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How do you cite from a presentation or poster at a conference?
For example, a presentation whose PDF is listed at http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/exoclimes/2012/pdf/talks/Day02_Ferreira.pdf?
And what if the presentation doesn't have a publicly available URL? How would the citation style differ from that of a poster?

It's worth checking with the conference... for example, Society for Neuroscience poster abstracts have a citation style listed at the bottom of every page (scroll to bottom of page, under "support" heading).

I would try to avoid citing a presentation or poster in the first place. It won't make a very good reference for your readers, since not only may it be hard to find, but it won't have a complete description of what the previous authors did. Instead, I would contact the authors of the poster, and ask if they have a paper about their project, or at least a preprint, and then cite that.

The specifics of the citation would depend on the citation style you are using. I am most familiar with Chicago style. To cite the presentation you've linked to in Chicago style, I would put:
David Ferreira, et al., "Climate of an Earth-like Aquaplanet: the high-obliquity case and the tidally-locked case" (presentation, Exoclimes 2012, Aspen, CO, January 16–20, 2012), accessed June 8, 2012, http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/exoclimes/2012/pdf/talks/Day02_Ferreira.pdf.
Following these guidelines: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/08/
For APA style, you would only cite a presentation in a reference list if there is a tangible remnant ("recoverable data") of the presentation (e.g., slides posted on a website). The citation would look like:
Ferreira, D., Marshall, J., O'Gorman, P., Seager, S. & Lau, H. (January 2012). Climate of an Earth-Like Aquaplanet: the high-obliquity case and the tidally-locked case. Paper presented at Exoclimes 2012, Aspen, Co.
For more examples in APA citation, look here: http://citationonline.net/CitationHelp/csg04-manuscripts-apa.htm#53

It turns out that one commonly used weight update strategies for neural networks, RMSProp, was first introduced in a slide:

Given the number of citations, it should give you plenty of examples on how to cite a slide.
One common citation format:

T. Tieleman and G. Hinton. Lecture 6.5-rmsprop: Divide
  the gradient by a running average of its recent magnitude.
  COURSERA: Neural Networks for Machine Learning, 4,
  2012.

To supplement Nate's comments, what I have usually seen is "personal communication". The poster isn't yet peer-reviewed and if it has yet to be written up as a manuscript and you can't cite it as a paper that is "in press", "personal communication" is a good substitute.

I find "personal communication" rather poor as a citation. How can one look that up?

Well if it is personal communication with Dave Clarke, it gives people an idea. At least it is better than trying to cite a url that may not exist in a year.

I don't even remember the conversation ...

@Dave Clarke, Touche

"Personal communication" is what you write when you've given up on citing anything that could actually help the reader, and just want to give credit to your friend.  Which is about as much as citing a presentation accomplishes.

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What do publishers provide to authors in different disciplines?
Discussions about academic publication (for example, the recent Elsevier boycott, the actual cost of publication, open-access initiatives by universities and funding agencies, citation cartels, or post-publication review) are often muddled by the fact that publication practices and culture vary significantly from one discipline to the next.  I would like to see some of these differences explicitly teased apart.
I'm particularly interested in exactly how publishers in different disciplines help move authors' ideas to formally published papers.  Publishing in any discipline requires the combined effort of authors, publishers, editors, and reviewers, but the distribution of these efforts (and their associated costs) seems to vary from one discipline to the next.
What specific services do publishers provide to authors in your discipline? Please only one answer per discipline.  (If necessary, define "discipline" as "set of researchers with the same publication practices".)
(At a deeper level, I am curious why so many people seem to associate the value, authority, and prestige of various publication venues with their publishers instead of their authors, editors, and readers.  But that's not a good question for StackExchange; let's stick to the narrower factual question.)
I'll provide an answer for my own discipline.

So... nothing, then?

It doesn't directly answer your question, but you might be interested in Priem & Hemminger's "Decoupling the scholarly journal", http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2012.00019 for the types of services that could be shifted away from the publisher.  (eg, why should peer reviewers have to deal with papers that haven't even been edited for spelling and grammar mistakes?)

A question asking for a big list. A proper answer would have a list inevitably as long as the number of disciplines or longer.

In theoretical computer science:

Papers are written, illustrated, and typeset (in LaTeX) by authors and refereed by unpaid volunteers.  Some publishers give free journal subscriptions to editorial board members; a few pay a small stipend to the editors-in-chief of each journal; otherwise, editors are also unpaid volunteers.
Most journal publishers provide an online system to help editors track submissions and communicate with referees.  Conference publishers do not; most program committees use free systems like EasyChair or HotCRP.
Some journal publishers employ copy editors, who produce the final camera-ready paper directly from author-provided LaTeX and image files.  Specifically, copy editors correct (and invariably insert) spelling and grammar errors, and reformat the paper (especially the bibliography) to fit the publisher's standards.  For other journals and most conference proceedings (Springer's LNCS series being a notable exception), copy editors simply do not exist; camera-ready papers are produced by authors using publisher-provided LaTeX packages, except possibly for page numbers.
Most publishers provide electronic versions of their papers to subscribers.  Some publishers also provide extensive indexing and cross-referencing of their publication catalog.  Online-only venues are still relatively rare, so for most venues, publishers print, bind, and ship paper copies.

My experience (logic programming, concurrency, software engineering) is very similar. Around 2000, one of the Springer journals claimed to retype the entire article despite being provided with the LaTeX source files. Fixing all the typesetting mistakes introduced during this process took me ages. In a different paper the copy editor decided to replace temporal logics by temporary logics...

Yeah, everybody seems to have a copy-editing horror story.

In mathematics, the publisher mainly:

organizes the peer-review (for example by providing an electronic platform for submission, communication with authors and referees, etc.);
provides copy-editing;
publishes in paper (organizes printing, sends the volumes, etc.) and electronic formats (manages a website, cross-links, a database, etc.).

I would add a remark: it seems that many of the cheapest journals do all these three things a lot better than most the expensive ones. For example the professionalism of copy-editing was far better for my papers handled by the London Mathematical Society or the American Mathematical Society than for the one I got published by Elsevier, Springer or World Scientific. My only copy-editing horror story happened at Springer (seven errors in formulas introduced after the proofs).

In psychology and neuroscience, in addition to all the services noted by JeffE for theoretical computer science, the publisher lays out the text and the figures on the page to fit the standard journal layout.
This usually requires manual intervention because papers in psychology and neuroscience are rarely composed with LaTeX. More often they are submitted as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF. The need for intervention by a person makes this process expensive, although it is sometimes outsourced to India to make it cheaper. In many cases, layout seems to be the process that preventes academics from publishing their journals online themselves without a publisher. Doing the layout seems too time-consuming for academics to manage on their own.

One can easily produce beautiful layouts with LaTeX, if provided with the right style file.

@DaveClarke: As others have pointed out elsewhere, producing a functional layout is "easy" only if (1) you've climbed the LaTeX learning curve already, and (2) someone else provides a polished class file.  But producing beautiful layouts is NOT easy, in any platform.  If they were easy to make, at least one CS or math journal would have one!

@JeffE: I agree. However, many of the difficulties of producing beautiful layouts are actually related to the specifics of traditional printing press: the need to save space (e.g. overuse of inline equations, mixing figures and text on the same page, and the use of two-column layouts), the need to justify the bottoms of pages on a two-page spread (e.g. controlling orphans/widows), etc. If our primary goal was to produce reasonably beautiful papers for reading on screen, with an appropriate tool chain it might within the reach of a much larger fraction of researchers.

Indeed. If only there was some sort of... markup format, that would like... be formatted for a screen, right?  Oh well, I guess we're stuck then. :)  On a side note, does anyone actually go find a print copy of a journal in the library any time other than when they couldn't find it online?

@JukkaSuomela Mostly agreed, except that figures should arguably be next to referencing text if possible for readability (according to e.g. Edward Tufte). But I learned typesetting papers from a CSist with typography books; doing better than stuff outsourced to India is certainly much easier.

@Namey If you suggest HTML, that's not really sufficient for typography. It might be fine for plain text and section titles, but reasonable output for figures and equations is much harder. In my field those are also typically formatted by hand (with line breaks) for a specific size, and that's hard to avoid to reach a certain quality.

