text:
What's the point of visiting students?
I've started a PhD recently and seen a few students from other universities visit our lab for a few days or maybe few weeks. The other university pays all expenses which many times amount to thousands of dollars. Most of the time, the visiting student gets a place, brings her/his own laptop and does research the way he does it at his university.
What's the point of this? Couldn't the visiting student just stay at his university and discuss his research with our lab on Skype?
One explanation I thought of is face to face networking but the cost seems to high for that. Or it may be an excuse to travel and see the world, but that's quite ridiculous. I also asked the visiting students, but they told me they didn't know.

I also asked the visiting students, but they told me they didn't know. OMG

Note to self: Do not visit biszo09's department.

Also see this post: dealing with irresponsiveness of remote scientists. I think working in the same lab is always better than cooperating via skype.

@CherryQu that's true but if a collaboration project lasts 3 years, what do you get by working in the same lab for 1 week?

I'm with Dilbert on this one. I do actually prefer mailing lists to skype. This lets you read faster or slower depending on interest or involvement on the topic, the minutes are  already written, no need to plan or schedule (I could even read it while commuting) and I don't need seeing faces or hearing voices, luckily I can read and type. IMHO, this is more efficient and better, but I know I'm a minority here. So, yeah, think about conferences...

The main goal, from my experience, is the facetime with many different people. Skype is nice, but it's primarily intended for conversations with very few people. A visit allows students to to talk to many professors and students face-to-face in a short timespan, get to know the place, interact with students in a lab, and get a sense for what the place is like, something which is impossible over the 'net.
Also, this gives the university a good chance to see what the student is like. It's easy to look good on paper and can put on a clean shirt (pants optional) for a skype interview. It's a lot harder to keep up a fake act in front of dozens of faculty and students over a one-or-two day period.

I think that a brilliant researchers with Tourette syndrome should not punished for their condition. I think the best way to know how people are like at a professional level is to look at their work, which can travel pretty well through the Internet, because it uses to be information.

Getting to know people's work is best done through their work.  Getting to know people as professional colleagues is best done face-to-face.  Researchers are apes; we do apey things.

Thank you so much for pointing at that!, I started to think about this kind of things with the non-verbal language reference of @ZevChonoles. I'm not sure I do/can speak that language, but I guess there is a big point there. As much as I cannot see it, I cannot really tell how big it is or how much money/time it's worth, so I'll assume people are doing right. I'm afraid I cannot really support the apey activities as much as I consider myself a transhumanist, but certainly that clarifies quite a lot about research, society, life, culture, etc. I'll try to keep that in mind. Thank you again.

For me, one of the main goals of visiting the grad schools I was interested in was to figure out whether the location was somewhere I'd want to live for the next 5+ years. If the research is a good fit at a given school, but you'll be mugged, or miles away from civilization, or miles away from the nearest Thai restaurant, or whatever else that'd make you miserable, that's something you'll at least want to know when making your decision, and I think spending a few days at each of the places you're (seriously) considering is helpful in that regard.
Also, I think you're underestimating the value of face-to-face networking. Walking around the department, chatting with the grad students, professors, etc. you bump into is much easier than scheduling a Skype session with everyone you might conceivably talk to, and yes, there are certain non-verbal cues that you'll miss when video chatting. And the general atmosphere is something to take into account too; do the grad students seem to get along, hang out together, help one another? Does no one come to their office because the building is too depressing?

I see why it is useful for the student, but what does the university that pays for it get in return?

It's not in the program's interest to portray themselves as being perfect for everyone and trying to convince as many admitted students as possible to come; it's worth it for a program to have grad students who are happy and are a good fit. Additionally, I think it's at least partially cultural inertia, i.e., "the other schools are offering visits, if we don't then people will have less information about us than other programs and we will lose out on students who will otherwise have known they'd be a good fit here and come here instead".

In my experience (both sides: visiting and being where other students visit), the purpose can range all the way

from very narrowly defined purposes, such as learning a particular technique/method
(I'm chemist. You will not learn phyico- or bio-chemical lab techniques efficiently via skype sessions)
to "exploratory" purposes like finding out whether a collaboration is feasible and brainstorming topics.
Of course this implies that it may turn out during the stay that for some reason the initial idea is not or not yet feasible.
Or even just networking.

Most of the time, the visiting student gets a place, brings her/his own laptop and does research the way he does it at his university.

In my experience this happens when

collaboration as intended turns out to be impossible early during the stay: then the best option for the student may be to use the time away from the home lab to catch up with that pile of things-to-be-done. Depending on how far away the host institute is, getting an earlier flight home plus possibly the hassle of finding some place to stay because you sublet your room and the discussion whether you will be reimbursed for a room that you leave earlier but don't get refunded for that may be out of question.
External constraints and/or bad planning lead to the visit being just in the wrong time: I once had the option to do a visit but that was possible only during holiday time at the host institution - not that I didn't meet the people I wanted to meet, but the meetings were spread over a longer time. (I did get quite some work done off the todo list in the meantime - but I certainly was a bit "homeless" at the host institution for some of the time)
Bad planning of the type that some supervisors decide who (student) is to visit whom (student) and when, and one or both of the directly affected people don't really have the time.

Side note: Consider the cost of

further up the career path, people travel thousands of km for a visit of few hours.
I had a scholarship where I was expected to put in a full day's travel to have a 1 h meeting with my mentor or give a 10 min presentation. Likewise, the mentor put in almost a full day's travel in order to have a few hours visit to my lab.

As for what the guest's institution gets out of that:

Besides the obvious chance to successful collaboration or training on certain methods if the research stay is successful,
it can be seen as part of the student's training (that applies particularly if e.g. a scholarship pays for the visit)

In a way, you have to learn how to do a research stay before becoming really efficient at that,
just like your home institution is probably not going to get that much out of your first conference visit, but without a fist, there will never be the efficient 5th conference visit.
Even just "living" in the hosting group will add experience how other groups handle their research life.

Possibly, they wouldn't have gotten the student without: e.g. when I negotiated for the PhD student position, my prof threw into the deal that he would put me in contact to some other groups so I could do a research stay abroad (we did work, though, and I was paid by the hosting institution, not by my home institution)

It seems you are talking about a wholly different time scale, seeing as subletting is not something you would do for only a few weeks. I've had some PhD students in my lab for a couple of weeks and some for a couple of months and my colleague PhD went to a uni on the other side of the world for half a year.

@TimKuipers: subletting for a few weeks is not unheard of, depending on what city we're speaking about (e.g. wg-gesucht.de right now has several offers to rent a room in a shared flat for 2 or 3 weeks in Munich, some but not all of them are also on AirBNB). When I was visiting an institute in Heidelberg for a couple of weeks, I also stayed in a room someone sublet while doing a practicum somewhere else. It is also not unheard of there that students sublet their rooms for the vacations.

The other answers cover your question from the student's and general research point of view pretty well. But if your question is why do universities encourage visiting students and student exchange, I can think of 2 reasons:

Publicity  and improvement of their international reputation
Gaining a few more points in the university rankings (example: Times Higher
Education has criteria named 'International Outlook')

On a less utilitarian note: international collaboration is, on the long haul, generally  beneficial to research (even though there are a lot of exchanges that bring much less to science than to the local nightlife sector).


text:
What should I do if I discover a paper I rejected because of methodological flaws has been published in another journal?
I recently discovered that a paper I reviewed a while back and rejected as a result of major methodological flaws had been resubmitted to another journal and published without addressing any of the significant errors that required the paper to be rejected in the first place. Is there anything I can do that doesn't violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to address the problem?

Inform to the editor of the published journal or make a comment to the published paper.

There is no need to do anything.  If you wish, you may submit a comment to the journal without mentioning the peer review.

Regarding the confidentiality of reviewers, I asked about that at MO some time ago, i.e. under what circumstances a reviewer may disclose his identity. I was surprised by the diversity of of replies ranging from "that's not the reviewers business" over "it's the reviewers decision" to "I always sign my reviews with my real name".  So you may consider it an option to contact the editorial board, the handling editor or even the authors directly.

Two things are unclear about your question Is there anything I can do that doesn't violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to address the problem?:

What is the goal of any intervention?
Why do you think that anything should be done?

If, for example, you aim for retraction, I guess this could be difficult. You may go for this on the ground that you can prove that the authors were aware of the flaws you pointed out and submitted the paper knowing that there was something wrong. The journal may have some rule that the authors have to certify that the results are true to the best of their knowledge. If this really is so, you may have some angle of attack. If you aim for correction by the authors, it could also be difficult. However, you could consider writing a letter to the editor, pointing out what is wrong and then ask if the journal would publish such a letter. Some journals I know have such formats. You could also do follow-up research on the same topic and write a paper yourself where you refer to the paper with flaws and describe what wrong there.
For the second question, it sounds like you feel that "What's published and peer-reviewed should be true." While this resonates with me, it's not something that is close to true now and probably never will be. Mistakes happen. You may then trust in the scientific community that the flawed paper will be perceived as such in the long run and find peace with this particular paper.
Finally, the premise that confidentiality of the peer review process may permit some actions is not totally clear. As I wrote in a comment, I asked a question about this on MO and got very different responses.

