text:
Am I capable of doing PhD based on my advisor's words?
I am average student completed my under-grad and grad studies successfully. I am doing PhD since mid 2015 (~7 years now).

I was a hard-working student. I was a self-motivated student always wanted to do PhD and stay in Academia. I was hoping somehow my work will help to people.
If I compare playing tennis to a PhD studies, I feel like my advisor is breaking my racket to motivate me and I cannot keep up with a broken racket, which is my will to move on.

These are the some stuff that my advisor told me multiple times. I cannot forget or over-write them:

"You disappointed and hurt me. I don't know what am I going to do with you."
// One year later, during a meeting over zoom, when I told him that these words offended me and I do not want to hurt you anymore, he just closed the zoom meeting to my face saying I am not your psychologist.

"You are like a turtle. You can't even graduate in 20-30 years."

"You are bad at time management and always lost in details."

"Your model is junk. I won't write my name on top of this model."

"Even high-school students won't make the mistakes you do. Should I keep going?" [Me]: "No, please don't."

He threw a book at me and told me that: "You should learned from it"

He keep showing his other students Ph.D. and throw in front of me saying: "See how good they are writing, you should write like them, but I don't understand what you write."

I have three other Ph.D. students, I have to work on their papers, thesis, I have classes to teach. I don't time for you. But later, I learn that he was actually working on some other projects that he get fund from.

In front of all the jury members he also mentioned:

"I am giving you F to motivate you. I trust you keep working."
"I never helped that much to any of my student in my life. I don't know what I can do more."
"I start to understand the way he thinks and explains his work after 4 years. He is very complex."
"Doing Ph.D. is not meant for you, you don't have enough capacity for it."
"I cannot compile you."
"I will give you 'F' if you won't complete your paper in 4 weeks."
"I don't believe that you implemented and tested your code" // I have actually done
"If I want I can help his journal paper but I will never put a single character on his journal" with a small smile on his face

Everything boiled up when I get F from my progress at Fall 2018 on my PhD studies. All lead to depression and anxiety.
Then pandemic started in 2019. I have semester multiple semesters and enter into progress again in beginning of 2022 and jury gave me F again and threated me that if I don't submit my journal paper till next semester they will give me the second F and kick me out. Since then, I completely disconnected from my advisor, start to fear from him, but keep working on my journal.
I have completed my paper and shared with my advisor 8 months ago, and updated version 2 months ago -- but there is no response from my advisor. When I see him face to face, he told me that he was busy and have to work for his other students' projects. He is completely ghosting me and does not even response back to my e-mails.
=> If he allows me to submit my work to a journal; and if I complete my second journal in this semester (~within 4 months) there is a hope that I am approaching to graduation. If I cannot submit my journal in this month I think the everything is over.
Overall, I am not blaming my advisor, instead I chose blame myself and think over the following questions:

Where did I do wrong? What did I do to deserve all this?
Why did I start PhD journey?
Did I lost most important years of my life for nothing?
If I have chosen a different advisor, would it be the same?

All these let me to realize that I am actually not mentally and emotionally capable enough to be successful in PhD or even in any job from now on related to computer science and coding. I feel like have invested nearly 15 years (sum of undergrad and grad studies) of my life for something I am not worth of. And probably when I kicked out from PhD I will never ever code again.
=> Should I conclude that I am not capable enough to do PhD with the words of my advisor? or Should I give myself another chance?

Final Update 07/2024: I am pleased to announce that I have successfully completed my Ph.D. studies. It was challenging, but I kept holding on. Thank you all for your support.

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What country is this?

What language are the journal articles, thesis written in (Turkish, English, something else)? Is that the same as the classes at the university?

@Daniel R. Collins Moderators here warn me not to write more regarding my question, I don't want to put them in bad situation. // Yes sir, journal articles, thesis, defence, class everything is all in English. But we interact with our teachers speaking in Turkish. One of the bottleneck I am having is even I completed my 12 page journal my advisor does not even read it and says its unreadable due to a mathematical notations and model section is not that clear on his end.

Congratulations. That was fast. Just 4 years.

@Buffy Thank you, sir. It’s been a total of 8.5 years :)

Congratulations!

Though I can't relate to your situation, I have friends who were in a similar situation during their Ph.D. They were mentally abused and constantly demeaned by their advisors. Though this behaviour is predominant in South Asian universities. But it's quite prevalent in many western universities too. However, all my friends who went through such hard times, they did one common thing, they persevered.
They did not lose hope and did whatever was necessary to get the degree. After they graduated, they went their own way and are leading happy lives years after graduating.
What I trying to say is, you know that you are hard-working and a good student. What you are going through is because of your circumstances. You have worked hard for the past 4.5 years on your Ph.D., don't lose hope now. Do what's required for being eligible to defend and then change your circumstances.

All these let me to realize that I actually not capable enough
mentally and emotionally to be successful in PhD or even in any job
from now on.

Don't focus on something that hasn't happened yet. Your job now is to complete your degree. Don't worry about the success and job at the moment. Those will come. You are capable, that's why you are in a grad school.

Should I conclude that I am not capable enough to do PhD with the words of my advisor? or Should I give myself another chance?

No you shouldn't conclude that you are incapable of doing a PhD. Whether or not you should give yourself another chance depends entirely on you. We can help you with identifying the salient points that should play a role in that decision. (More on this later)

Overall, I am not blaming my advisor

That shows that you are mature and capable of being critical of yourself. But your supervisor was abusive. That behavior you described is not normal and it should not take place anywhere, let alone a university. Your supervisor has a lot to be blamed of, keep that in mind.

All lead to depression and anxiety.

That is understandable. But please don't overlook this. We (or at least I) are not qualified to give you advice on how to deal with depression. But I can suggest you to go see a medical professional. Health, and in this particular case mental health, is important above all.

What options do I have?
It greatly depends on the university. In my university for example we have a "mentor," which is a professor assigned to you who checks in on you periodically and acts as a neutral party when you have problems.
For instance, I could go to my mentor and tell him "look, my supervisor is being abusive. Am I crazy or am I right? What can we do?" And he might suggest to change advisor, mediate the conflict etc...
Maybe you don't have such a figure. In another university we had a similar figure but it was more general, not assigned to you personally. Check if your university has such a thing and do go talk to them.
If not, you could consider changing supervisor. That of course depends on various things

How far along in your thesis you are. If you are almost done, it's probably not worth it.
Is your supervisor an influential professor in your department, or is s/he generally admired? In that case your next supervisor might resent you for the choice you made.

You might also consider changing university altogether but that would likely mean starting from scratch. Fresh starts are good, but also very energy consuming.
Given what you described, it seems that your supervisor is breaking ethical rules that nearly any university would have. You may look at the appropriate department in your university and seek to file a complaint. This is an action that you could take together with one of the previous two suggestions.
Finally you could also hang in there, hope to get a decent letter and start a postdoc in a better place. However you should check that your anxiety allows you to do this. If the situation becomes unbearable, don't try to resist it.

Should I continue academia?
Like I said, we are not going to make a decision for you, but consider these

Do you still love doing research and, in particular, do you love your particular area of research?
Would you like to teach at university level?
Do you believe that in a more supportive and encouraging environment you would be able to perform better?
Are there any other jobs that you would consider doing other than academia?
Have you taken under consideration alternative options, like leaving academia and returning at a later moment.¹

Answer to (not necessarily only) these questions sincerely to yourself and decide accordingly.

¹ Gaps in the resume might be hard to motivate and might get in the way of getting a job in academia after having left it. But, even though I cannot provide any examples from my experience, I don't think that it would be absolutely impossible to re-enter.


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Should I provide a useful update to a professor currently grieving a parent?
I am a PhD student working with a professor I do not know very well, as a proposed supervisor, on several postdoctoral applications. The professor's mother passed away several weeks ago. Since that point, I have been working on these applications independently, but I have determined that one of these applications will no longer be feasible, given some of the application requirements.
I am unsure whether I should very briefly update (and emphasize that no response/action is needed) this professor via e-mail so that they know that their workload is reduced during the coming months, or whether I should wait until they've reached out to me asking for an update. For context, we did not establish a date at which we would resume communication.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I don't understand what the professor's role is. Are they helping you write the apps, or providing LOR?

@AzorAhai--hehim Apologies! Lack of clarity on my part. The professor is the proposed supervisor for the postdoctoral fellowship.

But there are multiple fellowships that you are applying to have them supervise you on?

Also several weeks is quite some time. I am not rigid here, and I went through that immense loss right finishing my PhD. I know the pain. But it is irrelevant, somehow.

Receiving an email starting with "No action needed, just an update" adds an infinitesimal amount to ones workload.
Wondering about whether some project is still going on, if its time yet to check in on the junior people involved and writing a request for information does take mental energy and a bit more time.

yes, especially if you put the "no action needed, just an updated" comment at the top of the e-mail (and/or indicate it in the subject line), before adding any other detail that might be useful if the professor does want more information about what's going on.