I used to work at an academic publisher and so have some knowledge of what services are provided to all STEM fields. Social sciences should be similar, although I am less familiar with them.
Publishers provide:

An editorial management system ("EMS"). See this question. EMSes help the editors keep track of the status of each paper, as well as things such as the performance of reviewers, author blacklists, and so on. EMSes (at least the more powerful ones) are usually not free and charge by per paper handled.
Editorial office support (the "desk editor"). Desk editors are usually degree holders although not necessarily in a relevant discipline. They handle everything that might need to be done for the journal. Examples: answer author queries, liaise with Clarivate Analytics to get a journal indexed in Web of Science (see selection process and the list of deliverables), operate the EMS for editors / reviewers who can't figure out how to use it or are not interested in learning, negotiate special issues with conference organizers, choose articles to feature on the journal's website, maintaining a publishing licence from the government.
Acquisitions. The editorial board does a lot of this, but it's also possible a motivated desk editor or more senior editorial consultant will do some acquisition work too. Typically this involves emailing researchers and asking if they'd be interested to write on ____. They may discuss the topic with the editorial board before attempting to acquire for it. Usually editorial board approval is still required. The publisher may also attempt to invite people to join the editorial board.
Peer review. Some journals are set up so that the desk editor assigns a member of the board to handle the paper. Desk rejections can also be due to the desk editor, although it requires some experience on his or her part. Actually handling the peer review process also happens relatively often in my experience. Sometimes the editorial board is either not very active or that no member of the board is interested in handling the paper, whereupon someone has to do it and that someone is the desk editor (or editorial consultant). Alternatively there could be an editor assigned who doesn't do anything for two months (example), and the desk editor moves the paper forward by inviting reviewers.
Marketing. There're often publisher booths at major conference. One may also see insertions in these conferences. Other marketing activities include making flyers (visit your local library if you want to see what these are like), usage marketing, or things like "we just discovered gravitational waves, here're some of our papers on gravitational waves for free".
Copyediting & proofreading. Self-explanatory.
Typesetting. Most authors actually don't know LaTeX very well, if they use LaTeX at all. It is very rare that a manuscript does not require typesetting. Expressions such as "Ref (??)" or figures being placed 3 pages away from where they are referenced are quite common, as are poor quality figures or even hand-drawn ones which need to be fixed. TeX occasionally also does things like split the caption of a figure between two pages. If one has reviewed papers in one's field one should also be able to see firsthand what the typesetting does, since the paper that's sent for review has not been typeset yet.
Website maintenance. Self-explanatory.
Electronic distribution of published papers. This includes generating epub files, xml files, and DOIs.
Customer service. This could e.g. be librarians asking why they haven't received an issue of the journal they subscribed to (which is a reason to publish issues whenever ready and not hold papers in reserve). If print issues are necessary, they + their distribution are also handled by the publisher.

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What are some general good principles for creating a poster for a poster session?
Should one create slides similar to those that one uses in a good powerpoint presentation? Or are there things that a poster should include that a powerpoint should not include? (and vice versa)

I asked a related question on the stats site, How should I organize my poster presentation?. I've also added the poster tag to this entry to go with your questions.

I strongly recommend Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and everything written by Edward Tufte ever.

Related: Poster orientation: Landscape or portrait (horizontal or vertical)?

The title is your bait, the first paragraph is your hook. Make the bait big and tasty, make the first paragraph catchy.
A poster is primarily an advert for you. Secondarily, it's an advert for your research. Thirdly, it's an advert for your department. And it will succeed at those things best, if it gives the casual reader an easily accessible introduction into what's novel about your research.
Know the flow: it should be clear to anyone reading, what they should read first, then second, and so on.
Make it clear that it's your work. Get your name and affiliation in big letters, with a photo of you. Include your contact details, and make sure you can be reached on them during the conference.
Don't use powerpoint. A poster is graphic design, so use a graphic design package such as InDesign. If you don't have an eye for graphic design, design the poster with someone who does. Most departments have at least one natural talent. It's often the person who keeps winning the "best poster at conference" prize. It's orthogonal to (i.e. independent of) quality of research.
Use a big, clear typeface. Not everyone you need to reach has the healthy, clear vision that most students have.
Briefly state the problem, the method, the results, and the implications.
Pretty pictures are crucial. The words are there just to supplement the explanation of your work given in the pictures.
Test, test, test. Print it out life-size (tiled sheets & sticky tape are your friend), show it to a couple of colleagues (one hot on your area of research, and one hot on design), watch the order in which they read things, ask for feedback. Implement any advice on content that comes from the one who is hot in your area of work. Implement any advice on design that comes from the one hot on design.

Is number 4) field-specific? I have never seen a poster on a CS conference that had the photo of an author on it (and I think I would perceive it as extremely self-aggrandizing, in the way that I'd do my best to stay at a certain minimum distance to the person who is trying to present themselves like that).

More images, and less text. A poster is a highly visual, two dimensional medium, and you should use the real estate as such. Since poster viewers will be skimming it while you explain something to another viewer, it's best to have lots of pictures so they can get a gist of the ideas.
PPT slides are the poor man's way of making slides on the quick. But they're not ideal. Again, it's best to use the entire real estate as a continuous medium, rather than as a set of tiles (unless you can do some creative flowing with the set of tiles).
Having said all of that, readers still like some sense of progression through the poster, so it helps to have visual cues (arrows, arcs, etc) that help the reader understand the order in which to read things.

Also, more images and less text.  And after you've done that, more images and less text.

"More images and less text" is good when you plan to stand near your poster for the entire session. But if you intend to also leave your poster alone for some time, you must include in it enough words to explain itself.

I broadly support most of the tips given in the previous answers, but I'd like to add some more general concerns which I feel that you should think of before you even draw the first line:

Take-home message: Think about this long and hard. If you had to describe what was exciting about your work in one single sentence, what would it be? What is the one thing you want people to remember about your work? About your presentation? Make sure you're 100% clear about this before you start writing your poster.
Clarity: Once you have your take-home message, make your entire poster subservient to it. Place it prominently in your title and make it crystal clear in your first paragraph, as EnergyNumbers and Ana suggest. Anything that's on your poster that does not contribute directly to the take-home message shouldn't be there.
Lead your readers/viewers: If your main argument requires a chain of explanations, display these prominently and mark them as such. Make the text flow follow the flow of your argument or reasoning. Place figures where they nail a point home, and nowhere else. Clip arts and colour can be cool, but don't use them if it will distract your readers from your take-home message or otherwise make their eyes wander.
Preparation: Try to think of the three questions people will ask you when you present your results, and try to answer them pre-emptively in the poster. Also try to be as prepared as possible to explain stuff while standing next to it, e.g. make sure it still has all the data you need to point to when making an argument.

This may all sound a bit reductionist, but remember that apart from the space restrictions, you're also dealing with time restrictions. People usually just browse posters while on their coffee break. Your job is to captivate them and make the most of that short break.
This might also all sound a bit too much like leading the viewer/reader like mindless cattle. Don't worry, though, they won't care. I've yet to hear anybody complain about an argument being presented too clearly. If anybody wants details beyond the take-home argument, you'll be standing there to give them, which is why you should be prepared and ready for questions.

Apart from the excellent advice you already received, here are some additional points:

Bulleted lists instead of flowing text helps make your points more concise. They are also easier to read.
Don't be too concise. Although text should be minimal and the poster is not a stand-alone thing (i.e. you're there to present it), take into account that people who are interested in your work will ask you to mail them a pdf of it after the conference. They should be able to reconstruct your work from it (after having heard you present it once).
Make the research question and conclusion stand out. Circle them, put them in bold, give them a different color, anything. A person looking at your poster should be able to read the title, the question and the answer at first glance.
Make the data as easy as possible to read: circle the important parts in the graphs, point arrows to them, write in words what they tell you.
Avoid putting tables, unless they are really small. Tables are difficult to read. Wherever possible, replace them with graphs.
Avoid trying to tell your audience everything. Choose one key point to present.
Aesthetics have a slightly different logic than usually. An ugly background color might work in your favor for example, as long as it makes your poster stand out. Symmetry, however, is highly valued. Also, I wouldn't go for more than 2 colors (apart from the background color and letters).
I've heard that sans serif fonts are considered better for posters, though I'm not sure why.

people who are interested in your work will ask you to mail them a pdf of it after the conference — So then why not preemptively have a stack of preprints next to the poster?  Or even better(?), a stack of business cards with the preprint's URL (and the author's contact info)?

Those are good suggestions as well, and many people follow them. The last conference I've been to actually provided the URL - we all uploaded our posters, and the website of the conference now has a searchable database. I found that a great idea. I didn't need to lug printed stuff back from China, which I would invariably forget in my suitcase before the jet lag wears off :)

Regarding fonts, sans-serif fonts don't have the "spiky" edges and look more neutral/natural. THat being said, I recall reading studies where it was very clearly shown that human eye uses the serif details to distinguish tightly packed letters, so for running text (i.e. paragraphs) serif is the way to go. My rule of thumb; sans-serif headings, serif body text. Works for documents, slides and poster :)

"the poster is not a stand-alone thing" - if this were about presentation slides, I would agree. Posters, on the other hand, are pretty much a stand-alone thing IMO. A poster session at a conference is the only opportunity to talk to a poster author (and even then, not everyone gets their timeslot), but that is by far not the only time the poster is looked at during the conference (preferrably, posters should be left available for the whole duration of the conference), and also afterward (when the poster moves to its final resting place at a wall in one's home university or so.

Here you have a great article for the Ten Simple Rules series, by Thomas C. Erren and Philip E. Bourne:
Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation
Take a look!


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How do I select a graduate program?
I've applied to several graduate (MSc) programs overseas, and I've received several acceptance letters. Now I have the problem to select one of those programs. How should I do it? What should I look into each program?

No program offers funding, and some programs are elegible for a local scholarship.
I can fund some programs with my own money.

-1: Isn't the question way to broad? We even know nothing about your country, your discipline or your preferences. And even with that is a very subjective matter...