What is the goal of any intervention seems pretty obvious to me: removing junk from the literature, or at least mark it as such.

That's also two different goals. Anyway, was not clear to me.

I think the first question you need to ask yourself is what have the authors done wrong. Disagreements between authors and reviewers about methodology are fairly common. I see two situations. The first is you believe the paper is wrong and needs to be retracted. The second is you believe the authors have intentionally mislead the reader (since you told them about the error in your review).
You should be able to make the claim that the methodology is flawed from the published manuscript. As that claim would only be based on the published manuscript, it would not violate the confidentiality of the peer review process. You should follow whatever procedure the publisher has for reporting issues.
If you believe the authors engaged in ethical misconduct by ignoring your review, you should be very careful. You should talk to colleagues to make sure that the methodology is in fact flawed. Once you are sure of the flaw, you then need to approach colleagues about the "hypothetical situation" of whether it is potentially unethical if the authors knew about the flaw prior to publishing the work. Once you are confident that there is a flaw and that it was potentially unethical to publish the work, you should go through the editor at the journal you reviewed for. Let the editor know about the misconduct and hopefully they will follow up on it. If the editor chooses not to follow up on a claim of misconduct, then you should follow up on that. In this case, where the journal refuses to follow up on a claim of misconduct, I think it is reasonable to violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to the extent required to show the misconduct to an outsider (e.g., COPE).

Yes. And, further, we can wonder whether not-so-competent authors would necessarily be convinced of their own incompetence even when it is explained to them. Thus, without deliberate intent, in what sense is failing to believe referees' comments/critiques "misconduct"? Incompetence, arguably, but it's more dangerous to start declaring that incompetence is an ethical failure, etc.

There are plenty of similar cases where a rejected paper gets published in some other journal. But if a reviewer had pointed out some mistakes, then it is a bad attempt to submit to another journal without making a correction or giving proper evidence. In my point of view, the author must have disobeyed the statement during journal submission, if they have anything like,
"whether this manuscript was rejected by another journal. If yes, then why?"

So inform the methodological flaws you noticed to the editor of the published journal with a request to being confidential. And let the editor to reply in that matter.
Another best way would be you can write a commentary note to the published paper to make a discussion. In this case you will have to justify the drawbacks of the used methodology.
Another possible way would be to remain silent.

I have never seen a policy like that.  Maybe it happens in other disciplines?

I have seen a question like that in a minority of biology journals.

The author may have said the manuscript was rejected because Reviewer 2 thought the method was flawed. The editor could have then confirmed that the method was fine and even asked additional reviewers to check the method.

For that matter, an author may believe and claim that their earlier submission was "rejected because referees were idiots", no matter what evidence referees give, etc.

@paulgarrett, or just venue shopping.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How long is too long to wait for a rejection because of a lack of reviewers?
I am posing this question here because of a mini-controversy that arose on another list on which I participate.
One poster suggested that the poster's "rights were trampled on," because a journal spent two months trying (but failing) to find reviewers for a particular paper. However, the journal did not notify the poster during that time that anything was amiss with the process.
At the end of the two months, the journal sent back a rejection notice, because they could not find peer reviewers. While I believe that the journal could have done a better job in notifying the author that the review was experiencing delays, I didn't find the length of time spent in the review process at all unreasonable—particularly if the journal submission process allows potential reviewers to see the manuscript before electing to accept or decline the invitation to review.
The poster believed that it the journal should have sent the rejection much earlier—but I figured it might take six weeks or more in some cases to find reviewers (particularly given that the paper was somewhat outside the "core" themes of the journal).
So what is a reasonable amount of time for a journal to spend before returning the paper because of the inability to find peer reviewers?

Two months is frustrating, but not unreasonable, and certainly not 'trampling'.

I know a paper that got accepted because the editor couldn't find reviewers.

If anything, my reaction is that two months is too soon to absolutely give up on trying to find an appropriate referee.  Generally (at least in my discipline) people are given a week or two to accept or decline a referee request, so two months probably means that not more than ten or so people were asked.
My understanding of what it means to be an editor is that they should in principle be working harder to find a suitable referee.  However, if the editor is having an especially bad time of it, it may be worth letting the author know: maybe they will choose to resubmit to a different journal or to switch to a different editor at the same journal.  The latter happened to me years ago: the editor that I submitted to asked one person to referee, got referred to a second, and so forth.  He reported failure to me after the loop closed up.  But the failure was conditional failure, and he gave me the option of switching to a different editor at the same journal, which I did.  (Unfortunately after that the paper still was not treated well, but that's not part of the present story.)
Academia is specialized, but it's not that specialized: probably most journal submissions have at least 100 suitable referees in the world, right?  If so, then two months is way too soon to say definitively that a suitable referee could not be found.  In my experience, editors often "sugarcoat" the things that they tell authors -- probably because they didn't like the hate mail they got from their earlier, more forthright approach -- to the extent that if you take literally the reasons given for objection, they often sound rather silly.  In this case I might suspect that "I spent two months and I couldn't find a suitable referee" is meant to be code for "I asked enough people whose opinions I trusted, and while they were not willing to formally referee the paper, they told me that it did not interest them and thus probably did not merit publication."  If the editor is himself making a judgment call about the suitability of the submission, in my opinion that's fine but they should be upfront about it.
Unfortunately the current culture of academic journals makes extracting "the real story" from the editor almost prohibitively difficult.  In practice it is probably in your poster's best interest just to try again at a different journal.

The poster did exactly that, and got the paper accepted. However, the poster ranted about a conspiracy because of the "trampling" and "poor handling."

Having the paper accepted seems like the best possible resolution of the situation.

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


text:
Ethics of soliciting letters for US permanent residency application?
I recently received a request from a postdoctoral associate working at another institution to "write a support letter" for his residency application. I put the statement in quotes because the candidate in question has already written out the letter and is asking me only to put it on official letterhead, sign it, and return it.
Is such behavior considered acceptable for the US permanent residency application? Is there a difference in appropriateness if the applicant knows the recommender well?

I get these all the time for former students who worked with me. I hear the letters are drafted by specialist lawyers, not the candidate themselves FYI .

The ones I have been asked to sign are basically factual statements of what the student did and what skills it entails, not personal judgements of their ability or impact of their work or anything else that is personal or subjective. Is the request you've received similar?

I got such a request a few years ago from a mathematician I had worked with for a few years by email.  I took the sample letter, and adapted it to include comments relating to my own interactions with the candidate.  That person is now working in the US, so the application must have succeeded.

@ff524: Yes, it is an assessment of technical capabilities letter. However, unlike the ones you've received for former students, this individual does not know me and has never met me in person (at least not that I can recall!).

A key factor in this process is that you have to be an expert on the subject and you have to know the applicants work.  If the letter you've been given overstates the candidates ability or overstates your interaction with that person, then don't sign the letter.

As @ff524 said, it's standard for these to be drafted by lawyers who know what the immigration services are looking for. I've signed some for people I know, which were rather different from the way I would have phrased them myself if I were writing a recommendation letter, but that I was happy to sign off on to facilitate their green card.

For GC application, a number of RLs is required (Usually 5-8). Out these, 2-3 are to be from persons the applicants know (ie former advisors) and the rest are from others he met in conferences, or have cited his work in their articles. These are called independent referees. Basically, researchers who do not have a direct or day-to-day contact with the applicant.

For me, the key criterion is "do I know the person through shared endeavor" e.g. having studied or worked together for a reasonable period of time.
If there has been no previous contact i.e. a stranger, I would NOT respond at all to a request for a support letter.
As a possible comparison, a stranger asks you to guarantee a bank loan for them ...  most people can see where that one will lead...


text:
1 or 2 Year Master's Program
I originally posted this on math.stackexchange but was recommended to post here.
I have been admitted to two Master's Programs in math (both with funding). One is 1 year long and the other is 2 years long. I plan on obtaining a PhD directly afterwards.
The 1 year option lets me save one year. But I would have to apply to PhD programs within the first semester and it seems I would not have time to get good recommendation letters or make a strong impression from my Master's Program. The 2 years option would give me more chance to demonstrate what I've done.
If they are comparable programs, which would be the better choice?

I think you've answered your own question.  (Save one year for what?)

I would normally choose the two-year program, for exactly the reasons that you cite. One of the few reasons why I would consider the one-year program is if there is a particular individual you want to work with, or if it is your first-choice school for the PhD program and it offers a path of lower resistance to already be a student there.
Otherwise, as JeffE points out, you won't really save much time by going to the one-year program over the two-year program. (Besides, if it's a coursework-based program, you'll probably get more out of the two-year deal!)

I would choose the two year program as a Master's program is just that: You'd want to MASTER a certain topic and two years or so is generally a decent amount of time in which you could hone your skills and defend your research (if you would opt for a thesis option).

