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How important is the keyword section in a paper
I am writing a computer science paper that has a keywords section that comes directly after the abstract. Currently I have just one keyword in there, how important is that section? Do I have to come up with as many related keywords as I think of, or nobody actually uses this section and I can ignore it?

Database searches often use the information in that section. Most papers, in journal or online, make the keywords explicit. Many journals/societies put effort into a useful keyword taxonomy for their readers/members to use. So, yes, you likely can ignore the section (although the editor may insist on a certain number of entries), but that will make others ignore your work since you haven't helped them find it.

A recent statistical analysis finds that the number of keywords has a small and significant effect on how often a paper is cited. This suggests that adding some keywords to your paper is good for you and for those would try to locate and cite relevant literature. Thus, you should not ignore the keywords but enter as many relevant keywords as the journal's house style allows.
Shahadat Uddin, Arif Khan, The impact of author-selected keywords on citation counts, in Journal of Informetrics, Volume 10, Issue 4, 2016, pp 1166-1177.

Please remove the dot at the end of the link, otherwise it ends up nowhere.

Note that the cited work does not describe a controlled experiment, so there is only a correlation between number of keywords and citation count. It might be possible that "better" papers just contain more keywords on average.

Yes, and I struggle to imagine an experimental design for this question. They control for journal reputation, however, which sounds like a reasonable proxy for "better papers".

The number of keywords you should use depends on the journal you will submit your paper to. They usually require 3 to 5 keywords so they can direct the paper to relevant reviewers and editor.
It also makes it easier to get recognition since search engines utilizes keywords instead of scanning whole papers.
In short: No, you definitely should not ignore it. You should write down related keywords but do not exceed the number of journal.
Additionally each journal has a "Author's Guideline" documentation. If a submission fails to meet these guidelines, your paper is most likely to be rejected even before evaluation.


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Is an instructor position a possibility to pursue research (semi-)seriously?
I have been offered two positions, in two different countries, and I am trying to determine which one is a better fit.
POSITION 1: The first position is as Instructor - a teaching only position - which is offered in one year contracts for the first three years, then in three year contracts, until certain conditions of excellence have been satisfied in which case I may qualify for the status of "senior instructor." This position comes with the summer's free to pursue research or any other opportunity.
POSITION 2: The second is an Assistant Professor (equivalent) position in my home country, where the pay is less than half, and this position comes with the same teaching load, but also the expectation of research. This type of position is known to be strenuous and I have rarely met individuals holding this position that seemed happy (it comes with the usual tiresome academic hassles). The only silver-lining - and at this point I am not sure I consider it a silver-lining - is that this position comes with lifelong job security.
Both positions are in top 10 universities in their respective countries.
I guess I have two questions.

First: I am being told by the recruiting committee of position 1, that people recruited in this position have found it easy to continue working on research part time. Yet this could be to convince me to take the job. And it could also be a case of the "Most say that they would do research, but instead discover that teaching fulfills all their needs" (which might be the case, or rather might be that most people are susceptible to inertia). I do not have the perspective to judge how likely this is.
Second: I cannot either determine if this type of position - by contract - is meant to be long term or not. Even though it is something favorable to me, I am intellectually opposed to tenure, even if I understand how it is important for research where month to month (or yearly) productivity is not guaranteed - but it seems less pertinent for a position evaluated on the basis of teaching alone.

Yet if this position is only going to last me a year or two, it seems suicidal to turn down another more permanent position - however weak it is.
Any opinion on this would be truly appreciated.
(Finally, for full disclosure, I should mention, to be fair, that position 2 is in a city that has a significant richer cultural life.)

I am being told by the recruiting committee of position 1, that people recruited in this position have found it easy to continue working on research part time. — And did the people previously  recruited into this position agree?  You did talk to a few of them, didn't you?

Without specific details (country, university, your preference for country, career goals..) it is hard to judge. It also seems you are biased against Position 2. Position 1 can be a potential career killer, if you want to continue research. People at interview can say whatever; I don't think you confirmed. Position 2 looks like most academic research jobs with tenure track or similar.

I will not be able to provide a full answer, but here are some assorted thoughts:

First: I am being told by the recruiting committee of position 1, that people recruited in this position have found it easy to continue working on research part time. Yet this could be to convince me to take the job.

I am sure this depends, but I would certainly not take the committee's word on that. Instead, I would talk to other instructors informally. To be honest, if the summer is the only time where you could do research (as in, during the term you have no time at all), I would assume that you will be out of the research game entirely before long. Further, if you are not evaluated by your research outcomes, it may be hard to keep up the motivation to do any research and not focus solely on teaching.

Second: I cannot either determine if this type of position - by contract - is meant to be long term or not.

It sounds like it's supposed to be long-term by default, but keeping the window open to get rid of you should you (a) underperform or (b) your expertise not be needed anymore short-term.

this position [the assistant professorship] comes with the same teaching load but also the expectation of research.

Something seems off here. If the first post allows for research only during the summer, and the second post requires research and teaching, with teaching load being as high as in the other post, when would you do the research?
My experience is that it is very hard to estimate in advance what teaching load one really will have at a new place. Number of courses, number of students, etc. are all relative coarse-grained instruments, as it is entirely unclear how much work teaching X courses per year will actually be. I tend to look at what the committee expects you to do in addition to teaching, as this will be based on what other people in your post manage to do. If they expect you to do teaching and research in the second post, I would assume that the actual teaching load will be measurably less than in the first post, where they seem to assume that you have time to research "during summer".