Possibly related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/124/79

May I ask why you chose an MSc instead of a PhD? What is your career goal? I don't mean to imply one is better than the other. If you are going to spend a lot of money and time, it should be well-spent.
In some places, like the UK, not much more time is needed to get a PhD beyond an MSc. In the U.S., PhD's in the sciences are usually completely funded.  Per badp this seems not to be the case in Italy.
For either an MSc or PHD I suggest looking at the career paths of former graduates of that lab. This is something I wish someone had told me when I entered my lab. The charisma of the lab boss or excellence of the equipment are meaningless if, after 2-3 years, you can't move on as you hoped. Trace the career path of the last few graduates - from MSc all the way to how many wanted to and got faculty positions and how long it took them. In my experience what you do is much less important that who you know, which comes from getting into the right environment.

I want to get the PhD, but the MSc is just the first step into the PhD.

@Matias: My point was that I don't believe that a Master's must necessarily precede a PhD. Nor, do I even think it is common. I am reasonably sure that this is correct in the U.S. both for people born here and for those who come here to do graduate work. It is true though that many of those coming to the U.S. have other degrees.

@mac389 If you are asking clarifying questions, please post those as comments. There's no need to post not-an-answer as an answer and then edit. This messes with voting and generally isn't how the whole thing is supposed to work. Getting your clarifications and then posting a comprehensive, informed answer is a lot better. Thanks.

Even though this answer is posed as a question it is IMO actually a pretty good response. Taking the PhD track is an easy way to circumvent no funding, and for my program there is no commitment to continue with the PhD (although I don't know to what extent this generalizes to other programs).

@mac389 hm... I dunno how it works there, but at least in Italy you can't study for a doctorate without getting a master first.

@mac389 I have been looking at CVs in my field of interest and practically all of them have Masters preceding the PhD.

@badp, Matias: See my edited answer. I think the most important question becomes then where do the students of any lab you are considering go afterwards?

As you are presumably pursuing this degree so you can eventually work in industry, I would consider the following:

Find out which programs are more highly regarded in industry.
Consider the success rates of each university in helping their graduates find employment; this can vary significantly from institution to institution.
Consider the extra-curricular aspects; what does each program's city have to offer? Programs with ties to local industry may help you obtain some useful internship experience.

Depending on which country you are talking about, there may be league tables for the universities in that country. While the total ranking can be misleading, they provide useful information such as staff to student ratios -- the higher the ratio, the more opportunity you will have to ask questions.
I would also look at the reputation of the universities in the specific field that you want to do your MSc in, e.g. how many people work in that area and are they well-known (involved in many conferences/journals and similar).
In the end it might boil down to money though, so you should probably look at what you can afford first (not only in terms of tuition, but also living expenses in that area).


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Is it better to apply to doctoral program in the fall semester or spring semester?
I plan to apply for USA universities. Is there any difference between the number of PhD opportunities in spring and fall semesters? I mean in which semester do I have a better chance to be approved?
In my country application for spring semester is not so usual. What about USA?

Most universities offer Doctoral admissions exclusively in fall semester (once a year). Deadlines for applications are typically in December. For more detailed information, you should check the particular department's webpage.

All institutions I know of in the US have deadlines for submitting applications to the doctoral program. The earliest ones I remember were in December, and the later ones were in early spring.
Your chances of being accepted are zero if you submit after the deadline, and if you submitted early it would be at best annoying. So long story short just follow the rules of the institution to which you are applying.


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How to phrase the title in a presentation at an academic interview?
When delivering a presentation at an academic interview, what are some keywords which should be included in the title of the presentation? Should the title be in the first person? What are some good examples?
The position I am considering is assistant professor / lecturer
I imagine some choices to be:

The interview presentation for JACK JAY
The presentation for lecturer at Uni Awesome by JACK JAY
JACK JAY'S presentation as candidate lecturer at Uni Awesome

Can you provide us with: i) The position you're applying, and ii) A few samples for us to comment on? Usually, faculty candidates in my institute titled their presentation with their highlighted project or research. Occasionally, a couple may have some catchy titles, but still they never deviated too far away from the key project.

@Penguin_Knight, does this improve the question?

I simply put the title of the talk, like I would title any other talk. I've never mentioned it as "a presentation by" or "an interview for" in my slides.

You don't need to include any of the proposed titles in your presentation.  They all come across as stilted and affected, and are entirely unnecessary.
Instead, if this is a public presentation, treat it as you would any other such presentation: indicate the title of your talk as you normally would have it, and so on.
If this is the "private" presentation to the faculty, then you should give it a title representing your current and future research interests. You don't need to say "what" the presentation is for—again, the location of the talk should be sufficient.

Just throw it out here. Perhaps others can upload their suggested topic slide as well? That would be fun.
I don't like to appear to be overly kissing-up, so I'll opt for toning down the university. My talk would have been broadcasted and posted for a while at the institute so the audience should know why they are here. So I'll just focus on up-playing my topic and who I am.
It'd be prudent to clarify with the hiring committee chair on the format and topics to be covered. But beyond that, just be at ease with the format stuff; focus on the contents. Be very, very certain that you cover just enough background to show you can think in breadth and depth, explain what your research questions are, and present your methods and results in alignment with your questions, and state briefly the implication. For job talk, leave a few minutes to elaborate how your work can grow into your career path, and highlight potential synergistic collaboration with some hot areas that your target institute is good at (e.g. "I'll also love to collaborate with the specialists at your Marine Dietary Assessment Center to cast a more critical look at the diet-obesity association.") You'll need to read their website/reports up on that. Find some friends, colleagues, and mentors to sit in your practice sessions.
Best of luck!


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Should I translate experimental materials for my thesis?
For my Ph.D. thesis, I developed a new usability method which focuses on a survey. The main contribution is a description for practitioners how to conduct such a survey. For this, I could not develop a standard questionnaire, but gave guidelines on how to construct one.
I am validating the method by conducting such a survey myself. My target population consists of German-speaking people (I’m measuring the usability of a software available only with a German interface), so my questionnaire is in German.
I want to add the questionnaire in the appendix. But my thesis is written in English. Now, my question is: Should I provide the questionnaire in English or in German?

If I provide it in German, some readers won’t be able to understand it, and it won’t be useful as an example if some of them want to apply the method themselves. Note that my reviewers speak German, so this won’t be a problem for them.
If I provide it in English, it won’t be a documentation of what I actually used in the experiment. Note that in psychometry, a translated questionnaire is not considered equivalent to the original and when a standard questionnaire is developed, any translation is required to be validated again.

What is the proper thing to do here? Use the original experiment material, even if it is of no use to many readers, or create an approximation which has not really been validated and whose usefulness is thus diminished as well?

Returning back to my old question, now that I am close to finishing - there is about 15 pages per questionnaire, with 4 questionnaires, so I already have a 60 pages in this appendix. I also have another appendix with 50 pages. If I double the questionnaire-containing appendix, I will have 170 pages worth of appendices at a 100-115 pages thesis, which seems excessive.

Why not include both?

I don't see why the size should stop you from including both versions. However long the texts are, they are very relevant to your work.

Providing both the original and the translation would satisfy everyone.

This could easily be done with a simple table, depending on the length of the questions. It's important that it be both, too - although it's only once and clearly anecdotal, I've seen a paper rejected because the reader could not understand a 'foreign' language in the paper. Their reasoning was that if you want to publish a paper in an English publication, a reader who only speaks English should be able to understand it. If you're publishing for an international group, perhaps it would be more accepted, although you still can't expect people to speak two specific languages.

Both. Depending on how you structure your thesis, you may include one of them in an appendix.


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Difference between criterion validity and reliability equivalence
In the book Doing research in the real world by David E. Gray, there is a section on experiment design. When discussing validity and reliability, the author defines “criterion validity” as

This is where we compare how people have answered a new measure of a concept, with existing, widely accepted measures of a concept.

and a little later, in the “Reliability” part, there is a subheading “Equivalence”, which says

Another way of testing the reliability of an instrument is by comparing the
  responses of a set of subjects with responses made by the same set of subjects on another instrument (preferably on the same day).

So if I got this right, we are both times measuring if there is a difference between the answer on our new instrument and another, existing instrument.
Is there a practical difference between the two concepts, or only a philosophical one? And whether practical or philosophical, what is the actual difference?
Update The author discusses validity and reliability in general, then lists 7 different aspects of validity and 5 different aspects of reliability. "Criterion validity" and "reliability equivalence" are only one type of each, respectively. Please consider in your answer that this question is not about validity vs. reliability in general, but only about these two specific aspects.

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about experiment design and not academia.

The list of topics doesn't say that research methodology is off-topic, and doing proper research is part of being in academia. Is there an existing policy against "how is research done" questions, and where can I read about it? I don't personally see a good argument why being a good university teacher should be on topic but being a good university researcher should be off topic.

CV is the right place, because validity and reliability play a big role in measurement and research design, thus deserve focus in statistics and epidemiology (what CV focuses on.)

Cross validated is absolutely not the right place. Statistical validity is a tiny part of validity. This is about theory of science, not about statistics.