If you are certain that you will continue on PhD program after you obtain your master degree, then you should choose the 2 year program. Others already explain why. I am not going to repeat the reasons.
However, if you are not 100% sure about obtaining PhD after you get a master, I would take the 1 year program if I were you. A plan is just a plan after all. How do you know what will happen 1 year from now? Why not get a master degree first? You will have other options after that, such as teaching at a high school, get a job in industry, etc. A master degree may be worth 10% more of the salary.
So, the bottom line is your desire to have a PhD in math. You are the only one who knows the answer.


text:
Math degree to CS Masters chances
I am switching fields from math to CS. I want to get a Masters in CS focused on coursework to go into industry later. I am aiming for a good school but not the very top.
I have some CS courses and a bit of programming experience but my background is mainly in math. My GPA for my math Masters is 3.1-3.2 but my undergrad GPA is much higher. My math subject GRE score is pretty good.
I think I will be quite capable of handling the CS Masters coursework but I want a sense for how high/low I am aiming and how CS depts consider applicants. Also, do I have any chance if I have minimal CS background and low Masters GPA?
Thanks.

I switch from math masters to cs PhD program.  I was successful, but it took some time.  I would leverage all the personal connections that you have to try and get good advice and recommendations.  I even made a list of schools and professors who work on the more math oriented CS topics.  I showed it to one of my more CS oriented math professors and he went down the list.  Out of the 100 people on the list, he knew 3 of them personally and called all 3 of them on the phone to help me out.  :)

My BS was in Math, and I'm almost finished with my Master's in CS. At the time of my application, I had finished all the lower division CS courses, but no upper division.
You will find that Math is excellent prep for CS, and that CS departments recognize this. To do well in upper division math, you need to be able to think logically and abstractly, which are both valuable in CS. In many ways, math and programming are the same -- you have a starting condition, you have a set of rules you can use, and you have a desired end point. You would like to get there in an elegant manner, without too many missteps, and in a manner that others can understand.
In the US at least, most schools that I looked at assume that their MS students will be lacking one or more required upper division CS classes, and have provisions for those students to take those classes. The year I entered, out of 80 students only one had all the required upper division classes. I don't think you'll find this is a problem. However, the more you have, the better you will look compared to others.
Your best bet is to call up the graduate coordinator for CS at the schools you are considering, and discuss things with them. They won't make any guarantees, but the can give you a good sense of whether you are wasting your time applying at that school, and often will give you hints on things you can do to make yourself a stronger applicant.


text:
How can I improve my research experience for PhD application?
It's well-known that many grad schools (especially top-ranked) require some research experience from prospective students and consider this as main criterion for accept/reject decision.
During undergraduate study I was working on my research (hadn't finished it - had solved just one particular case) - but can't say it was great research. Now I work as software developer in subdivision of national Academy of Science. My position requires only coding, no problem solving (there's no projects here requiring any fundamential research).
How can I make any research (better related to my field of interests) without being undergrad or MS student, without working in lab. Can I simply choose interesting problem (e.g. my undegrad problem), work hard to solve it and then refer to that in research statement? Who should write letter of recommendation in this case? Or I must have any advisor (who can verify my results and then write recommendation letter for me)? Can it be unofficial advisor (just researcher I know well)?

Not a direct answer to your question: At a minimum, write up your partial results, post them to a publicly-accessible web page, and include a link in your research statement.  It's vital to remember that most research fails.  The fact that you've made a credible attempt at independent research already puts you above the majority of graduate school applicants, but just claiming to have done research is not enough.

From my experience, there are three reasons why potential advisors want to see undergraduate research:

Show that the student cares enough about research to actually have participated in research during their undergraduate years.
Student is at least somewhat familiar with the ins-and-outs of performing academic research in a university setting.
The quality of the performed research may give some indication as to how "good" of a student the candidate will be.

If you perform research yourself outside of the university settings, you'll provide a strong showing for (1), nothing at all for (2), and given that you're unlikely to publish anything, nothing of much use to the advisor for (3).
To that end, I would try to get a job as a research assistant before applying. (I'm not sure this position exists in all fields.) This is usually a paid position, and will give you an experience to work with research, help run a lab, learn about academia, and and even possibly work towards being acknowledged--or even possibly a co-author, although that's unlikely--in a paper. It should help your application significantly.

You can consider the possibility of becoming a research assistant or research associate in the research group you want to join, before applying for Phd program.
You can try to contact the reseach group leader and ask him/her if they have possibility (i.e. funding) and willing to assume you for some months as research associate. By this way, the group is able to know you and test you; you're able to work, get paid, do research, publish papers, and so reinforce your PhD candidacy.
Them, when the Phd announcement will be out, you'll be a A-star candidate ;-)

Why would they take you as a paid research associate if they wouldn't already take you as a PhD student?

@ArtemKaznatcheev: It might be easier to convince one PI to pay you than to convince the entire admissions committee to admit you.

@Artem Kaznatcheev In Continental Europe, university most important research groups often have some available funds to use to assume a research associate for some months. And, as JeffE told you, in this case, you should just convince the research team leader, while for Phd admission, you'll have to convince all the committee.

Glad I could help @JackBauer in the 6 years since my comment I have found the answer to my question on my own: as JeffE points out, it is often different amounts of red tape involved between PhD and RA. Also, RA is a smaller commitment (they can hire you for a year) versus the 3 to 6 years of PhD and so less of a gamble for a prof. You can also have more RAs than PhDs since you can have your PhD students help supervise and teach the RAs. It is also a good idea for a student to do an RA before PhD so that they can get insight into the group. Maybe a separate question/answer pair is needed?

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


text:
Practical implications of noting "equally contributing authors"
I was recently reading a paper on which the author list had an interesting twist: both the first and second author had an asterisk next to their name, with the footnote "these authors contributed equally."
I'm curious about the practical implications of such a scenario. Obviously, one is listed first and one is listed second (in this case, alphabetical, by last name), and that's how it'll be displayed in citations. However, can the second listed author—who is supposed to be given equal weight to first author regarding credit—list their name first on their CV, even though its listed differently in the journal? Are there any other implications I'm not considering?

+1 I have wondered about that recently. Some journals require (and publish) an explicit statement by the authors describing their respective contributions. But most journals (at least in my field) don't. Yet, there is a recent trend that some authors include such a statement even when not required, and I have wondered about that.

You can't change the citation--changing the order of authors results in the wrong citation!  You can replicate the note in the C.V. so it is clear that there are co-first authors.

I would see such a step as a clear indication of authors contributions for the record, so as to make sure this gets accepted as truthful also in the future during promotions, job applications, etc. Technically speaking, in a CV one can write stuff even dishonestly disregarding co-authors (e.g., arbitrarily indicating the percentage of own contribution). This  kind of public indication of the contribution tackles the problem once and forever. In some fields the alphabetical order is a standard (mathematicians I know have that as almost a strict rule) and then you need a tool to make your contribution visible. Especially if your name is at your disadvantage in this game. E.g., when you are called Zhang and co-author paper often with some Adams or so. Also, if alphabetic order is desired for whatever reason and the more senior co-author happens to precede the student who did the actual work, such an indication might be desirable.
Another point is, some journals require such an explicit indication. E.g., Nature does that, although the statement of individual contribution comes as a paragraph at the end of the paper.
Finally, some national schemes for evaluation of research output require such an indication made in a publication archive system. Having it included in the paper also indicates that authors try to avoid any future disputes regarding individual contributions.

In a sandwich PhD thesis, the PhD candidate might indicate their contribution to each paper.

In some fields the alphabetical order is a standard (mathematicians I know have that as almost a strict rule) and then you need a tool to make your contribution visible. — The standard fiction in theoretical computer science, which inherited alphabetical author order form mathematics, is that 100% of the authors each contributed 100% of the paper.  That's our story and we're sticking to it.  (And, yes, every recommendation letter I write has a short paragraph about alphabetical author order.)


text:
Can you list a "last-minute" invited talk on your CV?
A session at an annual professional society meeting that I regularly help to organize includes an "invited" talk to anchor the session. Some years, the invited speaker is unable to attend the meeting (due to illness, travel problems, etc.). If we are able to arrange a last-minute substitute speaker to fill the time slot (rather than canceling it and risking losing the audience to other parallel sessions), would that speaker be able to list the talk as an "invited" talk on her CV, even though it's not been advertised or listed anywhere?

If talks I invite myself to give count, I'm pretty sure this does too.

@ff524: The key question, in my opinion, is what to do if there's no documentation of the talk having taken place.

Why not? Of all the possible people to give the (new) talk, you invited that person, and even trusted them to give a good talk on short notice!

I think that there is no difference between first and last minute invited speakers. Nobody mentions in his CV that he is invited in the last days. The important is that he has talked in that conference and this is of value to be mentioned in his CV.

