained, use appropriate scientific language and writing style, and be free of major language flaws. In some research directions, there is a standard paper organization that should be followed (for example: Introduction, Related Work, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusion).
Appropriate consideration of related work. The paper needs to depict its own contribution within the landscape of existing research. Closely related work has to be referenced and discussed.
Validation. (Only applies to papers that contribute some solution to a problem; a counter-example to this are empirical study papers.) The paper needs to validate the presented solution, for example, using a theoretical validation with theorems and proofs, or an empirical validation in which the solution is applied to realistic instances.

There is a lot of variation in how these criteria will be interpreted specifically. Some venues will have much higher standards than others, with top international conferences and journals on the one, and small national workshops at the other end of the range. Some venues will offer special paper types (for example, experience reports or tool demonstrations) that de-emphasize some of the criteria.

Thanks. I wonder if I apply an existing method of another problem to a new problem, is it novel?

@LeiXun Yes, in my research area, that would be a common approach to achieve novelty. For publication at a top conference or journal, one would have to show that the new method achieves an improvement to the state of the art (Validation).


text:
How to import the citation of arxiv papers to Mendeley that could produce the accurate citation format?
I am using Mendeley to save my reference. And I find it seems that Mendeley does know the format of arxiv format.
I find many papers use a format like this:
Andrew Howard, Mark Sandler, Grace Chu, Liang-Chieh Chen, Bo Chen, Mingxing Tan, Weijun
Wang, Yukun Zhu, Ruoming Pang, Vijay Vasudevan, et al. Searching for mobilenetv3. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1905.02244, 2019.

Here is the link for the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02244
I wonder how can I get it to Mendeley?
Thanks.

Some vital pieces of information are missing from the question. You talk about "how to import..." a paper into Mendeley. Both existing answers show you how to do this. However, you seem to be after formatting a citation which has nothing to do with the underlying information in the database (Mendeley). For the correct formatting you need to adjust the "Citation Style". Mendeley uses here the CSL standard but we don't know where you want to insert your citation.

@halirutan Sorry for bringing you confusion. I did chose the IEEE style when I compare these citations. I agree with the answer below show me how to import citations from arxiv to Mendeley, but as you can see, the output format is not accurate. That is why I asked this question because I thought I must did something wrong.

For this kind of problems usually, I go to the Google Scholar and search the paper and from the results section, you can click on the cite button as shown in the picture and download the citation in any one of the formats. This downloaded file can be dragged and dropped to Mendeley.

Thanks for the reply, sorry I have just notice ShuffleNet paper is no longer a good example since it has been published. Now I have edited my question to a paper that is only on arxiv.

I have tried your method, however, it did not works very well. EndNote format did not work with Mendeley, RefWorks format required registration so I did not try. BibTex and RefMan format works with Mendeley, however, the reference style is still different: A. Howard et al., “Searching for MobileNetV3,” arXiv Prepr. arXiv1905.02244, 2019.

If you are using one of the common browsers, you can use the Mendeley Web Importer which is a plugin giving you a button to import the paper directly from the web-page.
Navigating to the arxiv paper you linked and clicking the Mendeley button in my browser opens a window and the imported information looks reasonable to me

The plugin lets you choose a Mendeley folder you want to use for the paper if you have structured your library into different categories and it will also download a PDF if available. Once you open the desktop Mendeley, everything is synced and you will have both the citation and the PDF locally on your machine.

Thanks for the reply. I have tried your method, but I feel that Mendeley do not know the format for arxiv: A. Howard et al., “Searching for MobileNetV3,” May 2019.

Can you explain what the output formatting has to do with importing the complete citing information? In your database, you always want each and every name of the authors. When you prepare your citations for LaTeX (or god forbid Word), then you select a formatting style which will probably abbreviate names and only use the first author and then "et al.".

I think the problem is not et al., it is I cannot get arXiv  preprint arXiv:1905.02244, 2019.

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Mendeley and I have actively worked on the Web Importer.
I feel that people before me have answered your question already and others have provided good insights as well. My intention here is to provide some additional technical details and not to promote Mendeley in any way.