Anyhow, I often feel we spend too much time putting questions into silo. Answer submitted.

@dgraziotin not that I know of, otherwise I would have suggested it :)

Let's say it's criterion-valid to post the question here. But I bet the answers we got here and in CV will be reliable.

@rumtscho sorry to have been terse. I am not sure if we have discussed if "how is research done" type questions are on topic. My feeling is that experiment design is much broader than experiment design for academics. But I only have one vote. This is probably worth a meta discussion.

To anybody interested, I posted a question on meta, http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/779/are-questions-on-the-theory-of-academic-research-on-topic

@StrongBad the fact that experiments are also used outside of science shouldn't be a reason to not accept the question here. Alcohol is used outside of human consumption, as a biofuel for example, and corn starch is used to make plastics. On Cooking.SE, we still answer questions about alcohol and corn starch, unless they happen to be obviously focused on the non-cooking application only.

I disagree that CV is the wrong place, but I +1'd your point that statistical validity isn't the whole story anyway. Thing is, same's true of CV answers. Lots of good scientists over there with a strong sense of validity in a larger sense and plenty of enthusiasm for extending it beyond statistical issues alone (e.g., Is Facebook coming to an end?). That being said, no objection from me to asking here; +1!

@NickStauner the validity of a research tool is not a statistical topic, it is a topic from scientific theory. We happen to use statistic methods as a convenient way to measure it. Many statisticians will know quite a bit about it, because statistics is applied on data coming from experiments, and therefore statisticians learn about good experiments. It is sad that many grad students are not taught scientific theory and research methodology separately and only have some exposure during other courses, for example statistics - but it is a separate research field.

No disagreement if you're saying there are meaningful differences (nor with the deplorability of grad education on basic theory and methodology, or your comment in general), but as a statistician might say, validity and statistics are only partially independent :) I only really disagree that CV is a bad place to ask! I acknowledge that meta-SO discourages cross-posting, but I've managed to do it successfully myself following some advice on how to pull it off justifiably. Worth considering no?

@NickStauner and anybody else bothered by my insistence that this one question is for here, please see my post at http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/784/103. I made a mistake in hastily wording that comment in such a provocative way, but did not mean to imply that Crossvalidating is in general a bad place for asking on validity and reliability.

Criterion validity concerns with measuring the right thing. For instance, GPA is likely to have criterion validity to measure a student's academic understanding. While the change in weight in the last semester has much less criterion validity to measure the same trait. Basically, if the measurement you use and the trait you want to measure has a high correlation, then there is likely criterion validity.
Reliability concerns mostly with measuring the thing right. For instance, if GPA can measure a student's academic understanding, and percent attendance can also measure a student's academic understanding, then GPA and percent attendance should correlate, aka, they are reliable. Before subjected to reliability assessment, the tests are usually checked if they are criterion-valid. However, it's possible to have two tests that are highly correlated (reliable) but invalid. Such as using dietary fat intake and serum lipid to predict a college graduate's earning potential.
Notice that there a few different types of reliabilities, the one you cited is more about alternate forms reliability, there are also test-retest reliability and inter-rater reliability, etc.
Practically, they are not interchangeable. Validity happens between the true trait (or behavior) and the measurements. Reliability happens between two measurements (or modes/instances of measurement.)

See also accuracy and precision.

Slightly off-topic as the terms you ask for are more specific, but:
Unfortunately, there is some ambiguity as to what exactly is meant by different terms in this quality control/validation/method context.
E.g.

in machine learning the "validation set" is often used to optimize parameters - as opposed to proving whether or not the model "does its job" (a shortened version of one definition of validity). The latter is measured with the "test set" (again, in my opinion, a rather ambiguous name).
The Handbook of validation in analytical chemistry spends several pages to compare and discuss differences between several definitions given in literature and norms specific to the field of analytical chemistry. The bottom line of these definitions is that in analytical chemistry, validity is not only about measuring the right thing (as @Penguin_Knight nicely explained), but also about measuring the right thing right.

I'd therefore recommend that you state what you are speaking about rather than relying on these terms.

Validity is comparing the new results with the existing literature, without doing extra experiments.
Reliability is comparing the new results with some extra experiments that you carry on with some other settings/devices.
I agree with @StrongBad that this question is off-topic, but there is no SE site on research in general and I think this question is quite interesting.

I don't know where this view comes from, but it is certainly not the one the book author had in mind. In another subchapter, he insists that external validity has to be shown through comparison with a series of new studies. As for the off-topic suggestion, please share your view on Meta, http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/779/are-questions-on-the-theory-of-academic-research-on-topic.


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Should I take courses that are not directly part of my research topic?
I've received conflicting advice as to whether I should choose my coursework based on my research topic or not. The main pro usually is that I'll quickly be able to get up to speed on my research. The con is usually that there are so many other courses that I could take, in which I could learn topics I may not ever have a chance to formally learn, and given the constant need to hunt for funding, I may never have a chance to put aside and study in-depth again. Any definitive answers to this topic?

I don't think a "definitive" answer is possible, but the following is based on personal experience and observation of many other students.
If your advisor is okay with it, take as many courses as you can in things that interest you and are in the realm of your discipline.  As an applied math grad student, one of the best things I did was to take a graduate course in optimization from the CS department, even though I thought it had nothing to do with my thesis (in numerical discretization of PDEs).  It ended up being crucial and allowing me to publish at least one paper that I never would have written if I hadn't taken that course.  I also took courses in things like astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and turbulence; I don't use those things much but I can converse with scientists in those fields, which is often useful.
Of course, I didn't take, say, philosophy or Italian or business management courses -- stick to courses related to your field.  And make sure that whoever is paying you is okay with it.

As with David Ketcheson, I don't think a definitive answer is possible, but here are my thoughts:

It depends on the attitude of your program. Are they trying to ramrod you through your coursework as swiftly as possible? Do they support "dabbling" in other aspects of your graduate career - side projects, practicums, etc.? The answer will likely change wildly depending on those answers.
How set is your "research topic"? I've bounced around several in my time - I think picking up skills that might be useful trumps "Is it directly relevant to Thesis Aim #1". After all, the moment you get out of your PhD program, your research agenda changes again. If all you have is a hammer, and what you'd really like to do is research screws, you're in trouble. If on the other hand, you took 'Seminar in Advanced Screwdriver Theory'...
When it comes down to it, do you need to "take" the course, or do you just want to learn the material? I've sat in on several classes (my university doesn't have a formal auditing system) because I wanted to hear what they had to say. That's a nice, low risk way of expanding one's horizons.

I've found if nothing else it widens your contacts in the university, gives you a better feel for "Surely someone in Department X knows how to deal with that...", etc.

If you are interested in a teaching job, my answer is yes, definitely.  You may be asked to teach some courses that are not in your field, or even before it happens, the search committee may want someone who can teach a wide range of courses.

Yes!
How do you know in advance what's going to be useful later?  The wider a net you cast, the more tools you have at your disposal.

I think this does depend a lot on the kind of person you are/ the way of job you like to have.
I studied IT, but I visited a broad variety of courses. Even history, chinese for beginners, and some other stuff which you might think is not related to my field of work. I don't regret it!
But as a Software Engineer it's actually important to understand a lot of different fields. As you can be on projects that differ a lof from each other.
Also you propably can widen your personal network of contacts, if you go to class with students that you didn't know before!
I would stick to the topics you are interrested in, instead of ending up as an unhappy person after your studies.

In graduate school, you have to maintain a higher GPA than an undergrad. In some schools I've been to, a C lands you on probation, and a second C gets you dismissed. In my view, this means that courses too far away from your core research will be excessively risky. I dislike this, as it means that I can't afford to learn things that stretch my boundaries.

As @EpiGrad, @JeffE, and @Swiss Coder said, you should learn about subjects that are outside the direct focus of your research. This provides you with knowledge and tools you might otherwise never obtain. I would add though, that it is rarely wise to take a course in something you have no interest in simply for the sake of "knowledge". However, if you are truly interested in something, don't scrap the possibility of taking the course just because it is not directly part of your research topic. Higher education is intended to help us become well-rounded humans,not force us into the narrow trench of knowing only about a specific field.
Also consider, of course, whether you really need to take a course on this, or if there are other ways to learn what you want to know. Auditing a course is a good option, especially if you don't need to receive credit for it. There are also numerous online options for learning,on your own time and without tuition costs. For myself, though, online learning without the support of a professor and peers rarely works well. I need the motivation of knowing that someone is tracking my progress.
So definitely explore subjects outside "your" area of expertise, and keep in mind that a formal course may not be the only or best option.


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Is a self-taught person allowed to compete with other in a prize like Nobel Prize, Field Medal, etc?
If a person studies and/or does experiments at his/her own home or laboratory because of some reasons, is he/she still allowed to compete with others to get a prize like Nobel Prize, Field Medal, etc?
More precisely, from the beginning he/she never gets educations from formal institutions (schools, colleges, universities).

Yes, there are no formal criteria in this direction. The results, their significance, and wide acceptance count. But I do not thik this question belongs here.

@abatkai: So do I have to delete this question?