Also, I do not think that the time of invitation is regularly mentioned in the certificates which may be given to the speakers (if any exists).


text:
Publishing in a SSCI indexed journal for Computer Science Researcher
I am working in an interdisciplinary area and most of my area specific journals are available in journal which are indexed by SSCI instead of SCI. But some people told that for computer science resaerchers SCI is preferred one. What should I do ? I have an option where I could publish in SCI journal which have much less IF as comapred to that of available SSCI indexed journals

This strongly depends on each particular country's bureaucracy, and on your planned career path. Unfortunately I don't think there is a single answer, but rather you will need to look at the requirements of the specific grants you will be requesting, specific positions you will be applying for, etc.
For example, I'm in a similar position as you and located in Spain. I need to publish in SCI journals for my promotion and tenure applications, because here if you are at a science department SCI is king and the rest counts practically zero for those purposes. However, when applying for a project grant I have been successful going to a non-CS panel and highlighting my publications in non-CS venues, and when applying for EU funding I have been successful highlighting good conference papers in my subfield (which is really where the most relevant publications are) and not even mentioning SCI. Americans in my field go straight to conferences and not even bother with SCI, Chinese do publish in SCI because it seems to be a requirement there, some offers for positions I have seen in northern Europe just list a mix of SCI journals, non-SCI journals and conferences that are relevant, etc.


text:
How to get SCI impact factor from other than Journal site
I could see the IF of journal I am looking for in their site. My problem is Thomsor Reuters report lists the journal as indexed in both SCI and SSCI, but kournal home page says its indexed in SSCI only. And it lists impact factor too. How can I confirm whether its really indexed in SCI and find its IF? I couldnt get a proper reply after contacting Journal. Can I get it anywhere in Thomson Reuters site?

To see if the journal is indexed in SCI or SSCI, you can search from Clarivate's master journal list. Checking the Impact Factor probably require subscription to Web of Science. Alternatively you can directly search for the journal titles in BioXBio or find any article for the journal to see Impact Factor in Scinapse.
(edit: I work with Pluto Network developing and servicing Scinapse.)


text:
How important are teaching portfolios in obtaining an academic position?
I have been recently introduced to the idea of teaching portfolios, that is a collection of teaching experiences and references made by peer educators. Their supposed purpose is to go along a researcher CV when applying for a position in academia, i.e. assistant/associate professor.
Any first hand experience?

This may be useful for someone considering a career at a teaching-first school, but I've never seen such portfolios asked for or even considered at research universities in the US and the larger European countries.

As far as I know, they are standard requirements in Australia's universities, and spreading at least to northern Europe.

I've revised my answer to make it more specific. But it's yet to catch on in most countries.

Creating a "portfolio" for teaching used to be the norm for those entering the teaching career on the secondary (high school) level and below.  My portfolio is HUGE (a 3-inch binder stuffed full of lesson plans, my philosophy of education, professional development, letters of recommendation, photos of my students, etc.), but I've only had one administrator ever actually LOOK at my portfolio and that was when I was interviewing for my first teaching position.
The move I've seen from many universities is to have their teaching students create virtual or online portfolios.  If I were you and I were considering applying for a higher-ed. position, I certainly wouldn't create anything that was a step backwards in technology.  If you choose to create a portfolio, spend the time and create a virtual one.

On the one hand, I'm not certain that it's even necessary to spend time creating a virtual portfolio, given that it's never looked at. On the other hand, sites like SlideShare.net make it so easy to do that you really won't spend any time on it at all.

I agree.  However, since it's rare, it might be something that helps you stand out.  Create it and then throw it on your resume somewhere with, "Visit my virtual portfolio at www.blahblahblah.net".

I think it's going to depend wildly on the position and very unpredictable factors.  In my extremely limited experience in one discipline (mathematics) at one level (research university), a portfolio would probably only be useful if the committee had already decided to hire you, and higher-ups (chairs, deans, provosti) expressed concern about your teaching.  In the right situation, they could be very useful, but it's not the most common in the world.

I have to agree with Meg Coates answer, they don't seem to be as important and they are made out to be by the powers to be. I created a "portfolio" and the only person who ever looked at it was a colleague who was part of an interview process. They don't appear to be looked when you go in for interviews. I like that I can look back on my portfolio and see past achievement and progress over the years but to be honest I quit updating mine about 4 or 5 years ago.
My final message would be go for and create the portfolio but don't be disappointed if it does not get reviewed during your hiring process.


text:
How many applications are usually received for a given PhD position?
I realise that the answer to this question varies greatly between department and universities but I would like to get some estimates from somebody within the field since I myself has absolutely no idea. When I apply for a PhD position, can I expect to compete with a handful of other persons or can there be hundreds of applications sent?

from 0 to tens depending on so many factors.

Note that I am not a professor in Europe, so my guess (which inspired the bounty) about how many applications they receive was only valid to one significant figure :-)

There was over 80 for the position I applied for a few years ago, at a Dutch neuroscience institute with a good reputation. I imagine there would be more at world famous universities in the US. I hear that most of the time, most applicants aren't that good, even the top 10% who make it to the interview. In my case the best candidate got the position, and the one ranked second (me) got an offer for a position later on... so in the end it was one out of 40.

"most applicants aren't that good" - I'm having some trouble understanding exactly what this means. Is it people missing the necessary qualifications (e.g. not having a masters degree in the first place)?

@Speldosa - Partly. What I've heard more about (and seen some) are the candidates who come to present some of their data for the interview. A lot of the time they have trouble expressing a clear motivation for the experiments they did for their masters thesis (this is the most common problem), often they skip over their data too quickly (some don't show graphs at all - huge mistake), and many tend to then draw conclusions that are not related to the data in a clear-cut way. These are of course very high-level mistakes, but still, it takes more to give an impression of a strong candidate.

@Speldosa: There's more to a good candidate than having a masters degree. There's more to a good candidate than having good grades.

The OP appears to be asking a Euro-specific question. In the US you don't apply for a single position - rather there's a large pool of applications for a small set of "slots". In contrast to the answer by @scientifics, in CS it's not uncommon to see over 500 applications for around 15-20 slots.

I'm located in Belgium in a computer science department. Recent positions that I've advertised have had between 3 and 30 applicants, depending on the topic. Most applicants were poor or hard to assess (from countries we have little experience with).
We currently have 8 positions open and are not expecting to get 8 good candidates.

"Most applicants were poor or hard to assess" - Are we talking about the equivalent to nigerian letters? Don't they even have the necessary qualifications or do they just have crappy grades and poor writing skills?

By that I mean they come from Universities we've never heard of in countries where it is difficult to get accurate information about quality. Achieving reasonable grades at a crappy university is no guarantee of quality. Achieving reasonable grades at an unknown university says very little about the student.

Interesting. I started out at a crappy university in a country that was going through some very crappy times. My impression is that good students are quite comparable in quality to good students elsewhere. The ones receiving mediocre grades, on the other hand, would probably have been failing at better universities.

@Ana: My point is more that "it is difficult to assess the quality" not that "the quality is poor".

"Poor" often also means that the candidates do not really fit the topic very well and there is no sign that they are really interested to do something completely new except as the safety option.

The University of Minnesota is one of few institutions that makes their admissions statistics publicly available https://apps.grad.umn.edu/programs/select_program.aspx?l=t (choose a field and press the "Program Statistics" radio button)
I pulled the info from my field (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) and you can see that it varies from year to year but the mean is around 80. Here is the site for the EEB program: http://gradpub.grad.umn.edu/data/stats/ad/1124400.html
In general, at least in the US, more and more people are applying to grad school since it is viewed as a viable alternative to the weak job market.

These are fantastic stats. I wonder if other schools have those as well. If anybody knows I would like to know.

Note that this is not 80 applications for one position.  As is common in US universities, applications are department-wide.  If you scroll down that page, you can see that for 2013-14, 87 applications were received, of which 11 students were accepted, and all of them actually enrolled (matriculated).  So the ratio of applications to seats is more like 8:1.

I have been part of the selection process of several high profile European research institutes in physics. For recent calls we received somewhere in the 150-200 applications for a handful of PhD positions (say 5).
For concurrent application rounds at different institutes in different countries but in the same field, I saw somewhere between 30% and 50% overlap in the candidate pools.

As mentioned before, in some US universities every year there is a cohort of new students entering a given PhD program (cohort size can vary a lot even between departments of the same university). At Cornell University, in the life science departments (e.g. Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Plant Sciences, etc) applications received per year can be ~ 100- 150, and cohorts are usually around 10 students per year.
Although the question of "if things have gotten more competitive" in the last decade might be department/school dependent- here are two websites of universities showing their admission stats over the past years- with overall number of applications seemingly going up:
Cornell University Doctorate programs: https://tableau.cornell.edu/t/PublicContent/views/TheOneDashboard/TheOneDashboard?%3Aorigin=card_share_link&%3Aembed=y
University of Chicago: https://provost.uchicago.edu/initiatives/phd-program-data

It really depends on the school and the program. For example, most big US universities that have chemistry PhD programs take ~50 new graduate students every year, so I can't imagine there are too many applications for each spot...

The PhD market in CS in Austria is very much a buyers market. I know from at least two professors (both are very well known in their respective fields; one of them is a real "big name" in algorithms) that they have problems finding (reasonable good and motivated) PhD students. As a well doing Master's student (not a genius, they tend to go to the US or UK), I was offered several PhD positions.