A polite yet brief e-mail should be totally fine, especially given that you say the loss occurred "several" weeks ago. You didn't say your location, but in the US bereavement leave is usually much shorter than that, so it is reasonable in that case to expect that the proposed advisor is probably slowly returning to work.
I agree that prefacing the title of your e-mail with something like [brief update, no action needed] is a good idea. BUT, you are updating them with the news that you plan to stop work on one of your proposed applications, due to your determination that the application requirements make it a bad fit. However, the advisor may have a different opinion. If I were in their shoes, I would want the ability to examine a decision like that and make sure I agree, rather than being flatly told after the fact.
I would then take the cue for how soon you should return to normal communication patterns based on their response to this e-mail. If they write you a detailed response ASAP you can assume that you can write to them nearly as usual. If they take several days, they are still processing their loss. If they respond with anger, you might reconsider working with them.

Thank you so much for your insights, particularly that there is a possibility the advisor may have a different opinion on the feasibility of the application. I'm afraid I sent the e-mail before seeing this note. I do think/hope that in this particular context, my taking the decision may be at least somewhat acceptable. The initial plan had been to make just one application and that is the application I am proceeding with. The proposed supervisor had also not begun work on any of the applications. We shall see, in any case, fingers crossed.

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My manuscript status says "18 reviewers invited." Is it a bad sign if that many reviewers were invited to review my manuscript?
So far, that is the only information given to me by the journal.  I have no idea if all 18 reviewers were invited at the same time, or if one at a time.  In either cause, is this a bad sign, something like a looming possibility that the editor might eventually reject my manuscript if they can't find any reviewer to go thru my work?

18 looks like a lot of reviewers to me.

Some journals use an "accept first" approach, were a bunch of reviewers are invited. The invitation is then terminated after the first pre-defined "X" number of reviewers to accept the invitation.

The information is completely useless. It could be that some of the 18 have declined, for whatever reasons - we don't know. I would take it as a bad quality indicator for the journal that they give you such useless information.

It is difficult to give an informative answer without knowing the culture of the journal to which you submitted.  In the journals where I am an editorial board member, 18 would be a high number to get the number of reviews necessary for a decision (often 3).
A couple of reasons to be pessimistic:

It could be that your manuscript is being handled by an associate editor (AE) who likes to fire off a huge number of review invitations routinely, in which case I would suspect that this AE does not work hard to find good expertise matches.
It could be that the information from which the potential reviewer has to decided whether to accept the invitation (author list (unless double blind), title, abstract (usually)) is not enticing the reviewers to accept.  If this is true, you could try to take this as constructive feedback that your title and abstract should make someone want to read your manuscript.

On the optimistic side, I do not think that having a large number of reviewers invited is particularly bad news for the ultimate acceptance of your manuscript. Best of luck.

Thanks for your answer.  I just logged in my account... it is now up to "23 reviewers invited."  Other than that information, I'm pretty much in the dark.  Hard to say how may reviewers have accepted at this point.  I just hope the journal does not make an outright rejection because no reviewers would accept my manuscript for review.

You will be lucky if you get 18 reviews!  It can be good, especially if you have nefarious/incompetent reviewers in the mix.  If your paper is good, most competent reviewers would acknowledge that in their review; this also helps the editor if many reviewers provide the same comments.   In contrast, if you have two reviewers, with opposing views, it is harder for the editor to judge; is it a bad paper or just a bad reviewer?

Without knowing the specifics (which would force you to identify the journal, which you should not do) it is hard to tell. When I was AE in Computer Science, it was very hard to get good reviewers. It used to be that some senior people would farm out reviews to their students, and if they checked the work of their students, then this would be fine, but this practice is now frowned upon. Now, senior people at the peak of their career are too busy to accept review requests unless they are for very specific conferences or highly prestigious journals. Those beyond their peak are slowing down and doing less community work and are even less likely to accept review requests. This leaves junior people, often selected because of their related thesis work. If they published as students, they have moved on and their email is no longer valid. If they moved to industry, they often do not get any rewards for doing reviews, even though they might be actively publishing. If they moved to a university, they feel overwhelmed. The result is that review invitations are often unanswered. You might have noticed that there are now efforts to at least get credit for doing reviews.
So, most journals have a hard time finding reviewers, while pressuring AEs to find them fast and not re-use them. They also do not want any connections between the reviewer and the AE and the reviewer should not be an AE.
Trying to answer your question: 18 reviewers is a large number, but: an AE might be inviting batches of people at a time that the AE does not personally know and expecting that maybe 35% will actually receive the invitation and of these, the majority will not accept. I am assuming a competent AE that has matched your article with reviewers based on the prospective reviewer's previous publications, but otherwise unknown to the reviewer.
There is at least one editor that use a system where the editor or editorial assistant seems to just randomly ask people that have reviewed for the editor before. I get review invitation to review articles in fields that I only know from wikipedia. That would be another way to get very large number of reviewers invited.

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Authorship for paper with questionable statistical analysis
For my master thesis in clinical medicine I have collected and analyzed data for a retrospective cohort study. Now one year later, a research assistant of the group is about to submit a manuscript based on my master thesis and I have been offered shared first co-authorship with said research assistant. Upon internal review I have noticed the following issues:

Definitions of clinical outcomes of the study have been changed such that they are now not well defined and not even of clinical interest
The statistical analysis I had performed for my thesis was completely ignored and omitted in the manuscript. For the manuscript, the research assistant employed statistical models I deem inappropriate as confirmed by fellow researchers external to the group. In addition, reporting of methods and results is poorly written with critical information missing.

I have provided feedback concerning the statistical methods but it was ignored. My advisor refused my request to see the new statistical analysis (in particular, I asked for the statistical software files edited by the research assistant), telling me that even though I have shared co-first authorship for the paper, I am not entitled to any insight in the statistical analysis, since the research assistant is in charge of it. I’m having a hard time accepting publication of a study of which I’m co-first author but haven’t seen the analysis behind it, especially since I highly suspect it is inappropriate. My advisor threatened to remove me from the paper completely if I don’t agree blindly.
Shall I renounce and let it be published without my name? Shall I agree and accept to have a paper published with my name and the knowledge that the quality might be really bad? Shall I contact the editors of the journal they want to submit it to?
Edit: Thank you all so much for your thoughtful answers and comments! I appreciate your help!

When you say "your advisor", do you mean the professor that was your advisor at the time, or is this person still your current advisor now?

If the reviewers act with due diligence, they will want to see the files as well. And if the methodology is as flawed as you suggest, the paper isn't likely to get published anyway. This might ease the decision not to be included as co-author in the prospective publication.

What you describe sounds terrible. I'd go as far as saying that your advisor is engaging in academic misconduct.

@henning Reviews are often pretty rushed and I have never had an experience of a reviewer asking for analysis files. The recently retracted Lancet hydroxychloroquine paper shows how even the most prestigious journals will accept papers without corroborating any of the primary data or analysis.

@DGreenwood unfortunately, reviewers aren't always diligent and the review process can be quite random, that's true.

@IanSudbery Technically, this person is not my advisor anymore but they have been the driving force behind aforementioned manuscript. Out of habit I still refer to them as my advisor

If you are to co-author a paper, you need to agree with its methodology and conclusions. You don't.
My advice, in general, is to offer to work with others to improve the paper to meet everyone's standards. You indicate that this might not be possible, which would be a fault of the PI. If you can't convince them to work with you, then I don't see a real way forward without saying that you won't be part of it in any way.
They can then go forward if they like, citing your past work properly. If they don't do that, it would be time to contact editors.

A difficulty might arise in that master's theses are not generally published, so would they be not be citable. In theory a student can withhold permission to use unpublished data from their advisor. In practice we all know how hard that is to enforce.

@IanSudbery, actually unpublished work is citable and the failure to do so is still potentially plagiarism. "J. Smith. Baskets in Ten Lessons, unpublished MS thesis, Harvard College, 2001".

Incredibly difficult to enforce though. I have to say I have never in my life seen a reference to an unpublished MS thesis in a peer reviewed article.

A master thesis should be an official source. It is somehow published by its nature. At least this apply in my country and the others I've worked in. @Ian Sudbery

Master's thesis' here are sent to the examiner, marked, moderated, viva'd, kept for a couple of years in case of appeal against the mark and then disposed of.

@IanSudbery I remember having even seen "private communication with the author" as a reference in an article once. And in this case the problem of inaccessability is easily solved by uploading the thesis in question onto some preprint-server as citer and citee are the same person.

Yes. pers. comms. used to not be that unusual.  But that only works if the citer wants to do that. If they refuse, its hard for the citee to prove that there is a problem.