This type of position is known to be strenuous and I have rarely met individuals holding this position that seemed happy (it comes with the usual tiresome academic hassles).

Yes, assistant professorships tend to be hasslesome, because you have to juggle a lot of balls. However, if you plan to take the instructor position and do serious research on the side, you will have the same problem (maybe worse).

The only silver-lining - and at this point I am not sure I consider it a silver-lining - is that this position comes with lifelong job security.

It is a silver lining. Lifelong job security does not mean you are chained there and can never leave. Even if it is not your dream job (which it clearly isn't), you can stay there until you are able to secure a better position, and then move on. Having an unbounded contract can almost by definition not be a bad thing.

the pay is less than half

This is clearly an important argument, but do take costs of living into account. Typically, the places that pay very well are also very costly to live in (I work in Switzerland, I know what I am talking about here - I would not have deemed possible how much more expensive living here is than in my home country).

Both positions are in top 10 universities in their respective countries.

But how are they in relation? Being Top 10 in Austria says next to nothing (we have less than 10 actual research universities in total). Being Top 10 in the US is pretty cool...

Finally, for full disclosure, I should mention, to be fair, that position 2 is in a city that has a significant richer cultural life.

I consider this a very important factor, but judging whether the same is true for you is an entirely personal thing, which we cannot help you with.

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Writing an open-source software and publishing it, for the sake of getting cited
I have some specific knowledge in a software widely used in experimental condensed matter physics. Currently, different groups implement their different programs using this software. I plan to write a "universal" program that might be used with little to no modifications by researchers worldwide. I plan for it to be free and open source, but I would like to publish the work in a journal for the sake of getting citations.
Question: since writing such a program requires time and effort, I think it makes sense to request researchers who would use the program to cite my paper. Right?
Note: I know that many people do this, but I would like to hear different viewpoints.

Read some recent articles from PLoS Computational Biology, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002802. Good to know potential pitfalls before starting.

FieldTrip (citation)
MNE (citation)
Nutmeg (citation)
SPM, (citation)

The preceding software are all open-source research software, each referenced by dozens, sometimes hundreds of research papers. It is expected that an open-source package developed by a research team will have an accompanying paper or set of papers, and that the users will cite those papers when using the package. You should make this very clear on the package website. (You do have a website for the software, right?)

To expand on this a bit, it is assumed that any research-level software package will have at least one accompanying paper, typically more, describing both the software, the functionality, and the algorithms. If you don't have that, people simply won't trust it. From my experience, most packages come from researchers with a good deal of experience/publications under their belt, who have decided to make their own scripts and techniques available for the general community. Given that it is quite difficult to obtain funding for this sort of thing until the software—and, by extension, you—is already very popular, you're essentially going to do most of the development on your "free time", which makes this a highly thankless task.
That all said, if software is your thing, go for it! If your software makes analysis easier, you can have an outsized impact on your field.

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Literature Review Confusion
I'm very new to the research domain and I'm extremely confused, let me explain further. For the literature review I've done assume that I have 1 topic, that comprises of three research papers say A,B,C. Now I put these papers in chronological order, I then take paper A and summarize it. What I mean here is that I discuss what the papers purpose was, how the authors met the papers purpose and mention the results. After this I then explain what is learned from each paper and what I can take forward in the proposed research and Introduce the next paper, in this case paper B. I do the same process for paper B etc. My question is that I've been told that this approach is wrong and that a literature review is like "telling a story" but frankly I can't see where I'm going wrong?? Can someone please help explain where exactly I am going wrong?


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How does a global organization compare global degrees?
Being a US citizen and native, my view of degree progression is

Bachelors, 4 years of study
Masters, 1-2 years of study, thesis or portfolio required
Doctorate, 3-4 years of study, comprehensive exams and dissertation required

How does this compare globally? My current understanding is that European schools invert the Bachelors/Masters terms. How does a global organization's human resources department track this for comparison? How do you ensure you are comparing apples to oranges? What are the names of the systems (if they have them, possibly American, European, or another nomenclature)? I recall looking for a simple presentation of this information before, and not being able to find it, so I hope to solve this once and for all here.

There are no comprehensive exams in (most of?) Europe.

Even in standard US universities, many masters degrees do not require a thesis or portfolio at all - they are entirely class based. Additionally many US doctorate programs substantially longer than 3-4 years, with 7 being not uncommon.

Seems like this should be community wiki as there is not one right answer, but rather many answers each corresponding to some part of the world.

As @DavidKetcheson says, there is no entity representing "Global universities" so this can't have a right answer. I think that it makes even less sense to have a bounty.

I suggest a right answer would be of the form: "There are three main types of systems of higher education: the Frabjob system, in X, Y, and Z region Nations, The Jaberwock system, which covers Foo, and Bar areas, and the Frimfram system, which is inconsistently adopted in Narf, Poit, and iki iki iki PiTang. These systems break down as follows:..." or as close to a system of nomenclature as we can get. What I suspect (without evidence yet) is a smattering of European systems plus the American, which have been adopted in various nations globally, each one's likely concentrated in regions.