For Physics (and some Astronomy) PhD programs, you can find out a lot of the information about acceptance rates and total # of applicants from the AIP graduate handbook.
Much of the same information is found at www.gradschoolshopper.com, which is somehow down today...


text:
How can I tell whether it is the volume or the issue number that is given?
If I'm reading a journal article for which the reference for example is stated as "Journal of Examples 3, 74-78 (2014)", how can I tell whether it's the volume or issue number that is given? In many circumstances, I understand that it's quite easy to tell. For example, if the number is quite high, it's probably not the issue number. And if it's a journal which I know have been in existence for long (for example Science), I can surmise that if I'm seeing a low digit, it's probably not the volume number.
However, sometimes it's not unambiguous. In the example given above, is it a new journal which  has only released three volumes? Or is it just issue three of some, unknown volume number?
Is there a system to all this madness? Is there a way to always tell what you're actually looking at?

The general rules are:

If there is only one number, it's the volume.
If there are two number, it's first volume, then issue.

Some additional information

@Nicolas link not available.


text:
Is it reasonable for me to expect an official and timely response to my PhD application?
I recently applied for a PhD position with a major university in Europe. However, I haven't heard back from them even though the dates for the interviews have passed. This somewhat provoces me since I've put a lot of work into my application (it feels disrespectful to not get back to me) and since it makes me unsure whether I have been rejected or merely forgotten. I've already got a response (possibly automately generated) that my application was received by them.

Have you asked?

Is the process "rolling" or on a fixed cycle? (And, for what it's worth, emails and letters for graduate admissions are not generally automatically generated; staff members typically compose those and send them out.)

I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect a timely response, however it seems to be the case that many graduate schools are overwhelmed with applications and underestimate the time it takes to deal with them. A slightly more cynical view would be that many graduate school admin departments are understaffed and don't have the resources to cater for expected number of applicants. In my case I submitted my application on 28 Feb and was informed that interviews would take place "during the week of the 19 March". This date came and went and I assumed I had not been successful, so I called the Faculty Graduate Office the following week and was informed that the process was taking longer than expected but I would be notified of the status in due course. On 5 April I received an email saying I had been selected for interview and "we will contact you shortly with an interview date and time". On 25 April I was given the interview date (for the middle of May).
I would recommend that you just call them and ask to know the status.

Interesting! I should probably get in touch with them. However, since all the applications have been sent via mail, I would estimate the time to write a canned response ("Unfortunately, you've not been selected for further interviewing. Good luck in the future!") and send out to everybody who has been rejected (that is, sending an e-mail to every applicant, minus the selected ones) to be about 5-10 minutes.

Ahh, but as mentioned to by @Daniel E. Shub yesterday in the comment to the other answer, they may not send out rejection emails until the process is complete. There could be a situation where non of the interviewees were found to be appointable, or some of the interviewees withdrew and they wanted to call others to be interviewed.

That's possible.

@longrob it sounds like you are in the process of applying to graduate school. Do you have any experience related to the inner workings of graduate admissions? In my experience the number of applicants and admin support (or lack thereof) doesn't change dramatically from year-to-year.

@DanielE.Shub, sorry for the late reply - for some reason I didn't get a notification. My experience of the inner workings of graduate admissions, is that the admin staff are overworked. It would be easy to question their competence too, but I had better not say too much about that ! I have been a student representative for taught postgraduates and sat on several committees staffed by academics (programmes committee, student education committee). My experience of these committees has been a very good one and I would say the academics involved in provision of programmes are dedicated...[cont]

....[cont] but they are often thwarted in their pursuits by admin staff and academics higher up the food chain (in management) who have their own agendas. So, while this doesn't answer your question about graduate school "admissions", I can extrapolate my experience to assume that many of the problems experienced by applicants do not come from the staff who are involved in teaching or supervising them.

No, final decisions take a while. It is not the fault of the program, but rather an issue of funding. Programs tend to initially reject very few applicants. An applicant that seems weak on "paper" might get accepted if their proposal fits into a very narrow funding scheme that no other applicants are eligible for. There is no global rank order of the applicants, but rather the "best" applicant for each funding scheme is identified. Programs generally construct strategies which lead to the most funding. The strategy is constantly revised when the program finds out about successful/unsuccessful funding applications and whether the applicant accepts the acceptance. Basically the whole system is a nightmare for everyone.

"No, final decisions take a while." - But in this case, I can only assume that the decisions already have been made. The dates for the interviews have passed (see my original question).

@Speldosa I agree that it is highly, possibly completely, unlikely that you will be admitted. Most (post)graduate programs do not send rejects until the entire process is completed. This is the similar to academic job searches where you are "lucky" if you ever get a rejection letter.


text:
What are some good ways to structure material before writing a theoretical paper/thesis/book?
Let's say that you are going to write a theoretical paper/thesis/book (that is, you're not conducting empirical work). More often than not, I find it troublesome to just start writing right away, especially when I don't know what the results of my investigation is going to be.
What are some good ways to structure and organize your material, as well as your workflow, before starting to write?

Of course, it's disastrous to be so disorganized that things get lost, work has to be duplicated (even if it's just typing), etc.
On the other hand, I observe that many novice writers over-allocate their time+energy to "planning". I say "over-allocate" exactly because (as in the question) when one doesn't have too many details about the sequel, it is hard to plan. Further, especially in thesis situations, and, even for more experienced people, in book writing, the very process significantly changes one's viewpoint, so that an initial plan/outline/table-of-contents/statement-of-intent easily becomes grossly inaccurate over time+experience.
For example, although it is interesting, and an interesting exercise, to try to write an introduction or preface at the beginning, it will most likely prove wildly irrelevant, and have to be scrapped nearly entirely.
A second crucial mechanism is (as suggested in the questioner's self-answer) feedback, and, equally, iteration of the writing/editing cycle.
The two concepts combine to suggest that one should not waste time doing nothing, but pretending to be trying to fathom what one will think, and what one will discover, some months in the future. Hesitation delays the very experience that will bring to life one's future viewpoint! :)

Stephen Mumford, an english philosopher, has created what he calls the Mumford Method. It is basically a prescription of how to structure your notes as well as how to utilize presentation opportunities to get feedback and redraft the material.

Could you provide a more in-depth summary of the essentials of this method? That way, people can decide if they want to pursue this in greater depth or not.


text:
Automatically, and freely, download PDFs for a set of references
In EndNote, I know there's an option to automatically download PDF files for the references you have in your library. Is there any way to do the same thing in some kind of non-commercial software, like for example Mendeley or BibDesk?

Sorry, this quite cannot be possible since many of them are non-free. Or do I miss something?

@tohecz Well, I should mention that I do have access to pretty much all digital journals and databases through my institution. However, is it the case that EndNote only fetches PDF from open access journals?

Do you have the DOIs? If so, then it should be possible with one wget in the shell...

@tochecz In most cases "no". What I usually have is the title, the authors, and the publication year.

@embert Thanks! Citavi was actually able to do it, at least for when you had the DOI numbers. I wrote an answer below.

As suggested by @embert in the comments to my original question, this is possible with the help of Citavi. After you've imported your references, go to "References" -> "Check availability and find full text" (the process is explained here).
From initial testing, this feature only seems to work when you have the DOI number for the articles. However, when you do, Citavi finds and downloads the PDFs.

The answer here uses proprietary/paid software. I propose a FOSS solution that works reliably for this task.
The cross-platform software JabRef has integrated fulltext fetchers to download the fulltext for any entry in the library. Import your bib file into Jabref and select a number of entries. Then, from the Quality pull-down menu, select Lookup Fulltext documents. However, you still have to manually confirm the download in a pop-up. But this is still just a bunch of clicking 'OK's at the same spatial location (for each pop-up that appears sequentially) with the mouse. Jabref does the heavy-lifting in the back to correctly download the PDF and link it appropriately by matching it to each relevant citation entry.
The latest master build of Jabref is recommended, since there were some recent fixes to the IEEE Fetcher. https://builds.jabref.org/master/ (if IEEE matters to the OP)


text:
Publish book chapters without giving away the rights
I'm currently writing a book where I, during the writing process, would like to try to publish some individual chapters (more or less unchanged) as standalone articles . Once I've written all of the chapters, I would then like to be able to do retain the full rights to my text even though it would heavily overlap with articles published in different journals.
Are there any kind of code words or licenses that I could look for in journals when searching for potential places to publish my book chapters in order to be sure that I don't give away the rights to my own work in this regard? I realize that I could ask the staff of individual journals directly, but I would like to know if there's a better way to scan potential journals to find suitable ones.

To a first approximation, I would suspect that open access journals will allow this, and subscription-based journals won't.