@IanSudbery From a plagiarism perspective, there are no uncitable sources of information.

You have to decide between not being an author and keeping yourself away from the paper or being an author with all the benefits and, possibly consequences, that come with it.
Will it be worth the authorship or not - you need to decide, but given the way you express your concerns I feel you are leaning to not being an author.


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Computer Science Publications: conference vs journal on application form
I'm a UK post-doc working in Computer Science -- specifically, Computer Vision and Robotics. For the next stage in my career, I'm aiming to apply for some very competitive post-doctoral research fellowships. Reading through the application guidelines, they list the metrics which are used to judge each candidate's ability.
Now, two of these metrics are related to publications. The first of these, is called "Number of peer-reviewed papers (not including conference papers)". The second of these is called "Number of papers presented at conferences". My understanding of the reason for this, is that in most academic fields, conferences papers are often not peer-reviewed, sometimes exist only as an abstract in written form, and are generally considered to be inferior to journal papers.
However, in my field of Computer Vision and Robotics, conference papers are in fact the dominant medium for publication. Typically, a conference publication consists of an 8-page paper, which is thoroughly peer reviewed by a number of reviewers, together with a rebuttal stage. The acceptance rates for these papers range from around 20% to around 40%. My peers and I always publish our work as a conference paper first, and then sometimes combine a couple of conferences papers into a journal paper. However, these journal papers are almost always just an extension of a conference paper, and usually act as an archive rather than the release of your latest research.
Therefore, in my field, conference papers are far more common than journal papers, and often have lower acceptance rates than journals. For example, I only have one journal paper, but I have eight first-authored conference papers, and this would be considered a good CV.
So, my question is, how should I fill out the application form for this fellowship? If I abide by the strict wording, then it will appear as if I only have one "serious" publication. However, if I put all my publications in the first section (number of peer-reviewed papers), then this will technically be incorrect, because most of them are conference papers. The fellowship I am applying for covers all areas of engineering, and I do not want my application to appear weaker than it actually is.
Thanks!

Tell me how many publications you had during phd and during your first postdoc position, I have an answer for it!

I have only one journal paper, but eight first-authored conference papers (all top conferences)....

Is the fellowship only open to applicants from CS? If yes, there is definitely no need to worry.

No, it's open to all areas of engineering. Probably around 10% of applications will be from CS. (I have added this to the question.)

I think, based on my experiences, the most important thing here is to 'don't put all your eggs in one basket', and do not focus only on a very cempetetive fellowhsip:
Have Plan B: Competitive fellowships are hard to get, but also it is very easy to be missed, due to the high valume of submissions, and not to be the chosen one. There are sometimes 1000 submissions, not all will be read by the same person. I see a student with 20 publications who didn't get the fellowship but another one with 5 publications who did. You are somewhat in a good position with 8 publications, just simply write that you have 9 publications. If the right person sees it, you probably will get it. So the advice here is to also look for other positions while applying for this as well.

This does not answer the question.

ObViously, you should follow the rules: put your journal publications under the "Number of peer-reviewed papers (not including conference papers)" section, and the conference papers under the conference section paper, but add a line stating something like *Please notice that in my field (computer science) conference proceedings publications have the same value of the journal publications.
Then, from tomorro, stop publishing in conference proceedings, and start to publish ONLY in journals.

Your first point is valid, but your second point unfortunately is not -- everybody in computer science publishes primarily in conferences! And I would not be able to publish in journals anyway without having conferences papers to show the prior work. Journal papers in my field almost always require at least one conference paper as the prior work.

The second paragraph is terrible advice.  In (most areas of) computer science, conference publications really do have more value/visibility/prestige/impact than journal papers.  If you're a computer scientist, publishing only in journals significantly decreases the visibility and impact of your work.

I disagree. It's true tha in some areas of computer science, conference publications do have more value/visibility/prestige/impact than journal papers. But most of the university and research centers hiring committees, and most of the funding agencies, will give more importance to your journal publications. If you're a scientist, publishing mainly in conference proceedings significantly decreases the impact of your work.

In computer science, hiring committee members and funding agency reviewers are other computer scientists. In this case, the greater value/visibility/prestige/impact of high-quality conference publications is of course a career benefit.

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Disagreement over how much IP to put in paper
Apologies if this is not the correct site for this- I work in a research lab that is in a kind of grey zone between academia and industry and I can't tell from the help centre if this would be considered off-topic here.
I'm a fairly junior researcher in my field, and I'm writing my first paper that I will be the lead author of. My paper is based on work that I did on a relatively niche process in my field that has little previously published on it.
However, I'm being told by my manager to not include any potential IP in the paper, and instead just report on the results. My issue with this is that work was fundamentally about creating a framework for this process- without the underlying technical description allowing the reader to recreate the process there is not a great deal of note I can say other than we did it and it worked.
The reasoning behind my managers argument is to ensure that the lab (which is kind of a corporate entity while also being a research lab) can exploit the work for products and services later down the line. I would be fine with this except that the company is quite poor when it comes to actually exploiting IP, and instead just prefers to sit on it. On top of that, the work performed doesn't really meet the level of being patentable, so it's not possible to protect the IP and then give a thorough description in the paper.
The likely outcome as I see it is then that I publish a paper with little technical information or impact and does nothing to further the field, the IP is not patented and the company does nothing with the outcomes of this work, meaning that the work might as well have not happened. As this is an area I am very enthusiastic about and have sunk quite a bit of my spare time in to (not to mention I am somewhat proud of it) I am rather disheartened by this.
My reasoning for wanting to publish the underlying technical content is that
(a) it has a much better chance of being cited, having a greater impact and increasing awareness of the work
(b) advances the field by allowing other groups to implement this process
(c) does not stop the company from engaging in commercial work with industry in this area as we are really the only group with expertise in this area.
So my question is how should I approach this issue?
Am I being overly pessimistic, and should I just accept what my manager wants?
Or should I try and argue my position (and if so, how?)
Edit: to clarify, this is a publicly owned institution, that has dual aims of both generating impact from science and also making a profit to provide a greater value for taxpayer money. It doesn't really have 'competitors' per se, and can be either commercially or research focused depending on the issue.

Well, you lab's patent folks should submit a patent application.

@JonCuster the issue is that it was decided that the work doesn't really meet the level of being 'patentable', unfortunately. That would definitely solve all my issues if it was!

Without details of the framework, it's worthless I reckon.   You are better off writing a product brochure.

You are probably just stuck. "Trade Secret" is a valid concern of any profit making organization. And the fact that what you have done isn't patentable now doesn't mean that it can't later be combined with other things to result in products and patents in the future. Large organizations hold quite a bit of IP in reserve hoping for future breakthroughs. And even if the company can't think of a way to exploit the work, they would hesitate to provide a boost to any competitor.
So, your manager is probably telling you true. Your employment contract probably says something about that.

A few ideas that turned into patents, and my PhD dissertation research after I retired, are public. Everything else I did, for over 30 years, was trade secret. If you really want to accumulate papers you need a more academic job.

Thanks for your answer! I hadn't considered  that the work could be combined with something else to be patentable in the future. That definitely makes me a lot happier with the idea of not publishing the technical data, even if it isn't my ideal choice.

@PatriciaShanahan my lab is publicly owned, with the aim of generating impact through science while also having an incentive to make a profit to be better value for the taxpayer. In some areas we operate like university group in terms of publications, while others we are much more commercially focused. I love both aspects, but I guess this is my first taste of 'you can't have your cake and eat it'!


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How much help should Ph.D. candidate expect from advisor (if at all)?
I'm a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate doing research in STEM. I'm in a US research university. I'm genuinely confused as what to expect from a Ph.D. advisor in general.
To start off, should the student propose the research topic, or should it be expected the advisor assigns a topic to the student to work on? I know the answer to this may not be black and white. In my current situation, I feel it's more like my advisor gave me a general area, and I find some specific research questions within the area to work on. Still, I feel my advisor is able to offer little concrete help, except maybe point to a few papers. Is this normal? To be completely honest, I do not completely trust my advisor's judgement, since they have co-authored a paper in this area which is fundamentally flawed. And despite my advisor having acknowledged the mistakes I've pointed out in that paper, they did not seem to take any further action.
I know this is concerning, but the fact is I have already tried working with several (2-3) faculty members at my institution. All seem to be able to offer little help. One faculty did not seem to know the literature very well and gave no useful advice, with another faculty I witnessed the birth of another erroneous publication. I genuinely don't know why this is happening, my institution is supposedly not terrible (say, top 10 in most grad school rankings of the department I'm in), and these faculty members have published in top-tier venues.
Can someone perhaps shed some light in my situation? Should I basically expect no help from my advisor, and perhaps merely treat advisors taking the role of 'project managers'? In daily communications, should I just report my work, instead of expecting meaningful technical advises?
(I might add that my current research is more mathematical. )

This may change drastically based on the country, the University, the advisor, and the particular relationship they have to some particular student. General answer will be difficult, but if you make your question a tad more specific (which country, what type of institution (e.g., research-heavy, small, big lab, …)), it will help in getting better answers.