In Europe most countries use the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) as have been stated in the other answers.
By this system it should be easier to compare a Higher education award from one country to another as the number of ECTS need to gain the award are now comparable regardless of the name of the award.
According to the EU this is what ECTS achieve. Site link here (This page also has a pdf ECTS users guide.)

By making higher education comparable across Europe, ECTS makes teaching and learning in higher education more transparent and facilitates the recognition of all studies. It aids curriculum design and quality assurance and allows for the transfer of learning experiences between different institutions, greater student mobility and more flexible routes to gain degrees. ECTS is closely related to the modernisation of higher education in Europe. In particular, it is a central tool in the Bologna Process which aims to make national systems more compatible.

The EU also has this page where you can set it up to compare the frameworks within Europe.
In some of the other answers you will also have seen reference to 'Bologna Process' This is the process that is overseen by the European Higher Education Area to assist with the standardisation of Higher Education awards across Europe. Their website also contains National Reports from all countries in the process.
The UK Government have also released comparison Documents link here for degrees around the world as compared to UK degrees. This Document details the characteristics of Masters degrees as viewed by the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.
In Ireland (my home country) the National Qualification Authority have an Interactive Framework page that shows the breakdown of all levels within the education system. They also produce a document that compared the Irish framework with that of the countries of the UK.
In Ireland there is also a International Qualifications Database where you can search by country to compare them to the Irish framework. This also includes undergraduate and professional degrees.
The European system, while very integrated, still has some differences from Country to Country at the moment, such as how grades are awarded on a per country basis.
Wikipedia has a page that, although not exhaustive, describes the degree system by region.

In Finland (and other Nordic countries) the situation is almost the same as what you describe. Here, the degree progression is

Bachelor's degree, 3 years (180 ECTS credits), includes a thesis without original research, e.g. literature review (10 cr)
Master's degree, 2 years (120 cr), includes a thesis with research (30 cr)
Doctorate, 4 years, completed by either writing a monograph or a stapler thesis consisting of a preface and four or more publications, some universities also require 6-12 months of coursework (40-60 cr)

Prerequisite for a bachelor's degree is three years of upper secondary school.
I think this applies for most other European countries as well.

According to the Bologna system, it should.

Moreover, in Europe it's typical to bundle Bachelor's and Master's (but it is very rare (if possible at all) to bundle Master's and Doctorate).

This is the situation in the Netherlands as well, although whether a Bachelor thesis is required varies per institution.

Because the only fixed workload of a PhD degree is the coursework, I don't know what the legal status of "4 years" is currently in Finland. It's not uncommon to get a doctorate in 3 years if you get the publications quickly, and on the other hand, if you only can get funding, you won't get kicked out if you don't finish your PhD thesis in 4 years. Probably the universities are somehow (=financially) encouraged to adjust their requirements such that most grad students get their degree in 4 years?

The amount of research in master's thesis varies. There might be very little in pure mathematics, for instance. 2. The amount of publications in an artikkeliväitöskirja varies. I have seen one accepted with just two, at least one of which was a preprint.

Global organizations don't compare global degrees.
The specifics matter mostly to academic organizations - which tend to be not global, so they are out of scope.
For global multinational companies, the HR organizations tend to be mostly local due to differences in employment legislation, labor markets, etc. As far the information matters for hiring and comparing local candidates, this is done by local HR, who don't compare global degrees.
The central corporate HR of huge multinational companies simply doesn't care about details of your degree, just as for most other historical data of any specific local employee. They care about the internal job titles, expenses and performance metrics; possibly some business area specific certification; but your degree doesn't particularly matter, it's an "untyped line of text in a CV". If parts of the organization deal with, say, R&D and worry about the degrees - then they do that locally. If the corporate holding company needs some rough statistics from all their local subsidiaries, then local HR's report their people by mapping it somehow to the "mothership" country standards.
That being said, European area (including not-EU) has mostly standardized to the 'Bologna' process; there are local flavors but they're moving to be standardized. For the rest of the world, you'd have to consider each case (country pair) separately to say what is equal to what, all the simple rules-of-thumb are just rough approximations.

Here in Serbia, the situation is similar to other Bologna countries.
Prerequisite for university education is finished elementary school (9 years, recently extended from 8) and a four-year secondary school.
Next step is the choice between the "academic" and "vocational" studies.
In the academic progression "tree" steps are as following:

3-year (180 ECTS points) basic studies giving title of "something",
followed by 2-year (120 ECTS points) Master studies giving title of
"master of something"
4-year (240 ECTS points) basic studies giving title of "graduated    something" followed by 1-year (60 ECTS points) Master studies giving
title of "master of something".
5-year (300 ECTS points) integrated studies, mostly in medical    fields, giving titles of "Master of something" or "Doctor of
something" or "Magister of something", depending on field.
6-year (360 ECTS points) integrated studies, in medical field, giving    title "Doctor of medicine"

1-year (60 ECTS points) specialist studies, master studies as
prerequisite, not required for doctorate, giving title of "Specialist
of something"
3-year (180 ECTS points) doctorate studies, master studies as
prerequisite, giving title of "Doctor of some sciences"

In the vocational tree steps are as following:

3-year (180 ECTS points) basic studies giving title of "vocational
something"
1-year (60 ECTS points) specialist studies giving title of
"specialist vocational something"

There is no direct path for transfer between vocational and academic studies, however schools are allowed to accept equivalence and credit certain exams.
I don't have any hard data about the pre-Bologna system at the moment, but major differences were that there were no master studies. Studies in the technical fields were all 5-year, while most humanities were 4-year.
Doctorate studies were separated into two steps:
Magister studies which had course-work and a thesis starting with "technical qualification exam" and ending with a minor thesis and "research qualification exam".
Doctorate studies themselves which had no coursework and only required publishing an original thesis.
Currently, Bologna-style doctorate studies are combination of previous magister and doctorate studies and contain the technical qualification exam and the research qualification exam.
Furthermore, in technical fields, the thesis results had to be original to science in general, while in humanities, thesis results had to be original in Serbian science.