As halirutan mentioned, the Web Importer will be able to import the reference in your Mendeley Library. The Web Importer works with most common document identifiers such as DOI, ISBN and ArXiv (to name a few).
In this case it has found arXiv:1905.02244v3 on the page and tries to find a match in the Mendeley Catalog. (If you're interested the API is available here.)

What you can see in the screenshot is raw, unformatted metadata. You would get a similar display if it has found a DOI or an ISBN.
Once you chose to import that reference via the Web Importer, that reference will be in Mendeley.
Now as other people have mentioned, you can then process references in your Mendeley Library with a particular citation style of your choice.

Hi, thanks for the reply. I did import this reference into the Mendeley, and I chose the IEEE as citation style. Then I right click the reference in Mendeley, chose "copy as ->Formatted Citation". Here is what I get [1] A. Howard et al., “Searching for MobileNetV3,” May 2019. As you can see, the arXiv information is missing.

I don't think this has to do with Mendeley itself. This is probably due to that particular citation style.

But if I use NightRocker's method, I could get A. Howard et al., “Searching for MobileNetV3,” arXiv Prepr. arXiv1905.02244, 2019. Same IEEE style. Just a different method of importing.

I searched for this paper and clicking on the cite button didn't offer to cite this reference using IEEE.

Do I have to import as IEEE to output IEEE? I thought I could import as BibTex, then Mendeley could have all the reference information about the paper, then I can output different citation styles.


text:
Emailing profs for PhD enquiries
I'm a Masters (Physics) student from India and I am looking to apply to the UK and Europe for a PhD for Autumn 2022. I am making a list of people I would like to work under. In doing so I have a few questions. I am set to graduate from my Masters in April 2022 and will have a thesis dissertation by then (which I have just begun work on).
Approximately at what point should I start emailing them to see if they'd be interested in considering my application (interview/submitting grades, transcripts etc). I would like to have at least my grades for this semester with me - which I will receive around early December. Would that be too late? I have seen a few funding deadlines in the UK around January.
The reason I'm apprehensive about emailing now is because my second semester grades are quite bad (I'm in my third semester now). I've had a very good academic record throughout my Bachelor's (9+ CGPA /10) and my first semester of the Masters was also good (8.4/10), but thanks to Covid and having to move across the country in the middle of the semester, my second semester did not go well and so my overall CGPA dropped (7.67/10). I'm confident I will improve by the end of this semester. My Master's is also at a much better ranked university (Top 5 in my country) but I am not sure how much this will help offset the drop in grade.
If I am emailing professors, do I need to include all my details (scores, SOP and so on) in the initial mail itself, or can I just send an inquiry, with my CV and maybe mentioning a one or two of their papers which interests me.

In the UK at least, almost all science PhD scholarships are attached to specific projects or programmes, which will have published application dates on relevant department websites or places like FindAPhD.com . This will also have info on what's required for the application in terms of transcripts, CV etc.
So, for the vast majority of PhDs you don't have flexibility around waiting for grades - you'll just need to submit whatever you have at the deadline.
Having said that, the benefit of contacting professors early is also quite marginal. Typically all applications are collected and evaluated together after the closing date based on the submitted application paperwork alone, so any prior inquiries won't impact on that. If you do have a real specific question about the project/group you could mail the professor, but just announcing that you want to apply isn't going to affect the process in any way.

If you are applying to a PhD in the UK, it all comes down to how you plan to fund things. If you are applying to specific programs - generally either government or charity funded, but Stephen McMahon's answer is the way to go. In theory, for the first time last year, government funded programs are allowed to take up to 30% of their students from overaseas. Just look for the adverts and apply as though it were a job.
The alternative is that you plan to either fund the PhD your self (you'd need access to a LOT of money to do this), or apply for some sort of personal scholarship (an example open to indian students would be the Commonwealth fellowship). Scholarships will require you create an application together with the supervisor. This is a large time investment for both you and the supervisor. You'll want to look up the application deadline for whatever scholarship you are proposing, and contact maybe three months prior to this.
I'd probably suggest you don't contact a potential supervisor without an idea of how you will fund your studies. Its just possible they may know of some source open to you that you don't know about, but its unlikely.