What field. Math can be quite different from chemistry, say. "Mathematical" can mean lots of things, actually.

@Buffy I'm doing mathematical / algorithmic research in computer science.

I am also in a similar situation. I feel like you were telling my story. I do not get any feedback in the meeting. All I have to do is to brief my work. I am also feeling that I should not expect any help from them.

It seems that your question is really: how do I find a PhD advisor, and as I start working with them, how do I establish myself as a member of the group?
That is a very common struggle faced by graduate students in the US (or in places with American-style PhD programs), where the student has to find an advisor after joining the PhD program.  In other countries (e.g. most of Europe) PhD students are almost always hired directly into a research group, and the advisor-student relationship is entrenched from the start.  In the US, the trouble is that when you're talking to professors, you're not "their" student yet so they have no responsibility towards you.  You may also feel like you have to impress professors so that you can "get in" to their group, and this can be an obstacle to effective communication.
This is one of the downsides of the US-style graduate school system, and there is no easy solution.  Some students are manage to find an advisor immediately and hit the ground running.  Others may end up awkwardly bouncing around between research groups, effectively wasting  a few years of time in the process.
You should simply be direct, and make it clear that you're looking for a project to do.  "What is expected" of a PhD student varies widely, of course, but as a general rule, PhD students (especially in their early stages) are not expected to independently come up with original research ideas.  So don't feel embarrassed if you don't come up with ideas yourself, and ask you advisor to give you ideas.  If they only give you a list of papers to read, then read them! Again, don't feel like you need to come up with a research project yourself (if you start to get ideas--then great!)   If you don't have new ideas, be honest about that, and just be prepared to discuss the papers your advisor gave you.
In terms of choosing advisors, you may want to choose a "less competitive" research group.  In most departments, you will find groups with well-known professors that everyone want to join, along with some less popular groups.  If you've been aiming only for the big name professors, maybe you should reach out to lesser known professors in your department instead.
As a last resort, you can go to your department for help.  Typically there is a professor (or multiple professors) involved with administration, usually with some title like director of graduate studies, etc.  Talk to them and explain your predicament.  In the way that most American graduate schools work, no individual professor is obligated to accept you into their research group, but the department as a whole does have some responsibility towards you.  After all, they admitted you to their program, and they don't want you to drop out.  If you truly felt like you put in a good effort into finding an advisor but it somehow hasn't worked out, your department should be able to help.

If you have an idea for a research topic, by all means discuss the idea with any potential advisor to see if they can offer support and assistance (both are important).
In some fields a doctoral student integrates into a well established research program and the advisor may have a lot to say about the topic, but even then, some flexibility might be possible. In other fields, math and some theoretical CS, each student works on an independent problem within a fairly narrow range of topics of interest to the advisor.
Some students are also much more able to carry on independently from the start, though, again, in some fields this is rare, especially in the US. Advisors should have the ability to suggest problems at least. If they don't then they are probably a poor choice for supervision. But the topic will need to seem "interesting" to them if they are to offer any advice.
Along the way a good advisor should be able and willing to review your work and make suggestions, especially when the going gets rough, though in some fields this can be delegated to, say, postdocs in the lab.
There are some places in which a small number of faculty with similar interests will hold a periodic seminar (weekly, perhaps) in which common ideas are discussed. This can take the form of a discussion group with the advisees of those faculty welcome or required to attend. It is a good way to get feedback and also to broaden your view of the research possibilities.
If you don't have an advisor (dissertation advisor might be distinct from academic advisor) figure out what the interests of several faculty members are. Approach someone and be honest about your needs and ability. Some might turn you down, but that is a favor. You need some mutuality of interests to be a success. More senior faculty are more likely to have a lot of ideas, though recently tenured faculty might have more energy. Either can work.
I recommend against untenured faculty as their own interests are likely to overwhelm what they can do to help as their tenure decision nears. It is also possible, with untenured faculty, that they will not get tenured leaving you in an uncomfortable spot.


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Advisor's paper fundamentally flawed, what do I do?
My advisor and another student collaborated on a paper, after reading it carefully myself, I've come to the conclusion that the approach is fundamentally flawed and the main result is plain wrong.
As recommended in these instances, I've tried on several occasions to politely frame my doubts as questions and asked for further explanation (instead of directly accusing the paper to be wrong), but my advisor was not able to give me adequate explanations. After talking to the student author it seems pretty clear to me they have little idea what they are doing.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to get in this mess, but my advisor wants me to do some work building on this current approach, which they still seem to firmly believe is correct. However, I cannot build on something that makes little sense. What should I do?
Update: I have shown the error in the paper clearly, I have given counterexamples, however I still don't think I'm getting through. While my advisor does agree there are issues in the paper, I get the feeling that he is still brushing these off as minor issues.

For clarification, is the paper already publisher, and has thus undergone peer review?

Is this a paper on applied science, where you try to make sense of recorded data without knowing the fundamental processes behind (i.e. most of geophysics, most of biology, a lot of neurological science)? It is unfortunately the norm, correlation taken as "explanation" with a large dosis of expert judgement (also known as bias). Some biases are more correct than others ;)

Is this the kind of paper that can be verified by independent research? Would it be possible to such a verification part of building on the current approach? Possibly on the premise of making the base stronger before you build on it and improving your understanding of the subject in the meantime.

I have read a bunch of published papers where I came to the conclusion that the approach was obviously fundamentally flawed. With the benefit of hindsight, sometimes my conclusion was wrong.

Why would you not go to the next highest authority, or invoke the institution's complaint procedure, if. not both?

The first step you should take is confirm that your assumption (the paper is flawed and wrong) is indeed correct. It would not shed a very good light on you if you accused your peers of making mistakes when in fact they didn't. So before going any further, make sure you are right.
Find another (or better, more than one) competent person able to judge the correctness of the paper -- while I don't doubt that you are competent to judge the papers' results, it is always wise to have a second pair of eyes. If the other(s) come to the same conclusion (the paper IS wrong), you can still follow the (good) advise given by others in their answers.

This, and then, if another person agrees that a correction is needed, have a meeting with both them and your advisor. Now there is a second, more credible, voice of dissent.

"It would not shed a very good light on you if you accused your peers of making mistakes when in fact they didn't." Verb "accuse" is a little strong here. The OP specifically said that they framed their doubts as questions, not accusations. This is science that we're talking about, not dogma. Questioning and doubting is the foundation of scientific work, not something to be avoided for fear of shedding bad light.

For a PhD it is difficult to find somebody to be able to judge the paper independently. They could talk to the advisor and how does OP look if asked by the advisor, that third parties are checking on the paper? I the paper goes into a peer view, the result could confirm OP's doubts, but this could take month to convince the advisor. Too late for OP and his Phd work.

The paper has to convince the reader. Even with talking to the authors the reader is not convinced. So the paper fails this important aspect.

@usr1234567 a paper has to convice the peers not just anybody (who might lack expertise and knowledge)

Keep pushing until you arrive to a point of contradiction evident to both sides. It seems that you have asked some questions and deemed answers inadequate, whereas your advisor and fellow student found them solid enough. Assuming that - what is there to prevent you from demonstrating a clear contradiction of their result, which you claim to be "plain wrong", with some well-established result?
The next stage after asking questions is asking questions with some extra evidence at hand. "Here are 2 textbooks and 15 papers claiming the opposite, and this is how I was taught and what I know about the subject. How can these things simultaneously be true?". Your fellow student might indeed be out of their depth and the advisor none the wiser -  we are blessed with having a great tool called the scientific debate at our disposal to sort these things out. It is possible that they are, indeed, simultaneously true - but how would one uncover it if not for asking questions?
If they persevere in their heretical ways even after that, welp, not much you could do. Find a better advisor and avoid dealing with cranks.

The question says "but my advisor was not able to give me adequate explanations. After talking to the student author it seems pretty clear to me they have little idea what they are doing." and your conclusion is "you have asked some questions and deemed answers inadequate, whereas your advisor and fellow student found them solid enough". I didn't get that "solid enough" vibe!

There are also a number of papers where the results are not mathematically wrong, but the model or the assumptions used are unrealistic, or differ from conventional models from the literature, or are deceptive. Eg, the paper proves "assumption X implies result Z", but the introduction and conclusion from the paper make it sound like this can be applied in situation Y, glossing over the fact that situation Y does not satisfy assumption X.

@Stef It sounded pretty clear to the OP that the fellow student had little idea what they were doing. There is no indication this feeling was conveyed to them. Maybe the student does realize they don't know a whole lot about the subject, but they might not realize OP does. Also, while your example is a kind of special failure mode, it is deconstructable the same way: find where, precisely, the discrepancy is. Maybe the authors did not make this assumption but worded it poorly. Maybe they failed to consider something important. Debate!