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What software license allows me to have GPL for academic use and paid use by industry for my open-source project?
I have spend many years during my PhD developing a code base and decided to open-source the code when I finished. It's currently under GPL. The code is used by many different research group around the world, and that was my goal; to provide a useful tool for the research community.
Recently I have been contacted by a company that wants to use the software. My intention was always to charge a fee for industrial use of the code. On the website, it says something to the effect of "GPL for academic use", "please contact me for industrial licensing".
Firstly, do you think this is reasonable approach? Personally, I don't think that industry should get a free ride from my publicly funded research code.
Secondly, what are reasonable terms, pricing and software license for an "industrial license"?

Well, you can dual license it but there is nothing preventing an industry concern from picking up a copy of the "academic" code from a professor they know. The GPL is like that.

Why not make it GPL for everyone? Most commercial parties will ask for another license anyway if they plan on using it in their own projects due to GPL's nature. Let them come to you for details, just make it clear that proprietary licensing is possible. Dual licensing is not in conflict with GPL. Dual licensing on-demand is easier than saying it's GPL for X, Y and Z but not A and B.

IANA lawyer, but I don't think "GPL" is compatible with "for academic use only". There are other open source licenses that would allow this, but if you have already released it to people under GPL then in practical terms you are stuck with this.

Is your "code" a standalone executable, or is it a library? According to gnu.org "using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs."

Why don't you think that industry should get a 'free ride' from your research?  What is the harm you are envisioning would ensue, if industry were to get a 'free ride'?  (Isn't the purpose of publicly funded research to benefit society?)  In practice, in selfish terms, your career benefits if industry adopts your idea, so it is probably in your interest to do whatever you can to support and facilitate technology transfer.  The details of how to do that will vary from field to field.

Your license is not the GPL if you add additional restrictions, and your restrictions may turn out to be incompatible with the GPL in subtle ways. Consult an IP attorney.
Fortunately for you, even if your code is GPL, many companies might not want to use it because they might worry about it infecting their product. So, you might be able to charge them for a proprietary licensed version. That being said, if your work came in under a US grant from the NSF or similar agency, its terms may require you to open source the work period. Additionally, your university is likely to have an Office of Technology Commercialization or similar body that is responsible for software licensing to industry. At mine, the Board of Regents retains the rights to all software and commercially licenses it with the "inventor" getting half and the university getting half, typically, unless it is open sourced.
You should check with your university and the grant terms that funded your work. Corporations are typically tax payers in their local jurisdictions, so it's not necessarily wrong for them to benefit much as another researcher would from your work (i.e., for free).

If you own the code, you can use dual licensing model, offering paid commercial version next to the GPL version. While not very respected by GPL enthusiasts, this dual licensing model is not uncommon.
Most of companies really do not like GPL, even if the license terms would permit them to use the software as they plan to use it no problem (GPL is mostly about sharing the modified source code). This can be used to persuade them to buy a commercial license.

The GPL does not restrict them to use your code in in their commercial product. What it means is that if they use it/modify it then when they distribute their software they must provide the source code of their application and yours.
Because many companies don't want to share their code, they can ask you for another licence. Since you are the Copyright owner, you can use as many licenceses as you want.
This dual licensing approach is the one that MySQL used and continues to use now that they were bought by Oracle.
More information about: http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/duallicence2
Now there loophole if a company uses your GPL code but they don't distribute your software, ie as a SaaS, they are not required to make that code public. In order to fix that the AGPL license was created.
Finally if you really want to avoid anyone but you from making money of your product, you could consider the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license as mentioned in this answer
My recommendation is use Dual Licensing, and stick with the GPL or AGPL

As @elviejo79 mentions, in my particular field also, SaaS is rapidly making GPL moot as a means of earning money from your software; let alone as a means of furthering the goals of the FSF.
AGPL seems to solve that, but it is a bit controversial; it is the most up to date and purist version of FSF's vision out there, but it is also very incompatible with a lot of licenses, including GPL. And that may discourage a lot of use cases you did not intend to discourage.
Personally, I am more a fan of a license that explicitly states its intent (free for academic, not for commercial) than roundabout haggling as to what constitutes 'distribution' or 'linking'.
This Academic Public License seem to capture that intent pretty well. Note that offering a license like this is likely to get you rants from zealots how its not Real Open Source. But you can solve that by offering a dual AGPL license option. Hardly anyone might want to use that license in practice, but it will shut up these types, since it doesn't get more FSF-approved than that.
And as a bonus, as mentioned by @Bill Barth above, it might also get your university IP Commissars off your back. Definitely try and stay under their radar if you can; in my experience the last thing you need in your life is a bunch of clueless lawyers taking a year or two blocking releases of your work while trying to figure out if they can make a buck off it.