@DamienWalters: no need, let the community and moderators decide.

@DamienWalters: It was only my opinion, not the general opinion. Let us wait.

Note: This question is not related to me but for my friend who dreams of getting such prizes. :D

@CharlesMorisset: The link is related to this question. My question might be a duplicate of it.

@DamienWalters Dreaming of getting such prizes may be not the right approach (and most likely lead to frustration), see http://xkcd.com/896/ containing But you don't become to be great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it hard so that you become great in the process.

The question is in my opinion meaningless. These prices are not awarded on a competitive basis. Candidates are nominated by others and are selected by a committee. See e.g., here. Anybody can be nominated.

Allowed - yes. Have any reasonable chance to compete - no.
(But to learn university-level things, given the determination - yes.)
There are two separate issues:

you won't learn stuff abut the current research lines and you won't be able to attract others to your results,
in academia things like degrees and university/advisor name do matter.

First, you can learn a lot of stuff by yourself. However, it is hard to get to research-level. Moreover, now most research requires a lot of collaboration. A century ago it may be still possible to invent something in one's private workshop (but still a lot of knowledge and infusion was required). Now it is not true anymore. Also, you need to know the tools and which problems are open, solved or seems to be dead-end. Moreover, you may end up solving problems which are difficult but not of the interest of other academicians.
See also from Gerard't Hooft, How to become a good theoretical physicist:

It so often happens that I receive mail - well-intended but totally useless - by amateur physicists who believe to have solved the world. They believe this, only because they understand totally nothing about the real way problems are solved in Modern Physics. If you really want to contribute to our theoretical understanding of physical laws - and it is an exciting experience if you succeed! - there are many things you need to know. First of all, be serious about it. All necessary science courses are taught at Universities, so, naturally, the first thing you should do is have yourself admitted at a University and absorb everything you can. But what if you are still young, at School, and before being admitted at a University, you have to endure the childish anecdotes that they call science there? What if you are older, and you are not at all looking forward to join those noisy crowds of young students ?

Also: almost all Nobel prize winners had advisors, which were also well-know and are from first league universities.
Second, the academia is less meritocratic than it seems to be. While certain skills and knowledge are essential, they are not the only factor. It does matter if you have a certain degree*), from which university you are and who is/was you advisor. Many contacts are within a clique, were you need to have a recommendation by people they know.
*) In science no matter how smart you are, you won't have chance without a certain degree, while in programming your skills and experience are more important than if you have a PhD degree or not even a BSc.
Nevertheless, finding enough skill and determination to do experiments in one's own home may be a good predictor of later success in science or engineering.

But internet can help him/her to know subjects in which most people are interested, to make a lot of collaboration with others, etc.

@DamienWalters In principle, yes. In practice - it is very hard. (Even being in 'mainstream' science I tried many times to get into collaboration with people I don't know in person and I never succeeded; at best there was a longer and interesting conversation that was never promoted to sth like a collaboration.) Also: there is a reason why Wikipedia did not come not from the academia. And why e.g. theoreticalphysics.SE does not flourish.

Of course, needless to say, internet makes it a lot easier to learn specialistic stuff (even if one has no library nearby, one can get almost any book), makes it easier to contact with like-minded or experts (via SE/usenet or a private correspondence), see what happens on the frontier (TED.com, blogs, ...), follow activities of scientists (via their homepages) and even be in touch with recent papers (arXiv.org, ...)

"in academia the world is way less meritocratic than it sounds" this should absolutely not be understated.

Modern science is a social institution, not just an abstract set of standards for discovering and evaluating knowledge. While in principle the abstract standards leave the door open for contributions to come from anywhere and anyone—and this is a good thing—the social organization of science means that such Robinson Crusoe fantasies are almost never realized in practice. They persist partly because of the mythos that grows up around individual scientific geniuses. A consequence, as the 't Hooft quote shows, is that scientists in many fields have drawers full of correspondence from cranks.

One part about "in academia the world is way less meritocratic than it sounds" is that, contrary to what we (pretend to) believe, when we judge one another (e.g. for hiring purposes, or prices), we do not measure one's strength, but one's successes, which rely a lot on chance, good connections and other factors (although one do needs some strength and background to seize the opportunities given to oneself).

@BenoîtKloeckner You are right, but it goes beyond. As an undergraduate student I already had a few publications but I got rejected from every summer research opportunity I had applied to. Now I see that a lot of funding is with restriction (e.g. in fact only for people from US, but it is not officially stated) and subjective opinions and contacts play a crucial role (i.e. a recommendation from well-known prof. counts higher than an actual proof of one's skills; which IMHO is deeply unfair for people not from the most prestigious universities).

The important factor here is that these prizes are awarded for making a significant contribution to knowledge. This cannot generally be assessed at the point at which you had the idea, and it is for this reason that prizes are usually awarded for contributions which are decades old.
For example, John Forbes Nash, Jr. was awarded a Nobel prize in 1994 for work done as a graduate student in the late 1940s.
It's only after many years of further research, by the originating researcher and the community as a whole, that the importance of an individual idea can be understood in that context.
A corollary of this is that only research which is published, presented at conferences and generally publicised in the research community is likely to attract sufficient attention and further development to be considered for such a prize.

It's certainly possible, if you're a genius on the order of Srinivasa Ramanujan and can invent an entirely new, provable/repeatable, and productive field from first principles.
Likely for a mere mortal? You've probably got better odds of winning the Lottery, being struck by lightning, or fill-in-your-least-likely-scenario-here. Not because there's any prejudice against autodidacts, but because the odds of someone selftaught actually finding something new -- and being correct about it -- are just not that great.
Go for it. Just don't expect recognition of that kind until you have produced work with is widely agreed to be truly revolutionary.
(Except, as noted, for the peace prize. Which is sometimes given based on hope rather than achievement. Even then, you'll probably have to be someone who has worldwide recognition.)

A person is nominated for a Nobel Prize by someone familiar with his work, and the Nobel Prize committee judges it for its originality, depth, and service to mankind.
It's barely possible for someone to make a highly original contribution to a field outside of the usual academic circles. In the unlikely event that this occurs, the Nobel Prize committee will consider it on its own merits.
For instance, the Nobel Prize was awarded to a new finance concept called microlending, developed by a banker, not a professor. Admittedly, it was the Nobel Peace prize, but it could have been awarded as the Economics prize.


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How do you judge the quality of a journal?
A colleague and I recently submitted a paper to a journal with an impressive-sounding name, the "International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Research". According to their website,

IJAICR is a referred [sic] journal in the field of computer science, artificial intelligence and soft computing methods.

It was accepted two days after we submitted it. That's too fast. We were suspicious. Although the journal said that all papers are peer-reviewed, we could not see how that was done in two days. Plus, we received no comments from the reviewers. Also, the submission guidelines didn't ask for a "blind" copy (without our names or any references to who we were).
But wait, there's more.
The acceptance letter asked us to send them US$300 to publish it. We did not. We've withdrawn our submission and will submit a new version of the paper to a more reputable journal in the coming months.
How might we make a better choice of respectable journals before we submit next time?

I think this question is really about how to recognize "vanity press".  Judging quality among respectable journals is a completely different question.

The link you have provided in your question does not work.

Being asked to pay for publication is not the best indicator of a bad journal, there are just as many open-source journals that are questionable in their conduct and quality. The overall quality of the articles and the 'street cred' of people that publish in that journal should be the measure of its credibility. So you should probably at least dig a little bit deeper before coming to this conclusion (although in this case your assumption is likely to be correct).

The link in the question now points to a website that sells sex toys in India

Thanks @robertspierre. I've removed the link.

I used to get periodic spam of this sort. Every month or so they would announce the launch of a new journal whose name consisted of "International Journal" (IJ) and four other letters. They were apparently in diverse fields of science, but it was obvious from typos and other details that the same scammers in India were behind all of them.

The way I usually choose journals is by looking at where people I trust/follow publish, and where previous work was published. It is usually not too hard to compare the quality your work to the quality of the work you are citing, and chose a target based on that. Unless your field is highly mutli-disciplinary, you will see the same journals/conferences popping up again and again in your references; submit to one of those.
Before submitting, however, it is always important to look at a few articles from previous issues. This will give you a second gauge of quality for the journal and also let you pick up on any formatting and presentations quirks that might be present in the publication.

Shorter version: Submit papers to the journals you cite most often.  Don't submit papers to journals you never cite.

@fredsbend Doesn't that just push the question back to "which papers should you cite?" — No, of course not!  Whether or not to cite a paper has absolutely nothing to do with where that paper is published. — what do they do? — They read a lot of papers and chase a lot of references (both forward and backward).

You may want to check that the publisher is not on Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers.
Surprisingly, the publisher in question is not.  I've found Beall's list to be fairly comprehensive, but the vanity press industry seems to be booming.
Caveat: that list is just one guy's opinion.  But it resonates with my own experience.
Update: As of late January 2017, Beall's list has been taken down.

A very good and useful link!