You could give the publisher of the article a non-exclusive license (meaning, you retain the right to grant more licenses to others).
Or, you could negotiate that you retain the right to publish the article later on in a book.
Note that if the book happens to be your thesis, many (but not) publishers have copyright transfer agreements that allows you this particular reuse. I guess they got tired of allowing PhD students to reuse the paper for cumulative (stapled) theses.
And you could check your local copyright law: in some jurisdictions you retain rights for secondary publication.
E.g. in Germany you retain the right to use your manuscript for secondary publication under certain conditions (1 year embargo period, non-commerical secondary publication, the paper was written mainly by public grants).
I'd guess if you approach the same publisher about the book who also published the papers, they may be more open to license the papers for reprinting in the book.


text:
What are the most important criteria to consider when hiring postdocs for a research group?
One of the most important challenges that academics will face is group management. Although this takes many forms for graduate students, undergraduate assistants, and so on, I believe postdocs are a fairly "universal"—a professor hires a postdoc specifically for his group.
However, it's not necessarily clear what qualities to look for in a postdoc.

Does it make a difference if it's your group's first or second postdoc, versus the n'th postdoc?
How much weight should one give to letters of recommendation?
How do you analyze a publication record, especially when towards the end of the PhD, many papers are often still unpublished and therefore "embargoed?"
Are there any criteria that applies specifically to postdocs that might not be considered in, say, hiring for industry or business?

My answer, item by item:

I think that there is a difference if this is yet another postdoc or your only postdoc. But most important, we should pay attention to the ratio postdoc/permanent researchers. If the ratio is low (few postdoc, lot of permanent researchers), you can choose to work with "junior" postdoc (=someone not completely capable for working alone), while if the ratio is high, you need postdoc that are in fact already at the level of an assistant prof.
But at some point I think we must ask ourselves if we always need one more postdoc. I guess this will depend on the field. In theoretical fields, when we hire a postdoc, this is to work with him. In some more practical fields, we tend to hire postdoc to make them working for us. The two cases are different : in the first case we need someone that will have ultimately an academic position, in the latter we need someone for coding, experimenting, etc.
Personally, I am not interested in the letters. I ask for references and I take my phone to know more about the candidate. Letters are always telling that the candidate is great, even if this is not completely true.
I ask the candidate his/her papers, even those unpublished, and I read them. Then I contact some of the other authors to know more about who done what.
Clearly yes. A postdoc is a researcher, I think that the way of working is very different : you can spend a lot of time without being "productive" when you are a postdoc, which is not the case in industry. This can be depressing, so we have to make sure that a postdoc (which has less guidance than a PhD student) can handle that.

How do you investigate the last item?

A phone call to the coauthors, to the supervisors, several interviews.


text:
Are there examples of highly cited papers that very poorly written?
We've had a little debate at work about whether a paper that presents good research, but that is at the same time very poorly written (either sloppy presentation, or not written in the native language of the authors), would nevertheless get a lot of citations. Are there good examples of such papers, specifically ones that present seminal work in some field, but that are very difficult to read because of the language or are riddled with errors?

I think Heidegger's Being and Time might fit this criteria. Though the philosopher's work was important to the field, he was criticized for the use of convoluted, imprecise language that managed to confuse other philosophers (Bertrand Russell being one such critic). In fact, the philosopher Paul Edwards published a collection of articles under the title Heidegger's Confusions in order to

rescue [Heidegger’s] valuable ideas from the logical confusions in which they are embedded and from the willfully obscure and perverse language in which they are frequently expressed.

With regard to more recent (and research-oriented) writing: talk of the poor grammatical quality of academic journals has been around a while. Take a look at this quote from the Chronicle article "Bad Writing and Bad Thinking"

Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we're in a sorry state, and most would say there isn't much to do about it.

So, although an example other than Heidegger's writing doesn't come to mind, it doesn't seem you'll have to look very far.


text:
Why do citation styles for webpages include accessed date?
I do understand that citations should be as precise as possible (including e.g. edition of a book or a page number), so that ideally, the reader can find the information exactly as I found it when writing.
I also understand that the problem with citing webpages is that they can change. But how does including the date when I accessed the page help anything? The reader still won't be able to read the same version I did (unless the page includes history, which is very rare). And comparing the accessed date with the current date isn't very helpful either: some webpages change multiple times per day, some aren't modified for years.
Or is the accessed date useful for some other purpose?

I am not aware of any published accounts of how style rules are developed. If you really want to know why a particular rule was developed, you need to ask them directly. That said, there are a number of different styles for dealing with electronic materials and these styles are changing:

MLA: You always need the date of access for electronic resources.

At some point the since 2014, the requirement has been dropped: https://style.mla.org/access-dates/

APA: You rarely use the date of retrieval, although in previous versions (APA 5) you always did
CMS: You never need the date of access/retrieval. I am not sure if you ever did in earlier versions.

This answer really doesn't address the OP's underlying question.  It essentially says: "i don't know, ask someone else..."

@Paul my point was 3 of the big players in terms of style guides recommend different things and at least one of them recently change its view. To me this means there is no definitive answer.

A URL does not refer to content, it is only an address.  Since you are making a claim about what was written at that address, you must associate a date with it, or it is meaningless.
If you do such a thing, you should also save the content, in case it is not recoverable and you want to refer to it again or support it further.

So you're saying it's important to uniquely identify what I was reading and it doesn't matter whether anyone else will be able to read it too?

Not that access doesn't matter, just that uniqueness does.

+1 It is really about identification. So sure, there are cases when the date is not necessary, DOI is one such for example (it's moreorless just a web address, but its contents should be stable in time).

The content you get can depend on other factors than just the date. URLs often produce different content depending on your IP address, your user-agent, and cookies. It is even possible for a page to be written in different languages and automatically have it delivered in the language, which the user chose in their browser.

@kasperd While that is certainly true, there is a limit to what is reasonable for an author to check. The types of sites which publish facts which are relevant to academic expositions would rarely contain this type of dynamic content generation, though if that changed, the rules would absolutely have to adapt, too. If you are citing primary sources on very volatile sites (say, Tumblr or 4chan), probably you need to take more precautions to ensure that the original source can be recovered.

If you know the URL and date, you may be able to use The Internet Archives (a.k.a. the Wayback Machine) to see the page, if it didn't change too frequently.

Most URL cited are institutional sources, the kind of guys that can provide reliable information*. If a reader finds that your claim does not coincide with the information they can find at the moment, they can contact the administrators of the page and ask. Certainly, it is easier to get the correct copy if you have an specific date.
In Bioinformatics it is common to use web servers to run some programs (example). In this cases, the dates are important for replicability, even when citing the program version, because the specific software versions it depends on may not be public (say, before March 15th, AwesomePredictor.com had installed BLAST+ 2.1, and after then they installed v2.2).

One could cite less formal sites to support side points like "this and that have been in the focus of popular culture", but these are ephemeral by nature.

I found an answer directly from a style guide. According to the APA Blog (6th edition),

[W]e usually don’t ask, “When did you consult that source?” One exception to this rule would be for material that is subject to frequent change, such as Wikipedia entries. Because this information is designed to be constantly updated, it’s important to let readers know when you retrieved it.

You can check the revision history of Wikipedia (though usually a poor academic source) but it isn't the only site that has a public record like that. Stack Exchange sites do too, as do many software documentation sites (through GitHub). Still other sites have private revision histories that an admin has access to. (For example, WordPress sites.)
Another answer brought up archival sites like archive.org. If the page wasn't updated, but the URL no longer works, then most likely you will only need to check one entry to find the information: the first. (You may also be able to search the internet instead to see if the page moved by using the other details, namely title and author.) But with a frequently updated source, it's possible that the cited information only appeared in a single revision of the page. Without knowing which, you'd have to check every snapshot (excluding those after the citation was published). And with an external archival site, the page could have changed between snapshots, so it's a good idea to save the page yourself if you're citing it. However, the comments on the APA article indicate that they believe archival sources to be secondary sources, so the URL of the original is what should go in the citation list.


text:
When is it appropriate to decline a review request?
There are some clear reasons to decline a review request, such as conflict-of-interests or not enough free time (e.g., going on a vacation..).
But what if you are just not interested in the paper you got (i.e., it is loosely related to what you do, but not entirely irrelevant)?
On which occasions is it appropriate to decline a review request?
Does it matter if the review is for conference vs journal?

It is appropriate to decline a request from an elsevier editor when you signed the petition on thecostofknowledge.com :).

Well, make up a reason that does not harm anyone's feelings ... ;-)

There are a few clear reasons to decline a review request, although in complete honesty, I've never actually declined to review a paper yet, so these are all at least "in theory" for me. Some of them are one's you've mentioned, but there are some others:

Conflict of interest. This one's pretty clear, though with the way some reviews are handled - based on recommendations, closely related expertise, etc. what actually constitutes a conflict of interest can get a little vague.
Lack of time. This is one that people seem to ignore or discount, but it's a big one. If you can't give a paper the attention it deserves, or your review is going to be late (predictably, not because of unforeseen things), then you should probably decline to review it. You're not doing you, the authors, or the editor any favors by making them chase you down for months to get a review.
Lack of expertise. If you read the methods section of a paper and your primary thought is "Huh?" not because the paper is unclear, but because its far afield from your expertise, I'd strongly consider contacting the editor for advice and asking not to be a reviewer.