In the I wish I just did MIT because I think the vast majority of people are use code, make changes and never return and commits

Not sure what you are saying; do you think MIT would have been more effective in making people contribute back? Did you stick with your GPL license in the first place? And did you work out a commercial dual license?

I guess what I’m saying is that I agree with you. Let the code be free, don’t tangle people up with the GPL, use a really permissive license like MIT, and put effort into make it more SaaS with a really low bar for people to use and get value out of the code. Like an open source mode with paid SaaS. Thinking out loud here.


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Counting the number of peer reviews in the CV
Sometimes I review papers that require more than one round of referee reports (e.g., first round was a "major revision", second round a "minor revision", and ultimately acceptance in third round). When listing the referee activity in my CV, I count these set of referee reports written for the same manuscript and the same journal as a single peer review. I believe that this was the common practice.
However, since the raise of services like Publons that allow to credit each individual referee report that is carried out by a reviewer, I wonder if researchers now tend to emphasize more the number of referee reports in the CV rather than the number of peer reviews (somehow giving an impression of a higher peer reviewing activity).
My question: is the common practice nowadays to list in the CV the number of peer reviews or the referee reports?

I might suggest that the number of people who really care about such details is pretty small. I can't speak for anyone else, but in my hiring decisions of PhDs, I don't care and likely would look a bit negatively at anyone touting their number of reviews. The number of, and quality of, papers is way more important. Refereeing is just an expected part of taking part in publishing.

I do not know whenever it's common practice or not, but I would certainly find it weird to count the number of reports instead of the number of reviews. Mentioning how many reviews were for journal (and which journals) and how many were for conferences (and which conferences) is, on the other side, common and, I believe, an important indication. But that's probably enough information.

Reviewing can be an important marker of esteem in the field, but I'd say the important thing us which journals are asking you to review, not how many reviews you are doing for each.

Like John Custer said. I would personally write Epsilone works as referee for several international journals and that is. I would only count referee activity in details if that would be part of an internal report and just if it counts for something, which is also unlike.

I have served on several search committees lately for faculty members, and, honestly, I haven't seen one CV structure the peer review section in this fashion.
In my personal opinion, doing so looks like CV padding. We all know that the reviewing process can have multiple read throughs and comments, so I do not think it is necessary to include the number of times you have done the process for each individual manuscript.
Just my two cents.

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Any chances for me in top 10 economics program?
I am bachelors of commerce from a not known university. I am going to take economics masters from India's top institute. I will take higher math courses as well. What else should I do to get in top 10 economics program ? (Are there any chances for me?)
Also can you please suggest some masters economics program which enrolls commerce undergrad?

If whoever downvoted this answer thinks it is a joke, it is not. You definitely need to pump up your math, and if the OP can get a Master's in math instead of an econ, that would definitely help more than an econ MA. The third part is the most problematic -- you only get a QJE if you are a Ph.D. student in Cambridge, MA, and it is unheard of a grad student from any other location to publish there... let alone an undergrad.

Top 10 according to what ranking? New Economic School (Moscow, Russia) regularly places their MA graduates into top 10 US programs. In fact, few of their graduates applying to Ph.D.s end up below top 20. In India, Master's from ISI would be very well recognized.

(If I had more rep then this probably would have been a comment not an answer, sorry).  That is a very hard question to answer without you providing much information.
Generally getting into a top 10 economics program is already a semi random process because so many applicants are so well qualified.  It requires a high GPA in hard courses, good recommendation letters, etc...  That being said, there are a lot of students from India who end up placing very well.
A website where you might get more opinions is http://www.urch.com/forums/phd-economics/ .  They have a general format for how to submit your profile, look at a few and check it out.  Might help you know where you stand (They also have old archives of student profiles with results).

I will say the highest probability course of action, but nobody has a guaranteed entrance into a top 10 program.
1. Practice the GRE extensively. If you score 800 in math that will help. Verbal score is not a hindrance if everything else is right, but if you score above 95% in verbal that will show.
2. Get in touch with professors in the top 10 programs, especially some that might have connections to you either through your schools, country, or area of interest. Start an intelligent conversation with them. Show them how interested you are in working with them. For this you will have to do thorough research on their work, but it is the best way of showing how badly you want to work with them.
3. Get excellent grades and develop relationships with your current professors to obtain the best letters of reference possible.
In summary, people tend to focus on the quantitative and the impartial, a typical economist bias, but develop personal relationships can pay off in putting you ahead of the curve.