Beall's list does more good than bad, but it is based on subjective intuition, not data or transparent criteria. It lists Frontiers, and I know of many reputable academic editors and reviewers who provide high-quality reviews for their journals. The controversy [http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals-added-to-list-of-questionable-publishers-1.18639]. A better procedure: check if it's on Beal's list, if listed, check if it is on the open access whitelist [http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-website-gets-tough-1.15674]. If on both further investigation may be needed.

The best way is by word-of-mouth: ask around the department, ask your PhD advisor, ask people you've worked with.
If it is a specialist journal, and you are a specialist, then the next best way is to look at the previously published issues of the journal and see what kinds of articles they accept.
Failing that, the Australian Government's Research Council puts out a ranking of journals and conferences every now and then. It is not perfect, but should give a rough idea of where a journal places in the eyes of the bureaucrats :-). Note that "new" journals (journals that have not been active for more than X years) are not ranked, so omission from the list does not necessarily mean that the journal itself is not worthwhile.

Notice that it has been announced that the Australian ranking will ne replaced by a score indicating "journal quality profile"

you can also recur to journal's impact factor from ISI Web of Science

"How do you judge the quality of a journal?"
One answer is already known to you:  Submit a paper to it and see how it responds.  I once submitted a few papers to an online journal (no print equivalent) and the referee reports that I got clearly showed that they read and understood the paper and that they knew the subject well.  They even suggested ways how the paper could be improved.  The quality of the referees reflect the quality of the journal.

IMHO, this is the best answer here, even though you don't really have time to go through the process of testing every journal you might be interested of. However, if the peer-review process is good, then the journal is good. End of story.

I disagree with @Speldosa. All you know on the basis of one submission is that the journal has at least one editor who picked good referees for at least one paper. Another half of editors could be accepting junk for all you know. Multiple submissions increase the odds that your conclusion is correct, but is not this an extremely expensive experiment to undertake, given that you are paying with your research output? Especially when you have a lot of observational data already available: other papers published in the journal.

@LVK That's a fair point.

Somehow, @LVK's reasoning (though correct), reminds me of the old black sheep joke about generalizing from a small amount of data. :)

PS - The only sad part of the story is - LVK doesn't seem to a mathematician from his/her profile. :P

This is like if you want to find out if that is a poison, test it out!

For some hard data I like eigenfactor, because I think there methodology makes a lot of sense.  The default settings are a bit odd, you want the AI score not EF score.  I also like the "eigenfactor category" under advanced search better than the "ISI category" that you can get on the main page.  Certainly it's better to have a more in-depth understanding, but also sometimes you just want a quick ballpark guesstimate of how good the journal is, and eigenfactor does that.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet, so I'm adding it as a separate answer:
Read some articles from the journal (in your subfield), and see how they feel like
When you look at a journal and check that the 5 or 6 latest articles in your domain are of the meh type, you probably don't want to publish there. If they make you feel “oh, I never quite thought of that, it's clever… I see how I may use it”, go for it!

I think that "quality" is a bit overrated, and that you should think most deeply about "fit" (i.e., how well your content matches the interests of a journal's reviewers and readership).  With that said, when I'm looking for the best journal to put an article, I have three methods:

Look at my cites for similar work to my manuscript, then look at where they published (similar to Artem's comment).  If your paper isn't citing related work, well... it probably has a pretty terrible lit review.  If you're citing sources out of your league for that paper (i.e., Science, Nature), find the publication list for that lab to find their fallback journals.
Ask greybeards I collaborate with where they would publish such a paper.  Good senior academics have a huge amount of expertise about the social networks and publishing networks in their fields.
Use journal rankings.  I find  Scimago to be the most convenient.  That also charts things like cites/paper over time, so you can see if a newer journal is growing or stagnant.  The Austrialian Research Counsel (mentioned by Willy Wong) is probably my #2 resource.  Thompson's ISI stuff is also useful, but I've found it sometimes has glaring omissions and has been less convenient to me (annoying to log in).  Conferences are harder to rank using indices.  Google and Microsoft have ranking systems that catch those pretty well, at least for comparing citations within a topic.  However, given the choice, I'd still go with option #1 or #2.  I mainly use this approach for interdisciplinary research that doesn't have an obvious, natural target journal.

First of all, I look at the publisher. If you don' find a lot of references to the publisher on the web, it is suspicious.
Then, I look at the editor in chief, and at the board of editors. If you don't find many big names here, this is again very suspicious.
Finally, google the journal name and look who is publishing in the journal. Most of the time it becomes clear if the journal is serious or not.

Highly specialized journals may not get mentioned a great deal on the open web, and googling is a very crude and time-consuming way to answer this question. This has the same issue as justin's answer in that predatory publishers lie. You're better off working from good authors (the ones you read and cite) to discover unknown journals than starting from an unknown journal and trying to then assess the quality of their authors.

"How do you judge the quality of a journal?"
Look at the editorial / advisory board. They've gotta be from the top schools or they've gotta be top researchers.

I agree.  However, please note that some journals include well-regarded people on their editorial boards without their permission.  See, for example, http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~razborov/

Just in case the contents of the website I linked to earlier changes, let me note that it involves the inclusion of Alexander Razborov's name on the editorial board of the South Asian Journal of Mathematics without his knowledge or permission.

You can test them yourself. This procedure will speed up by your experience. There are signs during submission and during review which shows which journal is really good and which is not. But there is another way too: look at the objective information below. It is possible to judge a journal based on the COLLECTIVE information you obtain from these factors:

Their editorial. You don't know them? Ok pass to the next ones.
Their publishing country (India? no thanks unless the paper is not good or the journal is an exception).
Their publisher (yes good publishers usually select good journals, although some weak journals with a lot of money can again hire a good publisher)
The time passes since you submit and they respond
The above factor SHOULD be considered along with the amount of manuscript they receive. Good journals receive thousands of manuscript a year, but still do not waste authors' time by keeping them waiting for too long before a rejection decision. Bad journals receive sporadic manuscripts and keep the authors wait for months until they tell the author their decision. It is a pain when you see some of them have "lost" you paper, or some of them reject your paper with a couple of lines of comment, after 6 months. Good journals do the same in less than 24 hours.
Indexing databases. Look where the journal is indexed in. ISI Web of Science? Medline? or what? The scam journals usually are not indexed in any accredited databases (not Google Scholar or Scopus). If a journal is accepted to be indexed in ISI or to a lesser degree, Medline, it is unlikely to be able to have low quality. Otherwise, ISI would have booted them out.

There are other factors too. But these will give you 90% insight already.

The indexing. I would've thought that would be the top answer actually.

Ask your institution's scientific librarian.
It's part of their job to know about journal reputation and quality.

Look at the journals responsible for the references you cite in your own manuscript. Upside, these are the journals publishing relevant and credible work in your area.  Downside, there are plenty perfectly good journals that are newer, or less specialized, and so might be missed.
BTW, a very fast review time with no reviews is suspicious.  But charging an article processing charge (APC) is not, in itself, a reason for worry.  That said, do look to see that you are getting the full open access you pay for if there is an APC (i.e. no transfer of copyright to the publisher and the article is released under a CC-BY license).  You can search for copyright policies by journal or publisher here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

The Journal Ranking site (www.journal-ranking.com) aims to rank many (11K) journals, according to their measure of impact (mainly number of citation, but weighted according to the ranking of the citing journal), number of articles, etc. It also let you sort by field.
But again, this is only their point of view, and their way of measuring quality.
(and it only ranks journals listed in the ISI's SCI)

The latest “breaking news” from that site is dated 20 May 2008 ;-)

yet, their data is updated to 2010.. Not that bad.

Generally, the scientific specialists' communities have traditionally identified journals having high editorial standards. That is the key: who are the editors and what are the standards. Are the breakthrough discoveries sent to that journal? From that, reputations are built and filtered down to preference and use by the community.

You can search for conferences/journals on Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en
Search by the full name (not the abbreviation), and you'll see its h5-index, which is the h-index in the last 5 years. Although it is hard to judge a conference using its h-index, you can at least compare them to one another.
There is also a list on the left from which you can get the conferences/journals with highest h5-index.

The Impact Factor is usually a good independent means of establishing a journal's quality. Essentially it is the average number of citations of its articles. The higher, the better. The logic is that good quality articles are cited more, so a journal that only lets in better quality articles will have a higher impact factor than one which lets in practically anything.
The quality of the journal you submit to will reflect on the quality of your paper, so you should try to submit to the better ranked journals within your field. You should be able to readily establish a short-list of suitable journals just by listing the journals of the papers you cite.
There are a few things to be aware of when comparing the impact factors of journals:

Impact factors also reflect the size of a field, so you cannot use it to compare the quality of journals from two separate and unrelated fields. A group of papers in a large popular field are naturally going to get cited more than those from a very small field.
Almost all journals have impact factors, unless they have been excluded as a result of being in some way nefarious (such as predatory journals), or if they are newly established and therefore haven't been around long enough to get one.

I could not find an impact factor for the journal you mentioned, even though it seems to have been around for at least 5 years. You are right to be cautious of it. I would not recommend submitting to a journal which does not have an impact factor, even if the reason for this turns out to be quite innocent.