You consider their paper to be wrong? They want you to write your own paper building on it? Then give them what they want and write a paper which does exactly that:

Attempt to replicate their results / build on them.
Arrive at different results / results which are contradicted by hard data.
Analyze what could explain those discrepancies.
Come to the conclusions that their results are wrong and yours are correct, because they made mistakes which you didn't.
Explain what their actual conclusion should have been.

This is how the scientific process is supposed to work. Bad science getting corrected by better science.

This might need to be adapted for a specific field, but is the right approach, I think.  In math, the best things are finding a counter example to a result, or finding a better proof.  Hard to do, but rewarding.

Even though this is probably the right thing to do in the interest of science, this could lead to quite a bit of animosity which is what OP is specifically trying to avoid. It can be difficult enough when the author you are correcting is far, far away, but when it's your advisor...

Bail out. Say firmly you think the method believe a stronger theoretical approach and you do not have time to commit so much time at this stage of your career.
You are doing a PhD, so you will have chance to publish. Even on the same topic: you cannot correct the current approach of your advisor, but you can show a more meaningful approach.
Keep in mind however that following a certain (correct or wrong) approach is much easier and quicker than lay down a new (correct) approach ... like 3-12 months, I w would say, you know the deficiencies of current approach so you know in which direction you have to look at.

Bail out, but instead of doing something related to the unlucky paper, try to move your thesis topic away from it. You still might citing it, but hopefully you can base your work on other aspects of your working group.

Write down all the discrepancies the advisor's paper has. Also explain why this approach cannot (or should not) be pursued further. Give this summary to the advisor and tell them politely to read this in their spare time and give it a serious consideration.
I hope they will understand if they want to.

"In his spare time"? If I was the advisor and an advisee brought me something like this, I would clear my calendar to read it...

One outcome could be, that the advisor is not convinced. Like OP is not convinced by the advisor's paper. Then, what?

+1 because I like this approach and if I were to receive written arguments in such a graphic form against something I'd written, I would drop everything else and go through it carefully. I couldn't rest until I'd sorted it all out. This may not work in all cases, but it might in this case. The OP can better judge if a hardcopy version of the OP's concerns, juxtaposed point-by-point with the paper will have an impact on the professor where verbal concerns have not made inroads.

@uhoh " I couldn't rest until I'd sorted it all out." you clearly did not went through submitting enough papers and receiving back the associated peer-reviews to be completed :D

@EarlGrey I certainly know of what you speak, but while it often feels like "running the gauntlet" there's no guarantee that it was a sufficiently rigorous and thorough gauntlet, or even the correct gauntlet. Occasionally reviewers see the something (or someone) they like and elect to save time by reviewing less thoroughly. When the main paper for my (Physics) thesis was published without a single correction or complaint from any of the reviewers I was overjoyed and felt vindicated for taking way too long to submit it. A year later a colleague found an obvious mistake, and I was heartbroken.


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Enquiry emails for grad school
I will be applying for grad school soon and have drafted a few informal enquiry emails. When would be the best time to send out informal enquiry emails to potential supervisors? Would it be advisable to send them out as soon as the programme starts to accept applications or even earlier than that? I'm asking  particularly for US universities.
Thank you!
EDIT: Since a lot of people have said this is field related, I thought I'd mention which field I'm applying for - I'm applying for microbiology/immunology programmes

This is a very subjective question, it varies from university to university, and even across fields. This varies from professor to professor as well, you can find a lot of information on the individual faculty pages as well. Some ask students to freely reach out, while others say strictly no because of various reasons. If you have to mail, then doing so after applying would be better, as the potential supervisor will be able to see the full picture, having all your credentials as well as that of other candidates.

Professors are busy people, you can get a rough idea of potential openings and a lot of other useful information by asking other graduate students in the potential supervisor's group.

Possible duplicate: When is the appropriate time to email professors as a prospective PhD student?.

See also this -- in the US, such mails are not required and may even be unadvisable.

Most professors that I know in the US (in computer science) do not want to receive such emails and will ignore them. Many have a note on their website saying so. The expectation is that students should submit an application and only after they are admitted should they talk to faculty. If you are interested in a particular faculty member, you should note this in your application.
That said, norms vary greatly. In the UK, the expectation is the opposite in my experience -- you should only apply after contacting a potential supervisor.
You should look at the websites of faculty that you are interested in working with and see what they say about contacting them. If they do invite such inquiries, then you should contact them. In terms of timing, earlier is generally better, as long as you are at the stage of having reasonably concrete plans.

I'm not familiar with computer science, but I think this answer is wrong.  Professors do want customized inquiries from qualified applicants.

In my field --- history (so I would think applicable to other humanities disciplines) --- these sorts of e-mails are actively encouraged, and I would recommend e-mailing potential supervisors to see if there's a good fit. Once in a while an application for a PhD applies out of the blue without pre-contacting a supervisor, that's usually rare and it isn't always a great fit.
Why? A potential PhD supervisor might not be taking that students that year, or they might be changing their research emphasis away from what the student wants to do, and it both helps them manage their workload and helps the student save throwing away application fees.
In Canada, if applications are due in January, I usually expect to see e-mails from potential students in September or October, but anytime through December is usually OK.

I'll write from my experience as an American professor in mathematics.
Generally I am happy to receive such emails, and I respond by thanking the writer for their interest, briefly describing our graduate program, and encouraging them to apply. If they ask about my research interests, or other aspects of the program, then I'm happy to answer questions. (Or, if they don't, I will tell them that I'm happy to answer questions.)
That said, I don't try to seriously evaluate them as applicants. If they include a CV then I basically ignore it. And I don't usually bring these conversations to the attention of our department's graduate admissions committee.
If you were applying in my field, I would say that sending such emails is a good idea, but that you should keep them brief, not try to "develop the conversation further" unless you have particular questions to ask (or are invited to by the professor), and take any sort of encouraging reply as a good sign. If you decide to send such emails, then now is a good time: professors are less busy now than they will be once the semester starts.

As people have said, this varies greatly by field. In my field (psychology), such emails are strongly recommended. In fact, to the point that it was suggested to me to not apply if I did not receive a response. At the very least, check that professors do not have a notice regarding emails or not taking students for 2021-22.
In my case, of the three professors I spoke to meaningfully, they were the only ones whose program I was accepted to (two) and received an interview for, but later declined (one). I emailed an additional couple, and applied to about three other programs "blind."
To answer your title question, I was told to send emails in August. My applications were due mostly December 1 - January 1. This also nicely is before the semester starts, when many professors will get busier.
However, I would check with a trusted mentor about expectations of doing this in your field. I note that you use a non-US spelling of "program," so best to check with someone who also has familiarity with the US system specifically.

Thanks! I wanted to ask a follow up to that - what do you mean by "spoke to  meaningfully" I recently got a response from PI sort of just redirecting me to the programme because first year is lab rotations (although the tone seemed very friendly!) but there wasn't much scope to develop the conversation further with questions/a discussion of projects, so am a bit confused as to what to expect from writing enquiry emails tailored to projects/interests

@PC123 Yes, I got a couple of those ("You sound great, please apply") and did not get an interview. One was a decent fit, the other weren't that great. By meaningfully, I mean we talked about my interests, and I had a phone call with two of them. The other wasn't a native speaker of English, and I think preferred emailing.

@PC123 As others have said, expectations are different in different fields. That said, my best guess is that if the PI wrote you a friendly email redirecting you to the program in general, then that's a positive sign, and possibly a sign that you're not expected to "develop the conversation further".


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Is it possible to ask about RA positions after being rejected by the same lab for a PhD?
I am currently looking at PhD programmes (mainly in the US) and have been advised to email potential PIs before I put in an application. I am afraid my profile isn't very competitive and my back up plan is to go get more research experience if I get rejected by all the programmes I apply to. In the case that occurs, would it be acceptable/is it normal to email the same PIs I wanted to work with to ask about research assistant positions? And if I re apply in the following year, is it acceptable to email the same PIs asking about their work since the PIs I have short listed and people I really really want to work with!
I hope I haven't rambled on too much!
EDIT: So is RA positions are given to grad students, how do I get more research experience to strengthen my application for grad school after I have graduated from my degree with a masters? (I'm international and so would need some financial support and visa sponsorship and can't "volunteer")
Thanks!

Usually research assistant positions are given only to the program's graduate students; non-students are not eligible.

You're probably best off looking for research tech positions in your own country. I doubt there is much support for those roles in terms of visas to the US.