I agree with everything here except the advice to contact professors before applying. This is common in many other fields, but in economics it is actively discouraged. See here for some really good advice from Susan Athey who has been involved in PhD admissions at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford GSB (arguably the top 3 programs) http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/athey/gradadvising.html

As an international applicant, I would recommend against getting a masters from anywhere except one of the top (1-3) schools in your country. A master's from university in the top 30 in the US or one of the top schools in UK/Canada are also options.
If you are not yet competitive for a top master's program, I would suggest trying to get a job as an economics research assistant, ideally with a well known professor. This has the advantage also of giving you a better look at what economics research looks like first hand, which is closer to what you'd be doing as a PhD student and professor than your classes in a masters program.
Ultimately to be competitive for a top 10 school, you absolutely need a high GPA and GRE, and then on top of that you need letters of recommendation from at least 1 or 2 professors that are respected in the field, ideally who have a track record of placing students at top PhD programs. Even then there seems to be a lot of noise in the system about who gets accepted where.
I posted it in a comment above, but to reiterate, I think this is very good advice. http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/athey/gradadvising.html


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What is equivalent degree of Masters by research degree in the USA?
There is a degree called “Masters by research” in Australia, in which a researcher basically researches for two years(full time) on the topic or research problem(differs from Phd on many aspects especially minimum requirements).
What is its equivalent degree in USA?
Is it MPhil? Are they both same or are they different? (may be based on entry requirements, task done and degree completion requirements).
As far as I know, both require dissertation but there are not many taught courses in Masters by research and you are expected to make some unique contribution to knowledge body.
Is MPhil restricted to certain faculty such as arts or it can be in any fields (For e.g., computer science)?
I am bit confused as some Australian universities also offer MPhil in addition to master by research degree and I could not find degree called "Masters by research" in US universities.
Can anyone please clarify?

In my experience, there isn't a separate degree in the US for achieving your Masters degree through research. In fact, in many places, that's the only way to do so. At the university where I received my Masters degree, you had three options, all of which granted the same degree:

Coursework - Take something like 30 course hours.
Coursework + Project - Take fewer hours (around 20 - 24) and do a larger project than a normal project course.
Coursework + Thesis - Take fewer hours (around 20 - 24) and do a smaller thesis than a PhD.

Many universities don't have of the options and just have #3.

Thank you very much. I think you are talking in context of US but in Australia there is masters by research degree which comprises of research only if we have some research experience or some prior degree. For e.g. this one from link below----Master's degrees by research (thesis) – a thesis represents 100 per cent of the course requirements in this supervised research degree. Administered by the Graduate Research and Scholarships Office.
source:http://www.studyat.uwa.edu.au/courses-and-careers/postgraduate-research/research#masters

Sorry, I should have clarified that I meant in the US. Isn't that what you were looking for?

Ya,but I am sorry. May be i misunderstood this line "In my experience, there isn't a separate degree for achieving your Masters degree through research." as there are no such degrees anywhere.
So,I have to enroll in normal masters and look for research you mean in US?
How is it different than Mphil? Just a query.

Gotcha. I've edited my answer to be more clear.

I am not familiar with the Australian higher education model, but there are no standardized degree requirements across the United States. Most program requirements are similar, but specific program requirements vary both within and among universities (e.g., most PhD programs require coursework in the US, but not all).
To answer your question What is its equivalent degree in USA?, I'll build upon Wesley Bland's answer. I've personally observed that some programs in the US give Masters of Science (MS) degrees for thesis based graduates (Wesley's option 2) and Masters of Arts (MA) for non-thesis based graduates (Wesley's option 1). Wesley's option 3 could be either an MS or MA degree. But, this trend is not consistent across school or even programs. Additionally, I've seen some programs give MAs to MS students who fail their thesis defense (rather than an MS degree if they re-defend their work or no degree at all).
Last, there is a current trend for schools to offer "professional" Masters level degrees in the US because these programs generate income for the university (see this article for a discussion on the topic. Some of these are MS degrees, some are MA degrees. Others are program specific degrees (e.g., Masters of International Affairs).


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How to copyright unpublished work during Phd
How do I protect my unpublished phd work (which i am planning on publishing soon)?
I am conducting expert interviews and I will have to send parts of my work to them for validation. But, how to ensure that they don't copy it or use it in their work before I publish it?

In many countries, creative work is protected by copyright by default, so there is nothing you need to do. But, copyright doesn't prevent others from copying/using it.

It is possible that work done during your PhD studies belongs to the University. Check your school's policies on copyright.

What kind of work it is?It is related to programming, data analysis, or mathematical?

@BenCrowell: But in many cases, even if the work is a "work for hire", the university's policy states that the faculty/student author gets to retain the copyright anyway.  Essentially, the law gives the copyright to the university, but the university's policy gives it right back to the author. So the policy is relevant.

Well, @BenCrowell , if the PhD student was hired to work in a research group or was funded with a certain grant, than the research output could be the property of the research group or granting body. Such PhD students sign IP agreements after they a hired.

In most countries your work is copyrighted when you create it. That is simple. The other question you need to address yourself is, why would folks you have contacted steal your work? This is a fear many people have, but almost never actually happens. Get over that fear.


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Is there a way to generate a report on where my paper was cited within another paper?
I do not mean the citations as they come up in Google Scholar, but given a paper that has cited my paper, is there a way to figure out where in their paper they have cited my paper?
The way I do it now is I try to find the reference number to my paper, and then do Ctrl+F to find where it appears in the papers. It could be also something similar to what is being asked here which helps in finding the impact of a paper within another paper.

What are you hoping for that is better than that? Are you talking about in PDFs, HTML?

Your university librarian will be able to tell you what citation list journals exist in your discipline.

this is too vague. You want to know context around the citation (5 sentences)? You want to know name of the subsection (Intro/Results/Discussion)? You want to know how many references are nearby, i.e. is your citation 1 out of 25 a row?

What is wrong with the current method?