To make a better choice for submitting I would google and use Wikidata.
Googling might lead you to lists like Jeffrey Beall's https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ and provide you with context about the journal, such as editorial board, blog posts, etc.
Wikidata will provide you with pointers to indexing services and journal rankings. Consider Journal of Machine Learning Research at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1660383 . It indicates a BFI level of 2 which is the high category of the Danish journal ranking system. It shows that Scopus is indexing the journal. (Strangely the Australian ERA link does not seem to work). I do not find "International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Research" in Wikidata, which should call for suspicion

You could use a combination of some simple rules and common sense. Among the simple rules once could list:

Presence in major databases, e.g. Web of Science, PubMed, etc
Does anyone in your field cite papers in this journal?
The quality of other papers in this journal
Do your colleagues publish in this journal?
Do they have typos in their webpage?

And common sense could help in a variety of ways. For example, today, I got the following letter, a rather nice one, seems like someone would have written it specially to me:

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to get in touch with you
  about a paper you authored entitled "Using principal component scores
  reduces the effect of socially desirable responding". Firstly, thank
  you for taking the time to publish this, it was an interesting read.
  Have you continued working in this area? If you have any other
  articles or ongoing research I would love to know more.
I am hoping to discuss with you having a short follow-up article or
  perhaps a review article published in one of the next issues of the
  journal I serve as an editor for, the Medical Research Archives. I
  think our readers would be interested in a paper with information from
  any continued research or new data since this was published. It would
  be especially helpful if the article could be written for more of a
  general medicine audience so that many sub specialties could gain from
  it. The article would not have to be long, and any of your co-authors
  or colleagues would be welcome to contribute to it. I am happy to
  assist in any way I can, and there is no hard deadline.

Ok. First of all, they refer to a paper on psychometrics and ask me to publish something on the same topic in "Medical Research Archives". Makes no sense. Second, they tell me "thank you for taking time to publish this" (gracias de nada! this is my job!) and "it was interesting to read" (how on earth would you know - having not read it? and what is the point of calling it "interesting" if you have nothing specific to say about it?). At this point, it it quite clear that they have a script sending these letters, using a database with e-mails and titles of research papers. It is not written the way an actual editor of a bona fide journal would write, so I just delete the e-mail. (It was better written than most such e-mails, that is the reason why I even checked their webpage, - not that I would for a second consider sending a paper to their journal - but just for curiosity about the new tricks of predatory publishers.)

Quality of the journal is reflected in your own experience.
When you've reached the level when you start thinking about publishing in your field of expertise,
and you find out about a journal you've never heard before through several years of undergraduate and postgraduate studies,
it is a good enough reason to be suspicious and cautious.

Many good answers are provided here. Along with the editorial board, publisher, and impact factor, one should check http://www.scimagojr.com/.
This site provides ranking for journals, and country.
The ranking of journals based on Q1 through Q4 in the specified subjects ensures of the quality of journals in that issue.
Q1 journals are the best in that subject and Q2, Q3, and Q4 are decreasing impact of the journals.

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


text:
Scientific publications and related software sourcecode
I want to create a dataset (offline, only for my research purposes) based on scientific publications (research papers), which are somehow connected to software source code (for example given by a git-repository). The research domains of the publications are irrelevant, as long as they are talking about related software source code (for example by mentioning functions or variables).
In order to create the dataset, I need journals/websites where papers and their related code are listed. I already found the Journal of Open Research Software, which fits my requirements, but I am pretty sure there are more resources like this out there.
How can I find publication venues in which papers regularly include links to related source code?

I don't see any question mark in your question. So, what is your question? If you want a list of such sites, sorry, we do not take shopping questions.

You can just get a DOI for your dataset/code, without having to publish it in a journal.

https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/

@scaaahu I thought the question is quite obvious - I am in need for ressources where I can find research papers related with code. I already searched a lot. I thought maybe someone knows such a journal and can help me.

See e.g. https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-physics-communications/

Even so I answered to this question, the Open Data SE might be a better place to ask.

The ACM Transactions on Mathematics Software ("TOMS") publishes a lot of papers on software.

You could try to extract this information from the Related identifiers of Zenodo software records (the related identifiers that are marked as Supplement to).
Here are two examples:

https://zenodo.org/record/345130
https://zenodo.org/record/570830

This is the search for all software records in the database:
Zenodo offers data following the crawling protocol OAI-PMH. So harvesting this information should be managable.


text:
Official abbreviations for CS conferences
Some journals like to abbreviate journal names in the papers they publish, and the AMS maintains a list of abbreviated journal names for those who need them. Is there a similar resource for conferences (in computer science)?
EDIT: to clarify, I'm not looking for acronyms (SODA, STOC, ICALP), but rather for something like "Proc. 6th Ann. ACM-SIAM Symp. Discrete Algorithms".

usually I just take the .bib source of the paper whether its abbreviated or not

@seteropere: I usually use unabbreviated citations, but I'm told to shorten a submission and I'd rather sacrifice unimportant parts like these before I modify the actual text.

I am not aware of any comprehensive list of abbreviations for CS conferences. One way to see many abbreviations is through CS conference listings and ranking. For example, here and here. The most obvious way is googling the name of the conference then checking the conference website.

I didn't see the edit which seems different from what I was trying to answer.

I think your answer is fine. If the conference web site uses the abbreviation itself, then it's official.

AFAIK, there is no such resource, and even if it existed, it would not be very useful.
In general, people do not know the full names of the conference, only their acronyms. The full names tend to change slightly every now and then, while the acronyms are much more stable.
You can safely write pretty much anything that resembles the correct name, as long as you include the acronym. You can often save some space by removing useless words such as "Annual", "International", "ACM", "IEEE", etc.
For example, "Proc. 6th Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)" would be perfectly fine and unambiguous.

Why wouldn't it be useful? Some journals have a misguided official policy of not using conference acronyms, and it would be good to have a standard set of abbreviations of conferences to use in these journals.

Removing "Annual" and "International" might be OK if you really have to save space, but it's better not to remove the "ACM" or "IEEE", since knowing the sponsor makes the conference easier to track down.

@Anonymous: "IEEE" isn't on the cover title of the Proceedings for the FOCS conference. How do you justify putting it in?

@Peter Shor: If it's not in the title, one certainly shouldn't modify the title to include it, but it's worth listing separately then ("Foundations of Computer Science 1997, IEEE Computer Society, ...").  For really major conferences it's not such a big deal, but minor conferences can be difficult to track down, and even major conferences may be unfamiliar to people in other fields.

I disagree with @AnonymousMathematician; if the society isn't named in the title, don't add it to the title. Report the title literally.  I rare cases that Google doesn't find the correct proceedings as the first hit, you should definitely include the publisher in the citation (for example, Springer), but not in the title.

@JeffE: That's exactly what I meant by listing it separately (but not modifying the title to include it).  I meant the "IEEE Computer Society" as being the publisher, not a continuation of the title.


text:
How to handle being removed from a paper for (perhaps) unethical reasons?
I was recently replaced in my role of analyzing data in a project by another person on the project. It's not clear that the person has the authority to do this. He is a resident in neurosurgery with no formal training in research.
This removal came nearly immediately after I communicated to him unequivocal null results that a colleague of mine confirmed. When I asked, he offered no explanation for this removal. He will replace me with a statistician who works for the device whose efficacy we were testing.
If I learn that he publishes observation on the current data set that completely contradict my findings, do I have an ethical duty to make this known?
This was a side project for me. My removal from it has no adverse professional impact for me. Nor do I think that speaking up will have an adverse impact for me, it may even not for him.

The story you tell certainly leaves off a certain fragrance. The key question seems to be whether or not you have been replaced in order to get more "friendly" results. It is clear that it is possible to have an opinion about how data should be analysed and that opinions may deviate. It is also possible to interpret results differently. But, all within reason. If your analysis is sound and provides a certain outcome while a new analysis provides the basis for a different there can be either a matter of academic disagreement or that one or the other is flawed. I cannot judge this of course.
Depending on which case you are facing the necessary, or possible, action would be to write a letter to the editor providing your analysis and view of the results to be published in the same journal, or to write the editor pointing at the error on the publication. In the latter, worse case, you of course need to be able to show without question that your view is correct and that the other is flawed (beyond just opinion). If the results are seriously flawed and may cause serious harm, the paper may even be retracted (see e.g. policy from Elsevier and examples from the New England Journal of Medicine).
So in short, the way forward depends on the seriousness of the flaw. An alternative option is of course to simply walk away and find better collaborators and more interesting vistas. But, if there are serious ethical problems you need to take action. Where you draw the line is not clear but usually a person with questionable behaviour has a history so you may be able to assess the over-all seriousness of the problem.

They want a significant effect. There isn't one on any of their stated outcome measures. My fault is continuing to work with them despite them having threatened to do similar in the past. I pause about walking away because this could affect patient care by revising some treatment guidelines. On the other hand, they don't change guidelines based on one study.

Also thanks for the articles. I was unaware of them.


text:
Scientifically meaningful sources of bibliometrics
Whether we like it or not, modern academia is increasingly being measured, in some vain attempt to get objective measures.  Although it is unwise to fight 'being measured', it is at least possible to steer the measures away from meaningless ones, backed by peer-reviewed research that establishes this unrefutably.
There are a lot of different metrics that have been defined - I am not looking for those.  What I want is pointers to the research behind the scientific validity of those metrics.
So the question is: where should I look for scientific assessments of bibliometrics?