I wouldn't necessarily not be a reviewer due to a failure to find the paper sufficiently interesting. If your expertise is indeed appropriate and the work is not of sufficiently compelling interest, that is a review finding all its own. Additionally, one would hope that you can evaluate the scientific merit of things that - while you are capable of understanding - you might not find directly interesting.
Whether or not it matters if its a conference or a paper likely depends on your field (how important are conferences?) and the particular conference or paper. For example, I might make a special effort to "find the time" for a journal I submit to (or would like to submit to) or a conference I frequently attend, but might not for a journal or conference I've never heard of.

Besides the obvious "conflict of interest", the main reason is time.  Being an academic requires finding a balance on all the demands on your time.  My policy is to accept no more than one major reviewing obligation (e.g. journal article, grant, 3-ish conference papers) per two-week period.  When I'm asked, I look at my schedule & tell the solicitor when the next available slot is.  Sometimes they take it, sometimes they don't, it depends on their policy, urgency & my schedule.
I'm not sure I have this right:  I still sometimes miss review deadlines I've committed to & I don't publish new results as quickly as I think I should.  But as I said, it's a matter of trying to find a balance, and I do get quite a lot of reviewing done.

I think that it's ok to decline a review request because you don't find the paper interesting if it's a colleague or somebody similarly close who asks you to do it. If they're the one on the PC/editorial board and have already agreed to do the review, it is, put simply, their problem. Of course, that might not be possible if you're a PhD student and your supervisor asks you to do the review :)
If you are approached directly by a member of the PC/editorial board because of your expertise in the area and not because you happen to be working in the same building, I would certainly do the review even if I don't find the paper interesting. The same goes for bidding processes some conferences use where you commit to reviewing a paper based sometimes only on the abstract.

I'm not familiar with the term PC.  What does it mean here?


text:
Are reviewers allowed to discuss their review with each other?
Suppose you find out that someone you know well or work with is reviewing the same journal paper you are reviewing (i.e., finding out this information on your own, and not via the journal or editor, assuming a blind process).
Can you discuss the paper? Can you discuss your reviews?

I would lean towards no.

I'd agree. best not to discuss.

You've already broken the rules by discovering the identity of the other reviewer.  Don't make it worse.

Those responding in the comment areas should provide actual answers with explanations of their reasoning.

@JeffE "broken the rules" is a bit harsh, no?

@RanG.  Nope, not at all.  Referees are supposed to be anonymous and independent.  You are supposed to act in public as though you don't even know the paper exists.

@jeffe, well, things happen. I'm not talking about putting the paper on your web-page or emailing it to everybody you know in order to find out who's reviewing it; but "accidentally" learning this information (implied by question you are asked; mis-addressed email; seeing the paper in the hands/office of someone; being the spouse of the other reviewer, etc.. )

@RanG. Of course things happen.  (Rules can be broken unintentionally.)  But when they do, you're supposed to pretend they didn't.

@JeffE in most cases, I would probably be more inclined to explain to the editor the situation and suggest that another reviewer be found rather than to pretend it didn't happen.

@David: You're right; that would be much better.

@David that's an interesting option!

If it's a blind process, you're not meant to find out. As various people have pointed out in the comments already, discussing your review with them is therefore a big no.
One of the main principles of reviewing by several people is that you get independent opinions, so that if a particular (maybe well-known and well-respected) person doesn't like the research, they can't just make it disappear by convincing everybody else that it's bad.
For some conferences (and maybe journals?), you are able to discuss your review with the other reviewers after the initial submission. But in this case the facilities for doing this are provided by the submission system. There are two important differences to the situtation you've described though. First, your initial review will not be influenced by the discussion and second, there is a record of the conversations and changes made.

The reasoning of having independent opinion makes a lot of sense.

The system where the reviewers can discuss their reviews (and the authors responses) is an excellent scheme.  We all make mistakes in reviewing from time to time, and this is a good way of dealing with them.

I largely agree with @Lars Kotthoff's answer, but I think there's another important aspect to the reviewers not discussing the paper with each other.
It encourages you not to rely on the other reviewers.
If I knew that X, who is really good at the mathematical side of things, was reviewing the paper, and talked it over with them, I might very well be tempted not to go over the math aspects of a paper with a fine-toothed comb, figuring "they've got it". Similarly, they might rely on me to pick over the data analysis or parameter choices, etc.
That's bad. Reviewers should be reviewing papers, not chunks of papers. It's one area where division of labor isn't desirable.

I think it depends upon the context and field.
For instance, on program committees in my field, once you've submitted your own review, it is normal to know who the other reviewers are and be able to see their reviews.  (As a program committee member, I've always been able to see other reviewers' reviews and see their identity.  If I was barred from doing so, I would probably refuse to serve on the program committee.)  I always read the other reviewers' reviews, and sometimes discover that I'd missed something important.  It is not uncommon for me to adjust my review in light of insightful comments found in other reviews.  Therefore, I think it is helpful to be able to read other reviews.
Generally, I think the reviewing process assumes that reviewers will be independent.  This is important, to give authors a fair shake and combat groupthink.  For instance, in my field, we generally try to ensure that every submitted paper receives at least 2 reviews (usually at least 3 reviews).  Why do we do this?  Because we know that reviewers are human and can make mistakes, and it is possible for one reviewer to dislike a paper that is nonetheless great and worthy of publication.  Therefore, our system relies upon reviewers to independently evaluate the paper in their initial review, without talking to other reviewers.  If all reviewers got together and shared notes before forming their own evaluation or submitting their own review, it would create significant dangers of groupthink and undermine the purpose of having multiple reviewers read every paper.
On the other hand, once you and the other reviewer have submitted your initial review, it's probably fair game to exchange notes -- but this may be dependent upon the culture in your field or conference/journal.  If you are not familiar with the culture, I recommend that you contact the program committee chair or journal editor to find out what process they want you to follow.


text:
How to schedule homework?
Many times topics in courses are week-aligned, i.e., topic1 is studied on week1 (say in lecture1 on Monday/Wednesday and then in TA-section-1 on Friday), then topic 2 is studied on week2, etc.
Say the semester is 10 weeks long, and that there are 5 homework assignment (1st assignment covers topic1 and topic2, etc.)
I wonder what is the best strategy to schedule homework assignments, given that deadlines should be (at least) 2 weeks after publishing a new set of homework.
I see several options:
Option 1.
Publish homework 1 (topic1+2) at the end of week2, with deadline at the end of week 4.
[generaly, publish HW No. i on week 2i with deadline on week 2i+2]
Pros: An assignment is published only after the students saw all the relevant materials and have full two weeks to work on it.
Cons: Students usually work towards the deadline. Then, they actually work on the assignment only towards the end of week4, when topic1+2 are already stale in their minds.
(Another issue, of secondary importance, is that the last HW may interfere with finals.)
Option 2.
Publish homework 1 (topic1+2) at the end of week 1 with deadline at the end of week 3.
[generally, publish HW No. i on week 2i-1 with deadline on week 2i+1]
Pros: The students exercise topic1+2 immediately after seeing it.
Cons: They have only 1 week to do the assignment; Students that try to start the assignment early may get confused since some of the material haven't been covered yet in the lecture.
Option 3.
Care less, do whatever.

Would love to hear your advice.

Use Option 1 or 2 or a different plan, publish it and then stick to it, but make one proviso that there will be no changes unless something else and with higher priority causes change : like another exam causing the schedule to change.

It's indeed an interesting question that I have wondered about myself a few times. In my case it is even worse because I am currently teaching a course that has lectures twice a week, so the scheduling gets even more annoying.
I am not sure if there is a silver bullet. My default nowadays is Option 2 - I publish homework before all relevant topics have been covered in class, just because otherwise it feels like the homework is ages behind the lecture. Another problem of your Option 1 is that the last in-class topics basically cannot be covered by homework at all. With Option 2 you only have like one class that can't be part of the homework anymore.
Of course, the ideal schedule in my opinion is Option 3 - publish all homework at the beginning of class and give students agency over how they schedule their own work. If you worry that students get confused because they don't know whether they should already be able to solve a given assignment, you can always note which lectures it refers to.

Publishing all HW at the beginning of the semester is a nice idea, but impractical since we devise new HW every term and write the HW only 1-2 weeks before the put online  (ok, we don't write entirely new HW every time, but there is some difference)

Well I have the same problem, but we should both keep in mind that this is largely a planning fault on our sides.

Additionally, there are always unexpected events, cancelled lecture, etc. Loosing this flexibility is even worse. But I see your point.

Strictly speaking from the perspective of a student, the more information you provide the better I can plan my schedule to accommodate all of the demands from all of my classes.
At the end of the day, you can (after notifying the class) modify the schedule as needed and the class should consent. However the same sentiment would be not shared when modifying the schedule without a plan whatsoever.
This is from someone who needed to take 24 units a semester (equivalent to 24 units a quarter). If professors didn't plan ahead of time, I would have to allocate flex time as part of my schedule. If assignments ran against big projects, I would have to make trade offs in quality.