Why do you need this info?  Probably it would be more useful to find out how people have used your work, or what they said about your work.  E.g., say a paper with a famous name cited your work, and you want to know whether the famous person said anything good about your work, or rubbishes your work.

I totally get the purpose of the question. When we update https://dealii.org/publications.html, we want to know which papers that cite ours cite us as "related art" and which actually use the software described in our papers. We only care about the latter category. So I understand why you would want to find the exact context of a citation. But we only do as the OP suggests: Find which reference is ours, then Ctrl-F to that number, and read the context. Having a tool do that for us would be fabulous.

In my field, it could happen that your citation gets buried in an aggregate citation, for example "A number of previous papers [1-8] deal with X". In that case, CTRL-F would not do the trick - you would need to visually scan the article.

I think scite does something very similar to what you're asking for. Note that they have different tiers, and the free tier is fairly limited.

ResearchGate does this as well (generally for free, although there are some concerns about it).

@lighthousekeeper Is there a way to see the context of all citations to a paper with RG? I've only seen it show context for the first recognized citation.


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Online Slot Management and recruitement tool for lab studies
In Human-Computer Interaction and Psychology (and others) lab studies are performed quite often. Although searching quite a bit, I did not find a tool/piece of software or application to provide a link for students to sign up for the study on a specific date and manage time slots. Besides our homebrewn approach I could not find anything on the net. Is there anybody out there with a better service than google calendar ?

The one time I had to do this, we coded one (this was before Google was even close to being a household name). There seem to be several free iPhone apps handling your needs (key word: appointment scheduler); maybe have a look if one does what you want well.


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Is a PhD right for you if you hate doing research in your free time but love doing it as a job?
Say for example you are a new PhD student and realize that you hate doing research in your free time but you are more than willing to spend several hours in the morning to do research. Was your decision to become a PhD student right for you or not?
I'm asking because people are suggesting that "you have to be really passionate and curious about everything all the time"
what if you want to be curious during your work and just relax and have fun doing unrelated things when you have some free time in your hands?
I guess this indicates that you aren't really passionate, but what's the threshold for "being passionate enough for a PhD"?
These thoughts have really made me somewhat confused over my decision of going for a PhD. It's been a few weeks that I'm into this program and after reading a lot of stuff online addressing the question whether the PhD is right for you or not, I'm already starting to question my decision.

There's a large area between "I want to do research all the time" and "I can do research a couple of hours in the morning". The former will burn you out, the latter will likely not allow you to keep up in the competitive academic job market.

The answer may depend on your field, e.g., you may have to spend long hours in a lab or collecting/analyzing data, whereas in math one can be quite productive with 4-6 hours/day of solid (active) research.  I would suggest talking to some older students in your program to see how much free time they have (bear in mind, this may depend a lot on their personality and advisor/project).

by morning I implicitly meant the 8-10 hours that you spend on average at your office or lab. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Of course if there's some urgent deadline, the 8-10 hours could become 15 and 20.

Free time? What free time?

@ksm001 "by morning I implicitly meant the 8-10 hours that you spend on average at your office or lab." That's an unusual definition of "several hours in the morning". You must get a really early start. :-)

I think that the question can be interpreted in many ways: (1) I hate doing research but it's an ok job (2) I like research but I'd hate to have to do it all day ( = work hours + free time) (3) I hate research but I like the benefits so I love the job.

There was no distinction between "work time" and "free time" when I was a Ph.D. student. My "free time" was simply that time I did other things than research. It was not tied to the hours of the day or the days of the week. And that "free time" was typically spent with guilt for not doing research.

@Sverre - I sympathize with you, but won't this information scare off an already worried beginner?

@New_new_newbie I don't think the OP's goal was for us to lure him into grad school.

such great answers that I have difficulty to accept just one. I'll listen to the community and go for the one with the most votes.

@Sverre - maybe you are right, but I think OP's question is a kind of rant-post. Somebody tried to scare/fend him off, and it appears that he has taken it the way he should have - with a pinch of salt.

Related: Do you not belong in a PhD program if you don't live and breathe your field of study?

The other answers already explain that no, you shouldn't be doing research all the time, with no time for breaks, relaxation and other interests. All this is quite correct.
However, I am a bit unsure whether the stark dichotomy "all research all the time" versus "a few hours in the morning" is really helpful here. Maybe an answer to the following question is more helpful:
Is doing a Ph.D. right for you if you plan on doing it as a 9-5 job, 40 hours per week?
And there, I would be a bit more careful. Yes, there are people who can do a Ph.D. like a "normal job", at their desk at 9am sharp and dropping their pencils at 5pm. It is possible. However, my personal impression is that these people will avoid the typical Ph.D. burnout, but they will likely not be top performers. So my answer to the modified question above is:
You will probably do fine with a 40 hour workweek, if you make sure to stay self-motivated. However, you should think deeply about just why you want to do a Ph.D... because unless you are uncommonly brilliant, you will likely not be productive enough to stay in academia and compete with people who routinely put in 50-60 hours per week. You may want to think about leaving academe with the Ph.D. and going into industry.
Note that I am not saying "40 hour Ph.D. students" are lazy. However, if you can't work up the level of passion and commitment to your topic that makes you want to put in 50-60 hours per week often, then there will likely be someone else, and that someone else will have more publications five or ten years down the road.

Note many careers expect more than 40 hours a week of work. In some cases substantially more.