You can ask for employment, but the title and work would probably be different from that of an RA. And the opportunity for authorship of papers might not be available.
In some fields, labs are very large, usually grant funded. There may be more need for lab assistants than can be fulfilled by graduate students. Someone has to watch that the kettle doesn't boil and bubble too much over night.
Holding such a position could possibly lead to interactions that open additional possibilities. But you would be an ordinary employee, subject to rules and protections for employees.
For an extreme example, I doubt that everyone working on projects at CERN is a student or professor. On the other hand, some at least, of these people wind up on long long authorship lists when experiments succeed.

"title and work would probably be different from that of an RA."  Chances of getting the title might be better in medical sciences.  Particle physicists seem to like employing engineers as staff.

Absolutely. The best course of action would have been to mention this during the application and/or interview for PhD, otherwise it might seem that you invented a straw to clutch for after the rejection.
But a candidate's suitability for any other role will naturally occur to an admissions tutor or interviewer.
Ask them, they can only say no thanks - but it is not a silly thing to do.


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Should I ask for a LOR from my future Master's Supervisor?
I start my master's year project in mid November this year and am currently applying to graduate school, most of whose deadlines are 1st of December. I was wondering if it was acceptable to ask my master's year supervisor for a letter of recommendation despite not having actually started in the lab yet? For more context, we have interacted twice in person and over video and have been communicating over email. But as a research lab degree I was wondering if it would be too soon to ask my supervisor for a letter, but at the same time wouldn't it appear odd that I haven't submitted a letter from my supervisor for my graduate school applications, especially considering my masters field is very closely linked to what I wish to pursue in graduate school. Also, when would be the best time to ask - once I start in the lab mid Nov for a 1st Dec deadline or just before starting, giving them a bit more time?
EDIT: I'm doing a Master's in the UK and applying to US graduate schools

Given it is UK, a "master's project" is basically an essay on some papers/topic from the literature, or is it original research?

Hi, no, my master's project is not a "taught" masters as you suggest, it is actually a part of an integrated master programme where we spend approximately 5 months in the lab and write that up as a dissertation for defense along side a review article. My research project is original research and not an "assigned" project per say

I'm just asking because from the point of view of a LOR, it makes a difference whether it is an essay or you did real research ...  though I guess US schools care less, since you anyway don't start with the research part of the PhD right away.

I would ask them now if they could imagine writing a letter, either now (outlining the reasons why they took you as a student), or close to Dec 1st.  But I would phrase it in a way where it is clear that you don't expect them to do it, since they don't know you well yet.  This way, your prospective supervisor can choose whatever they prefer - either they are happy to do it, or they will tell you that they can't judge you sufficiently well and that you should ask someone else (this is what I would do).
What I wouldn't do is to wait until close to the deadline and ask them then - first, if they say so you have to find someone else within a very short time (and most people don't like this, understandably), and second, this might come across as some kind of blackmailing ("I need your letter, since now it is to late to get someone else's").
In any case, good luck with your application.
(P.S.: As always, adding context about the country/region in which you are doing your master and in which you are applying can help you to get more tailored answers.)


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How to avoid generalization?
One of the tips I learn when writing academic papers is to avoid generalizing, and by that, it means we, as writers, need to understand the difference between fact and opinion and try to express things with different levels of certainty. However, I still find the way to differentiate between fact and opinion quite confusing. It would be great if someone can explain the difference between these two things.

Your title is quite general...

this seems to be better suited in [writing.se]

Generalization may be encouraged, since it extends scope (e.g., making academic papers more widely applicable), but perhaps you're interested in something else: What do you mean by generalizing? I don't see how it relates to understand[ing] the difference between fact and opinion and try[ing] to express things with different levels of certainty.

I think perhaps by generalizing you mean extrapolating, applying the rules governing one truth, to another. It may or may not lead to a second truth, but I think it is worth doing as it can be illuminating.

Generalization should be encouraged to extend scope, thereby making academic papers more widely applicable. Perhaps the OP is actually interested in another question: It is unclear what the OP means by generalizing, I don't see a relation with understand[ing] the difference between fact and opinion and try[ing] to express things with different levels of certainty. Maybe the OP is interested in

find[ing a] way to differentiate between fact and opinion...It would be great if someone can explain the difference between these two things.

Let's look at the definitions (from Google) of those terms:
 Fact. A thing that is known or proved to be true, e.g., hedgehogs have fleas.

 Opinion. A view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on
 fact or knowledge, e.g., hedgehogs should drink milk.

So, facts are true, whereas the validity of opinions are unknown.

The first example is also from Google, the second is a widely believed opinion, which is false.

It is a bit unclear to me how generalization relates to facts and opinions, however I think the core question of combating generalization is a good one.
Sometimes it is helpful to focus on writing concisely to avoid generalizations. For example, if you write “several different procedures were done in this experiment” and then list the procedures, the first part of the sentence is unnecessary and general. Start writing with the nitty-gritty specifics in mind, and then use topic sentences (which may be more general) appropriately.
Every sentence in your paper should add something helpful to it. Even if you are summarizing previous points (like in a conclusion), you want to have a specific purpose in mind so that your reader doesn’t waste time reading the same sentence with different wording.
In short, start by having a clear focus and then broaden (only as needed to help your reader) from there.


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How does Google Scholar find papers on personal websites?
Recently, I added a new paper to my personal website, and it appeared on Google Scholar a couple of days later. On my website, all I did was write the name of the paper, together with the authors and name of the conference, and then provided a link to the PDF. This information alone somehow informed Google Scholar that the text I added was actually a new paper. There is no other information about this paper on the web, so I know that Google only used my website to update Google Scholar.
So what I am wondering, is how does Google know what is a paper, and what is just some arbitrary text on my website? For example, if I had only written the name of the paper, without the authors and conference, and without the PDF, would this still have been detected?
On my website, the paper is listed on a webpage called "Publications", in a list with a load of other papers, but this is quite specific to the design of my own website. I'm wondering whether it has something to do with the PDF which I provided a link to. Perhaps it inspected the PDF and decided it was a paper, and if I hadn't added the PDF, it would not detect it as a paper. But then again, the HTML formatting does not necessarily indicate which text the PDF is actually associated with, even if it is obvious to a human on inspection of the webpage. Or perhaps Google Scholar just has some hand-engineered search which looks for instances of HTML where there is the name of a known conference, known authors, and a PDF nearby.

They have a huge basement full of little elves surfing the net like crazy.

Presumably the conference has a page and google knows that the conference (or journal) publishes papers.  If that coincides with authors that it knows about, maybe that's enough.

See Google Scholar's help page on inclusion. P.S. it has nothing to do with having it in a "known conference" - GS also indexes unpublished material. It basically looks for PDFs that have a title, an author list, and a references section. It keeps trying to index my (teaching) slides that are posted on my website, for example, because they have a title, author, and reference list at the end.

I think this is just a reflection of how awesome (and scarey) Google is - it happened to spider your site in the last few days and found it through whatever voodoo (or elves) they use these days.

@ff524: A few years ago (3 or 4) I happened to notice that if I googled my name in google scholar, then I would get a large number (over 20) of my teaching handouts (and tests and short quizzes) that I had archived in Math Forum posts back when you could do this (they seem to have eliminated this about a year ago). I haven't googled this in a while, but in doing so just now I only see two such items ("Exotic Group Examples" and this, and a few others that I don't know what they are (e.g. "MATHEMATICS: THE UNIVERSAL").

(Warning - gross oversimplifications incoming - if somebody doing research in Information Retrieval wants to add technical detail, be my guest!)
Fundamentally, Google finds all resources (HTML pages, images, as well as papers) on the web in the same way: periodically revisiting each and every resource it knows about, (re-)indexing it, and, for HTML content, following all links to other resources (rinse and repeat). Your web page is likely linked from your department web site, which Google definitely knows about, hence your web page is also in Google's database. Your web page links to your paper, hence Google will also know about your paper the next time the crawler checks your page. How long this will take is undefined, but Google has a lot of crawlers and is pretty smart about when to re-check certain types of pages, so it typically does not take very long.
Now, Google has specific heuristics in place to treat different types of resources differently. For instance, if an HTML page is added to the database keywords will be extracted, links will be followed, etc., while an image will lead to completely different actions. Scientific papers are not different in that sense - as soon as Google finds a PDF or Word file that "looks like" a scientific paper to the automated process, Google will generate paper metadata (title, authors, venue, keywords, ...) by parsing the PDF text as good as it can and add it to its special Google Scholar database, and this is when the paper appears in your profile.
Google's own website goes into quite some detail on this process. It also has instructions for authors looking to get their papers indexed by Scholar.

I imagine Google isn't just extracting the PDF metadata, but is parsing the actual content of the PDF.

@Ric Yes, I expressed myself quite badly.

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


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German Masters' level teaching (in math), seminar vs lecture
I have been told that there are 2 different styles of teaching Masters level courses in German university:

Normal lecture course - the person gives a certain number of lectures (measured in semester hours) each week and also has an exercise class each week (maybe done by a TA).