Could you clarify your question? Are you asking for a listing and definition of the "scientific productivity" indices? Or, are you asking for a comparison and to start a discussion on the development of another one? Mike

I do not understand what you look for: there are  easy-to-compute measures that are measurably well-correlated with scientific productivity. Once, one starts to use any of them for making career-impacting decisions, the people whose careers are affected respond to the stimulus. There is no way one can have an irrefutable meaningful statistic.

Johan Bollen and Herbert van de Sompels are two researchers to follow in this area. Bollen did an analysis of 39 different citation-based metrics which is a good place to start. However, it's crucial to note that there are serious errors in trying to use citation-counting methods as some sort of ground truth. Citation counting is problematic because:

Different fields have different citation practices. In biology it's common to have 10 or more authors on one paper, whereas in math you often have only one or two.
Citations take a long time to accumulate, penalizing early-stage researchers.
Citations only tell part of the story, leaving out the useful contributions made by researchers in the form of code written and datasets released.
Citations often mutate over time.

It's now possible to get more information about a paper than just who cited it, and it's possible to get this information before several years have passed and before the information about the impact of the paper becomes old and less useful. The Public Library of Science makes detailed article-level metrics available and Mendeley has an API from which you can collect real-time data about how many readers a paper has, as well as social metadata such as tags and annotations and reader demographics. These metrics are being consumed by services such as Total Impact and combined with data from Github, Twitter, and traditional citation metrics. My bet is that if you're looking for a meaningful set of measures, you're going to find it in these richer sets of aggregated data.

Although just a start, we had a "journal club" over at the stats.se site on such bibliometrics, and had a chat over this particular article;

Arnold, Douglas N. & Kristine K. Fowler. 2011. Nefarious Numbers.
  Notices of the AMS 58(3): 434-437. PDF link from publisher
Abstract from initial ArXiv print:
We investigate the journal impact factor, focusing on the applied
  mathematics category. We discuss impact factor manipulation and
  demonstrate that the impact factor gives an inaccurate view of journal
  quality, which is poorly correlated with expert opinion.

As far as scientific assessments the authors in the above article are pretty negative of such rankings, and give a few examples of editors having citation practices that intentionally inflate their journals rankings.
I'm sure more literature on the topic exists than this though (so I look forward to any other suggestions).

Unfortunately the transcript from the chat is currently not linked to in the applicable thread on meta stats. But I will update here if it becomes available.

This has been published in the March 2011 Notices of the AMS, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 434-437. http://www.ams.org/notices/201103/rtx110300434p.pdf.
The paper lists additional references that could be of interest.

Concenrning mathematics as in the answer of Andy W, the International Mathematical Union has a report on possible policies to measure and rank journals.

I'm against "productivity-based measures" like the h-index, to the point that I wrote an article on an alternative measure. This measure is based on impact, and it tries to remove productivity as a factor for evaluating scientific work. The article is open, and you can find it in Scientific Reports.


text:
Is there a way to see which papers have used a particular R package?
I'm a new user of an R package (tidy text mining) and I'd like to see what papers have used this package as examples for the kind of things I can do with it. Is there a way to do this?

Best suggestion I have is read the help file - usually has examples.

Sometimes (not often) papers will formally cite the package.
This is more likely to work if the authors have published a peer-reviewed paper that describes the package; it makes it easier to cite/more likely to be cited. In the case of the tidytext package (which may or may not be the package you're referring to), you can find the citation info here. More generally, try citation("package_name") within R. On Google Scholar, this page lists the articles that cite Silge and Robinson 2016.
Or you can use Google Scholar, which does a full-text search and may pick up the name from papers that mention it even if they haven't formally cited it.

Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. “Tidytext: Text Mining and Analysis Using Tidy Data Principles in R.” Journal of Open Source Software 1, no. 3 (July 11, 2016): 37. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00037.

Great, thanks so so much!!


text:
Asking A Colleague for a Letter of Recommendation
I am working as an Assistant Professor at a university for over 2 years, but I am not happy with my current job and university. I want to apply to a university in another country (from where I've done my PhD) for a faculty position.
I'd like to know if it would help the application if a colleague who is a PhD and already holding a Tenure Track Position writes a letter of recommendation for in support of this application?

To be sure I understand correctly, the colleague is a more senior colleague at the place you are currently working at or they are at the place you apply to?

To explain more, yes, he knows me for over 2 and a half year, but he is working with me at my current place of working, not at the place I am applying to

In a comment, you noted that this individual is working with you at your current position.
Yes, I think you should have a letter from a colleague at your current institution. Indeed, if you didn't have a letter from a co-worker (ideally, your chair, but I know that's tough for assistants) it would raise red flags. This letter should speak to your expertise in research, teaching, and service but almost more importantly, provide some context as to why you are departing. Search committees will want to have a narrative that you're moving to another university because it's better or for some other germane reason, and not because you're being forced out or are a toxic colleague, if that makes sense.
So not only should you have a letter from a colleague at your current university, I would argue that it's almost always a necessity.


text:
How much guidance should I reasonably expect from an MSc Thesis Supervisor
As part of my MSc I have to produce a Thesis/Dissertation which forms an integral part of the program and classification (roughly 1/4 - I imagine the subject can make a difference, so I should say that my MSc is in Mathematics in the UK).
I am wondering to what extend I should expect to be completely on my own in this endeavor. I have a supervisor who has a pretty good research reputation as far as I can tell from his publications and collaborations, so I'm quite happy in that sense, however it s becoming increasingly evident, that he will not provide much guidance when it comes to specific topic selection or anything else for that matter.
Is this normal and to be expected for an MSc Dissertation, or is it a bad sign that should make me think whether it may be better to switch? (I was under the impression that at such a junior level one could still expect quite a bit of hand-holding when it comes to the selection of a feasible topic).

Have you asked your supervisor this question?

@JeffE: I think he is convinced that he does what is required of him. I m trying to gauge whether this is the case, because if it is then I don't want to complain, and just accept the challenge. I think asking him directly will not give me the information I am after, as I m sure he will not admit to being less interested in his supervises then he should be. I did ask him for a narrower set of feasible topics given my background, but he says this is entirely up to me.

If you can't ask your supervisor directly about the job he expects you to do, you have a dysfunctional relationship with your advisor.  If he honestly (and not just defensively) believes he should not give you (and I mean you specifically, not just "his students") more guidance, and you honestly (not just defenseively) believe you (again, not "his students") need more guidance, then you might need to look for another advisor.  Or your current advisor might have good reasons to believe you don't need as much guidance as you think you do.  But you won't know unless you actually ask him.

@JeffE: I am of course talking to him directly about the job that s expected. It s pretty clear to me what he wants me to do, namely produce a Thesis on my own :) I also know that his approach seems unusual to me, but this may be due to my lack of experience, and may not mean anything negative, which is why I m trying to gather some more information. It s only wrt this last question that I m not sure going to him is the best idea.

I'm not sure how much of your issue is related to the specific field—mathematicians are known for being somewhat more independent than graduate students in, say, engineering.
That said, your advisor should at least show signs of being interested in your research. If you feel like you need help, and aren't getting any, then you need to make arrangements to get it. At first, I'd recommend talking to other graduate students and postdocs under your advisor. Next, I'd talk to other students outside the group; finally, I'd move on to other faculty.
It really depends on how easy or difficult it is to change advisors. If it's relatively easy, then in the end, it might be necessary as a last resort. If not, you'll need to make do with a rather unfortunate situation.
Ultimately, this is a case-by-case kind of situation: you'll need to talk to more people in your department and find out how widespread this is. Some advisors are completely hands-off, and expect their students to be self-motivating. Others are hands-on to the point of micromanagement. In math, my impression from conversations with colleagues is that the tendency is towards being hands-off, but it's impossible to say what will be the case in your specific department.

I have spoken to another supervise of his. He is in the same situation, so I m not being targeted at least. I want to get a feeling how normal this lack of involvement is though, before I decide to switch !

I've added a paragraph to address this point.

Staff at my department have to propose specific projects for MSc theses (possibly together with the student). Even if your university doesn't require that, I would expect your supervisor to help you significantly with selecting the topic of your thesis. For the thesis itself the help will be less, but I wouldn't think it reasonable to expect an MSc student to essentially come up with their thesis topic unless they want to.

It can vary a lot by advisor.  You should always talk to current (and former if possible) students of an advisor before committing to one.  Some questions you might ask:

How often do you meet with your advisor?
Did your advisor help you come up with a thesis topic?
Does your advisor answer your emails quickly/at all?
Do you feel comfortable asking your advisor for help?  Does he/she give it?
Does your advisor know and care about your career goals?
Is your advisor expected to stay around this school for long?  (An advisor could be pre-tenure and expected not to get it or could be up for sabbatical soon.)
When you thought you were done, did your advisor agree or want you to do more?  How long did it take to get the advisor to read the thesis?