I give work with a 2 week notice and 80% of the students attempt it on the last day AND expect me to answer all their questions by email at midnight when the test is the next day - planning Ha they have no idea what the word means...

Would not planning affect this result? I would argue not. Those who do things the last minute will do things the last minute regardless of the presence of a well-thought-out plan. But for the students that need to juggle multiple classes and demands, having a plan is paramount to success. The system positives of having a plan benefits those who plan ahead, the efforts of one (the teacher) would have net benefits for those who choose to plan ahead.

As far as last minute question, what would be the restrictions of you stating in the syllabus that questions will not be answered the day before?

I give a detailed plan of what and when  - do they read it... oh and those questions I already give a time limit for end of questions... Guess what - they still send the email : perhaps they can’t tell the time let alone read.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Sticking to the plan on my side helps as then there is no issue.

"At the end of the day, you can (after notifying the class) modify the schedule as needed and the class would consent." I take it you have not taught any undergrad class of significant size :) ?

Nope. But a professor of mine who had a well laid out schedule needed to modify it by informing the class.

It now says should.

I don't see how this answers the question. In both cases students have 2 weeks to work on each assignments. In both cases the plan is clear. The difference is the timing, or rather, the alignment of HW and lectures.


text:
How to improve technical writing
Whenever I write an article, I feel the result is not good enough. Although every theorem is solid and correctly proven, something is always "squeaky".
The main evidence for my feeling shows itself when my co-authors revise theorem I've written. Suddenly everything becomes compact, precise and clear. Properties that were used several times get a name; modular parts of the proof become lemmas; etc. The math remains the same, but the presentation is way more efficient and easy to follow.
How can I improve my technical writing skills?
Any tips and resources would be appreciated.
Comment: I'm not a native English speaker, which is an additional factor.

This classic article helped me a lot:
http://www.aapg.org/bulletin/abstract_scrutiny.pdf

@JoelReyesNoche The link doesn't work. I would be interested to see the article. Do you have it archived?

@pnp, How about: http://www.caam.rice.edu/~symes/CAAM600/abstract_scrutiny.pdf

The only way to improve writing (technical or non-technical) is by writing and submitting your work to the criticism of peers. Thankfully, in mathematics there is a culture of blogs. When you learn something new, write it up on your blog and share it with your friends. This will help you better understand what you wrote AND let you practice writing. At first, you won't get much feedback, but as your audience grows you will naturally learn from the feedback they provide.
Another great tool is math.SE and mathoverflow; on these sites you are guaranteed feedback. Ask and answer technical questions, this will let you practice your writing. As your writing and clarity improves you will also notice an average increase in number of up-votes, etc. This will give you useful positive reinforcement.

It also helps to look critically at other people's writing.  It's often easier to see ways to improve text that you didn't write, because you don't have a vested interest in the result.

I've started my own blog for exactly this reason. Granted, my blog isn't related to my research work, but the only way to get better at something is to do it, and writing is no exception.

@JeffE: That was going to be my other piece of advice: read papers by good and bad mathematicians, and learn from their examples what works—and what doesn't.

Thanks for the answer. I'm not sure writing a Blog suits many people, but I really like the idea of answering math.SE question as a way to practice writing skils.

Paul Halmos was a master expositor, and one of my favorite articles on writing is his: How to Write Mathematics

A more detailed collection of advice can be found in: Mathematical Writing, by Knuth, Larrabee, and Roberts

But as other answers have stated, the only way to improve your writing is to write (and to get feedback, and take that feedback to heart)


text:
Can teaching help one's studies?
Most of the questions about teaching assistantship portray TA'ing as a waste of time that only damages research. Although I am not TA'ing this year I consider applying for a TA position next year, because I feel I kind of missing it and it actually helps me to focus on my research.
Are there any clear benefits of TA'ing for one's studies and research?

I would definitely say that teaching helps you to understand better your teaching subject. Learning something is very different than learning something so that you are able to explain it to others.
As Einstein said it.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

When I teach, I see different viewpoints while I am explaining.
When you see, students do not understand your example, you are forced to think about it.
A question force you to see other parts of subject.
These things always help me to understand my subject better.
But you should be picky about your subjects. A subject which is completely different from your research topic is not suitable. But a subject which is helpful to your research subject will be better for you. For example I am studying Machine Learning, a lot of courses are offered which will be helpful in this topic.

Statistics
Optimization
Data Mining
....

But in the same token, web programming may not be helpful.

The idea that teaching is something that invariably and inexorably damages ones research and study prospects to be entirely opposed to my actual experience.
Some teaching experiences are nothing but time sinks that devour otherwise productive periods and leave you no closer to having finished, or produced interesting work. But the same can be said for some research experiences.
There are some definitive pros I found to teaching. First, it provided a second pass at material I thought I "knew", but now had to know inside and out. That was eye opening, to say the least. It afforded me more time to interact with the professor who was teaching the class, and gave me a framework where I was immersed in a topic - said immersion ended up in me adapting some things about my dissertation to a particular class topic I now knew really well.
It also teaches you to teach, and while generally an undervalued skill in academia compared to research, it's both something you should probably know, and does train you for some research oriented problems - how to give a new grad student in your lab a rundown of the topic, how to answer questions off the cuff during talks. How to give talks meant to convey information instead of a summary of results.


text:
Does anyone actually publish "structured proofs"?
In 1995, Leslie Lamport published an essay in the American Mathematical Monthly titled "How to write a proof".  In the essay, Lamport introduced the concept of a structured proof, in which the traditional high-level proof is augmented by a sequence of lower levels.  Each level of proof expands each step of the higher level into substeps.  The amount of detail at the lowest level is rather extreme -- Lamport's proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2 runs to 1.5 pages.
The essay has over 250 citations according to Google Scholar, but I have never seen a proof published in this format.  In a PDF or on paper, the extreme detail could be overwhelming; but I think modern web publishing platforms could accommodate it very well (with hierarchical collapsible subsections for each part of the proof).
In any case, are there examples of proofs published in the format suggested by Lamport?

I like the collapsible idea!  Have you asked about this over at http://matheducators.stackexchange.com?  It seems like this would be especially useful for students.

Not exactly the same format, but look at the work of Roland Backhouse or Richard Bird.

I know some textbooks, which work that way. Although, rather than inlining  subproofs, they were presented as separate theorems/lemmas.

A structured proof appears in Lamport's paper on Paxos http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (§2.1). That said, I am not sure whether this proof exhibits the advantages a structured proof is generally supposed to have, such as greater readability and lack of implicit logic... (I think his Step 4 in the Proof of Lemma needs more justification, and Step 5 says something different from what it wants to say.)

Somewhere on the internet is a whole book full of structured proofs (à la Lamport, and maybe even with his coauthorship). As far as I remember, its goal is to prove the correctness of some software, but a good part of it is basic mathematics; can anyone find it?

BTW: This should be a mathoverflow or math.stackexchange question.

Ah, found that book! Thomas L. Rodeheffer, The Naiad Clock Protocol: Specification, Model Checking, and Correctness Proof, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=183826 .

Apparently http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/hyperbook.html is a good introduction into structured proofs, with lots of examples.

Everything so far in the comments and the one current answer indicates that you can find plenty of structured proofs, and every last one of them has Lamport's hand in it.  So, apparently, nobody but Lamport  and his coworkers at MS use it.

There is also the proof for the Memoir system (390 pages).

pf2html is a latex2html style that implements collapsible hierarchical structured proofs for Lamport's pf.sty.

While most people use more traditional proof styles, the more exhaustive structured proof style that Lamport proposes seems to be adopted, at least in spirit, by machine-assisted proving systems like Coq and Lamport's own TLA+.  By bringing a very non-intuitive player into the loop (the machine), these systems force the mathematician to be much more explicit about every step and assumption, and encourage hierarchical structure by their use of programming-language style syntax.
These proving systems are typically quite expensive to use, and you generally wouldn't want to put their lengthy proofs into the middle of a paper---attaching as supplementary information is more the way to go.  They are, however, proving to be quite valuable in critical applications where dealing with every possible edge case is important, such as in the design of microprocessors or cryptographic protocols.

Modern Coq proofs written in ssreflect (e.g., https://github.com/hivert/Coq-Combi ) are actually not that long! The problems, as far as I can discern them from (unfortunately) somewhat afar are (1) that the Coq format does not easily support human readability (it is very hard to follow a Coq proof on pen and paper), (2) that lack of function extensionality and (lack of) good support for setoids make a lot of mathematical constructions forbiddingly hard to deal with (forget about encoding a tuple of elements of $A$ as a map $\left{1,2,\ldots,n\right} \to A$; the ...

... ssreflect people, conversely, seem to define maps between finite sets as tuples with certain properties, just because tuples know how to be equal!), and (3) that the infrastructure is still very much in flux and proofs might break with the next update of Coq or ssreflect. But this is absolutely a thing that will work one day.

And there I was like "why the hell doesn't my LaTeX work?". This question really should be on mathoverflow.

Thanks! This is interesting, though I don't believe these are examples of exactly what I asked for.