Seminar style course - the person picks a bunch of book chapters or papers and asks students to pick one of them and present them, so each student presents once during the course of the semester.

Is it accurate and can someone give me more details and their person views and experiences? Isn't there a danger with the second style that if you have say 3 students in the class then each student has much more workload? Is it hard work to do 3-4 semester hours of teaching a week?

Are you intending a career in Academia?

@Buffy Yes I am

I don't have an answer, from lack of knowledge about the system in Germany, but, for an academic career, version 2 has some advantages both in learning and in experience. Yes, it may be harder. The fact that it is more "active" is a plus.

In 2., do you mean "seminar style" rather than "semester style"?

@JochenGlueck Yes, sorry

Might be worth clarifying why you want to know.

@user2705196 I want to teach a certain load and want to know some views on how each style goes. It's hard to find information online it seems

In my experience, the distinction is not so much a question of "teaching style" but of purpose and scope of the course. Option 1-style courses were typically applied to more foundational courses, Option 2-style courses were chosen for niche topics. The former is easy to scale up if you have more students, and doing the homework will help your students build their problem-solving skills. The latter is helpful to give students specialising in a certain topic better perspectives, and carve out some credits for them to get more invested in their particular niche. This "choice" can also depend on how much money/teaching hours your department is willing to allocate to the topic.
[Edit: this paragraph is based on my experience at a specific University in Austria; it may not generalise] In terms of popularity, my former department had to cap the number of seminars you could credit towards a degree as a Mathematics Masters' student to avoid students making almost purely seminar-based degrees. Even if there are only a few students in a seminar, it's a lot less stressful to prepare a few papers for discussion, then spend the rest of the term chatting with people about interesting Mathematics topics, vs taking exams and having to turn up with solved homework assignments on a regular basis (possibly even in the morning). If only very few students enrolled, some combination of cancelling classes or having the lecturer present as well was often applied, although the specific policies will depend on your University.
tl;dr The course format should depend on what you want to achieve with it. Personally (warning, highly subjective), I'd prefer teaching seminars since you typically have a small group of highly motivated students who may be open to recruitment as future masters thesis students (or project interns). And if the topic is closely related to your research, it's more rewarding to prepare for. That being said, if you inherit your predecessor's teaching materials (or have your own prepared) and the lecture topic is easy for you, you often get a lot more hours out of Option 1.

That's an interesting perspective. Would you feel comfortable to share at which institution(s) you made the experiences described in the second paragraph? Some of the things described there are somewhat different from what I've experienced (at three different universities in Germany so far, in Ulm, Passau, and Wuppertal).

It was in Austria, so perhaps that makes the difference. I'll add a disclaimer to that effect, since seminars being "easier" is also a very subjective perspective.

Thanks! Upvoted.

The following is based on my experience at the Universities of Ulm, Passau, and Wuppertal (all three in Germany). It applies to both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mathematics.
Disclaimer: While things might be similar at many other German universities, they will most certainly be very different at German "Fachhochschulen" ("universities of applied sciences"). I do not have sufficient knowledge of the situation at Fachhochschulen to provide useful information or advice regarding the teaching load there (except for the very simple and vague observation that it is typically higher compared to universities).
The role of seminars
You're impression of lectures agrees with my experience.
Regarding seminars, there is quite a bit of variation, even within departments, depending on the preferences of the instructor (or sometimes the students). Every seminar I've (co-)organized (or attended as a student, though that was more than ten years ago) was based on each student preparing and giving a seminar talk. In contrast to user coffee_into_plots's experience in Austria I have (unfortunately) not seen a seminar, yet, where a significant amount of discussion takes place.
Different seminars might, for instance, vary regarding the following matters:

In some seminars the students will just be required to prepare and give a talk. In other cases they will also be required to hand-in a write-up of a few pages (sometimes before their talk or sometimes after that). That write-up, if required, might be required to be close in content to the seminar talk or to contain more material than the talk. In some cases, an instructor might only require a write-up if they are not satisfied with the quality of the presentation.

Some studenst might get a grade for the seminar, others might just "pass or fail" the seminar (depending on the regulations of their programme).

It happens frequently that only very few students attend a seminar. This can be handled in different ways. Some instructors might still just let each students give one talk, so the seminar ends after only a few meetings. Others might argue that this was not enough "exposure to the topic" or not enough "effort" and will fill a few other slots with talks by PhD students or postdocs or themselves (this can sometimes be a nice opportunity to to give a talk about a certain topic which one intended to learn anyway). Sometimes some of the students might volunteer to give two talks. I've not seen a situation so far where any of the students was required to give more than one talk.

Sometimes seminars are used as "companion courses" for certain lectures. I remember there was a lecture about "ODEs and dynamical systems" some years ago when I was a PhD student. Simultaneously we offered a seminar "Dynamical systems via computers", where the talks focussed on modelling concrete problems from the sciences by ODEs, presenting some theoretical properties of the specific ODE and visualizing some of the properties by means of computer simulations. It was possible for students to attend only the lecture or only the seminar, but it was particularly good for some students to attend both simultaneously.

I agree with coffee_into_plots's answer that the main point about seminars is that they have different objectives than lectures. From my point of view, students should learn the following things in seminars in mathematics (which they are not so likely to learn in lecture-based courses).

Learn a topic (i.e., they topic of their talk) in a more independent way than it usually happens in lectures.

Learn how to present mathematics in a talk.

Learn who to write a brief mathematical text (if they are required to hand-in somekind of write-up). This point can, for a Bachelor's student, be a good preparation for a Bachelor's thesis, so that they don't have to learn this from scratch when writing the thesis.

Related to the previous point: Some instructors require (or, say, invite) their students to type such a write-up in LaTeX, which will also be a good preparation for a thesis.

Exposure to the contents from the talks of the other students is also nice but is, from my perspective, not the main priority. This strongly distinguishes a seminar from a lecture which is typically accompanied by an exercise course and focusses on learning the contents.
In my experience, students will only be allowed to cover quite a small fraction of the required credit points for their program by seminars. Most of the points typically come from lecture-based courses.
Personal remark: Given the average quality (or lack thereof) of research talks at math conferences, I believe there's a severe lack of training and feedback. So I think we should actually require (or at least encourage) students to attend many more seminars than seems to be common.
Number of teaching hours per week
OP asked another question regarding "semester hours". The German word is "Semesterwochenstudenten", so I think the right translation would actually be "semester weekly hours". However, the word is quite misleading (both the German word as well as its English translation), since what is actually meant is the number of "hours one has to teach each week during the semester". (Mathematical/physical nitpick: I've heard people, maybe including myself, say "hours per week per semester", but this gives a squared time unit in the denominator which doesn't actually make sense.)
How many of such weekly teaching hours are much or few or difficult or easy to do depends on a lot of things, including your personal approach to teaching, the specific courses you teach, the motivation of the students, and so on. To give some orientation, here are some typical teaching loads that I've seen at German universities:

Postdoc, if 100% funded by a so-called "Landesstelle" (which means that their funding does not - neither completely nor partially - stem from a grant): 4 to 5 hours per week.
For positions which are partially funded by research grants, the teaching load is reduced proportionally. For postdocs that are completely funded by a research grant, their typically is no teaching requirement.

Assistant professor (in German "Juniorprofessor/in"): betwen 4 and 6 hours per week. (I currently have such a position and it's 4 hours per week, but it increases a bit after the first three years.)

Associate and full professor ("W2 and W3-Professor/in): 9 hours per week.

Permanent faculty position, but not professor (e.g. "Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben" or similar positions): There's a lot of variation, I've often seen 12 or 16 hours per week or something in between. Such positions sometimes come with specific administrational duties (e.g. coordination of international exchange programmes, or specific organizational tasks related to first year students, etc), which sometimes results in a somewhat lower teaching load than the 12 to 16 hours per week indicated above. Sometimes (often?), research is explicitly stated as one of several tasks for such positions, though the fraction of your time that you're supposed to spend on research in such a position is significantly lower than as a postdoc or professor.

This leaves the question which kind of teaching counts as how many hours. That tends to be a bit involved, and the details can for instance depend on the federal state where your university is located. Here's a rough idea of what to expect:

For everything that has been said above and will be said below, "an hour" is actually 45 minutes. This applies both in the specification of the teaching load and while actually teaching: courses in Germany are, presumably for historical reasons, organized in 45 minutes blocks. In most cases, two such 45 minutes blocks will be grouped to constitute a 90 minutes block - e.g. a lecture that is scheduled at 10 am will typically start at 10:15 and end at 11:45 (or end at 12, with a 15 minutes break in the middle). So those 90 minutes per week mean "two hours".
I should also point out that many lectures in Germany consist of four hours per week - which thus means two 90 minutes blockes per week. For instance, I currently give such a lecture, with one 90 minutes block on Tuesday and one on Thursday each week.

For lectures, the teaching load corresponds to what one might describe as "contact hours" in English, i.e. the time when actually giving the lecture or course. Note though that lecturers will typically be expected to offer office hours once a week, and those typically don't count towards your overall number of teaching hours. Preparation time for lectures is not counted, either.
So my present lecture mentioned above (90 minutes each Tuesday and 90 minutes each Thursday) suffices to cover 4 weekly hours of teaching load (which happends to be precisely the teaching load I'm required to cover).

Same for seminars. If there are several instructors for a seminar, though, then the overall weekly hours of the seminar will typically have to be split among all instructors. Time to assist the students with their preparation will typically not be counted extra.

Supervision of Bachelor's and Master's thesis sometimes counts towards your fulfillment of your teaching load, but I've never seen a department where they count much (having supervised one thesis might for instance count as a small fraction of one weekly hour in the semester when the thesis was submitted). So for many faculty members the theses don't make much of a difference regarding the fulfillment of their teaching load. On the other hand, there are sometimes people who advise quite a large number of thesis students and for those people it might indeed be relevant.

Things tends to be similar for teaching assistants (which are often employees at German universities, for instance PhD students or sometimes also permanent faculty members).
For all of this the theoretical details and how they are handled in practice can vary quite a bit. Please be prepared to sometimes encounter situations which might seem somewhat unfair (e.g., I've seen it happened quite a few times that people get the same amount of hours counted towards their teaching load for courses which obviously cause a very different amount of work, since the bureaucratic rules are not designed to reflect well what happens in reality).

Thanks a lot. I am wanting to offer a course of 4 hours teaching and 2 hours exercises (like you said, an hour meaning 45 minutes). My worry is that students will not take my module (or may drop out) because it is in reality 4.5 actual hours every week. It will be a Master level course. Do you have any view on that?

@StopUsingFacebook: Aren't those 4+2 courses (4 hours lecture plus 2 hours exercise course per week) very common where you teach? The vast majority of Master courses in mathematics that I've seen have precisely this format. (By they way, your comment sounds a bit as if you are already working at the institution where you want to teach that course; if so, then your colleagues will certainly be able to give you much better advice than anybody on the internet could).


text:
Is there any self hosted alternative to Researgate/Academia/GScholar
This morning I've been looking for a self-hosted alternative to Researgate/Academia/Google Scholar/linkedIn; I'm currently using WP Resume but what I want is something where taxonomy etc are already adapted for a scientific profile.
To be more specific, a tool or set of tools

where you can add references such as papers/proceedings/Etc, add items to them and organize them
which can parse google scholar and others to get citations stat (a cron job could trigger that)
where you have your profile page with skills, lab(s) etc
of course with a sexy interface (usually the biggest challenge in opensource projects)

Somehow a ideal mix between zotero.org for displaying references and researchgate/academia for their interface and profile pages. And aggregating stats from various sources. http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit3/ is nice and could be used like Zotero does for timelines
I've checked github and the vast web but I found nothing. The homemade technical solution seems to be wp-publications+wp-resume+exhibit3+lots of taxonomy and design work
Have you heard about something close to what I want?
Thank you reader(s)

Possible duplicate of Tool to manage and/or make available a list of my publications on the web?

Those three sites all do somewhat different things.  What are the specific features you're looking for? (please edit the question to include them)

Having your very own page tucked away in the dark recesses of the Internet serves no discernible purpose. Noone will ever see it.

@vonbrand on the other hand, it's frustrating when the only contact information available for a researcher is their Google Scholar/Researchgate/Academia etc profile. If that's your only online presence, and it doesn't include an email address, you will be unreachable.

@Tyler, then add a contact address...

@vonbrand "in the dark recesses of the Internet serves" Hmmm nope
it appears to be in second position well supported by LinkedIn etc which gives me the good ranking. And WordPress gives me a well tagged html. And since my content is original, all SEO markers are for my benefit
but my question is not about the relevance of the idea


text:
How to send your transcript directly from your US university to grad schools without the transcript office knowing which schools
I know it sounds weird, but I don't want the transcript office of my US alma mater keeping records of where my transcripts were sent.
The reason is I don't want people I know to call the transcript office pretending to be me and get the names of schools I applied to.

If you are in the US, isn't this the kind of thing FERPA was designed to prevent?

Have you double-checked whether the applications demand official transcripts? As far as I know, many allow for unofficial submissions initially (although this might depend on your field). If it's allowed, you could mail them yourself.

The triple exclamation mark in the first sentence is very off-putting...

If you are in the US, this is precisely the kind of thing FERPA prevents.  I have known students who successfully hid from abusive parents using FERPA.  @jwg: And given how many people their parents called that I know about, I'd be shocked to learn that they didn't call the registrar to ask where transcripts were sent.  OP's "paranoia" may very well be justified.

I'd be shocked if any university office disclosed personal information to an unverified caller. I'm sure the university office could be asked (via some student liaison officer?) to put a note for extreme privacy on your records. You could just say you had a stalker if you didn't want to go into family details.

@user48716 your redaction is not really a redaction since SE saves the hostory. I have rolled the edit back since the question is good you can use the contact us link to ask SE to disassociate the question from your account, but since this is the only activity on your account, I do not see what that would do.

@TheMathemagician, true. But you'd be surprised how easy it is to fool many people (and not just entry-level).

If you're in the US, talk to your registrar about what we call a "Privacy Lock." It is pretty much a set of measures to apply should the students wish to remain private. Things as extreme as taking you off the online directory, conceal all your names and e-mails, etc. can be done. Each school may do it slightly differently so you'd need to talk to them and get a sense of what is covered.
As for the transcript recipient, you can actually try asking them to put a flag in your personal profile. Most school registrars will probably open up your online record should someone call and ask about you, and if they see the flag they will know how to act accordingly. You can discuss with the registrar on what kind of privacy measures are in place by default and see if additional flags is appropriate, such as "do not disclose information unless in a face-to-face meeting with official proof of ID," etc.
And lastly, you may have to learn about the same security measures in your next school as well, perhaps as soon as you're enrolled. A lot of information is put online and I personally think it's exhausting to make sure that your name will not be featured anywhere. For instance, what if you applied for a scholarship and got it, and the funding agency wants to make a press release? What if you wanted to publish a paper and the journal needs to know your name and affiliation, and will print them if your work is accepted? Somewhere somehow they may still be able to find you so you'll need to be prepared.
And whatever that is driving you guys apart, I wish you'll find resolution and peace soon.

At my university in the U.S., the registrar will not tell anyone anything without explicit release by the student. This explicitly includes students' parents, for example, whether or not the parents are paying the tuition. I think this is a consequence of FERPA, specifically.

@paulgarrett, thanks! Yes, same in mine too. We cannot discuss student's grade in a recommendation letter unless the students explicitly allowed so. I'm looking at this as an anti-social-engineering answer as the OP is worried that someone may pretend to be him/her. In any case, I agree that a meeting with the school to learn your basic rights is a great recommendation.

@paulgarrett at most universities, a simple phone call and knowing a student id number is all that's required to make dramatic changes to your account, etc.

@SnakeDoc, are you sure? At my univ, access and/or changes require the student's login + password, and nothing can or will be done over the phone, more than sending a new temporary password to the pre-established email. True, if someone's hacked a student's password and/or email, then there's a problem... but larger. Student ID numbers are privileged info, but insufficient to get access...

It used to be the case that you could get an official copy of your transcript from most registrar's offices sealed in a blank envelope that you could then address and mail yourself. You might try asking your university about that. Then they don't know anything about where it went.

I know that at all three of the Universities I have attended, "Official Sealed Transcripts" are accepted either through the mail or through hand delivery - as long as the seal has not been broken (all US Universities)

@user48716, in this mode, they are typically sealed in a tamper-evident way. Who cares where it was mailed from as long as it has the seal?

While this might depend on the country, I would think unofficial transcripts would be suitable for the initial part of the admissions process. Some schools may require an official transcript prior to officially offering admission. I would ask whoever is writing a letter of reference for you to include a copy of your transcript with the letter. The letter should briefly explain the situation.
Any school that is not willing to help protect your privacy during the admissions process is probably not a good fit for you in the long run as they may not be willing to protect your privacy as a student.
That said, I am not sure what you are protecting against. I am not sure what damage knowing where you applied can cause.

It is hard to imagine, but I know cases from other (non-academic) environments where third parties sabotaged prospects of a candidate by knowing where the candidate applied to. If there is a reason to suspect that there are problems, it is reasonable to have at least the option to prevent third-party intervention.

"I am not sure what you are protecting against" - In the situation alluded to by the OP, my first thought was that the OP may simply be concerned about their "estranged family" finding out what city they are moving to.