On the other hand, working much more than 40 h will decrease your performance. Big tech companies, that are probably the closest environment to academia, tend to limit the time their employees work.

This answers seems very strictly related to the US, and perhaps a few other countries. It is quite possible to do research 9-5, I am thinking a public job for example.

Research is so multifaceted. When I entered our program, I was reading textbooks constantly. Then I was learning how others did things in their labs. Then I was neck deep in my own projects generating data for a year. Then I was analyzing those data for months. Now I spend most time writing combined with reading for appropriate citations. I haven't generated data in over a year. The program and field of study will dictate much of this schedule, but where that time goes could change dramatically and repeatedly as(if) you move from junior graduate student to faculty.

The vast majority of people are "not top performers".

@Daron: that is absolutely true. But in many (perhaps not all) academic fields, there is a cutthroat competition, because there are far more people that would like to continue with an academic career than there are positions, so if you want to get one of those scarce positions, you do have to compete with those top performers.

@StephanKolassa Do you really think you can have a successful career in industry working 40 hours a week?

@Oбжорoв: actually, yes, I do. I am doing so. The difference is that industry offers more career options for run-of-the-mill performers, whereas academia is much more up-or-out. You either make tenure or end up either leaving academia, or living more or less on the fringes. Compare the German limits on getting time-limited academic positions. I would say the better comparison to academia would be classical consultancies, with an absolute and explicit up-or-out philosophy.

@StephanKolassa You can just as well have have career options for run of the mill academics if you are willing to work at lower tier institutions. Obviously getting tenure at IAS is not for everyone, but neither is becoming a member of of the expo of Google.

Having to be passionate and curious about everything all the time is a great recipe—for exhaustion.
You should be curious and interested in the research that you want to do, and be motivated enough to keep going even (or perhaps especially) on days when things just don't work the way you want to. More importantly, it should be interesting enough to you that you're willing to put up with the failure that is a necessary component of successful research. But it's not necessary, or even practical or desirable, to spend every waking hour thinking about or doing research.

This, is a very simple yet highly explanatory of the situation. Too few students actually think about it

My experience is that I was so exhausted from learning new things at the beginning of my PhD, that I couldn't take more in at some point in the day. I would read light literature, watch silly sitcoms, go out, do things completely unrelated to work. And I also worried because I saw that my supervisor and other 'real' scientists seem immersed in their topic more of the time.
By the end of my PhD my fingers keep itching to write down ideas or look at data when I'm doing other stuff. It simply gets easier because there is less novelty to the work you're up against, and because you become more competent within your field. Once you feel that the knowledge you have can contribute to the field, it's a whole other ballgame. But that takes time, and it's really nothing to worry about when you're just beginning. Taking time off to do other things is still incredibly important of course - not only psychologically but also for work productivity - but the spontaneous, out of the blue research-related insights tend to increase in frequency over time. I don't think the number of hours you like to spend doing research right now can tell you all that much about what's to come.

I will also give my perspective as someone who is almost 3 years into a PhD in the UK.
I am one of the unusual students in my department who treats my PhD time like a full time job. I come in at the same time every day (9:30 approx.) and leave between 5pm and 6pm every day. I very rarely do any work at home, because I need the time to spend doing other things. My partner works full time, so we have a routine during the week and like to spend time together in the evenings and on weekends. The only times I actively work at home are when I have deadlines coming up (i.e. progress report due, presentation to finish). That said, I quite often discuss my work with my partner, which can help me think. My supervisor is very strict, so I certainly wouldn't get away with being away from my office without permission from him.
The first few months of a PhD isn't really indicative of what the rest of the time will be like. You will likely spend most of your time initially reading up on your research topic, which can be incredibly dull! Annoyingly, much of the scientific literature is written in a way that makes it hard to read, so when you are spending most of your day reading, you will find it difficult.
Once you have settled into your PhD, you will spend most of your time doing other things. It does depend on your research area. I am in the climate field, so much of my time is spent doing data manipulation and analysis on large datasets. During my first 6 months, I was doing a lot of data collection and quality control. I was also learning a lot of programming skills that I required to be able to work with these datasets. I also took some time to go to skills courses offered to PhD students at my university. One course that was very useful in my first year was about literature searches - how to do effective searches and also how to record the information learnt while reading. I can go back to a paper I read 2 years ago, and not have to re-read it because of the notes I made every time I read a paper.
Different universities provide different experiences, so you may get the opportunity to do some teaching (unfortunately I don't have that option). Attending a conference in your first year is a great experience, and something to work towards. I presented a poster of my research at my first conference, which was also a new skill learnt.
I guess what I am trying to say is that you don't have to spend hundreds of hours per week working on your research to be a successful PhD researcher. On the other hand, you will need to do more than a couple of hours per day to be able to get your PhD in a reasonable amount of time. I am on course to finish mine in 3.5 years.
Don't let your experience in the first few months put you off, as it will get better. If you still aren't enjoying it after 6 months to a year, then maybe reassess your decision.

total off-topic, but I am extremely interested to hear about: I can go back to a paper I read 2 years ago, and not have to re-read it because of the notes I made every time I read a paper. how do you do that?

@WolfgangKuehne I read through a paper highlighting important parts (i.e. data used, period studied, useful methods, important results). I then write a cover sheet with the name of the article, the authors, the date I read the paper, and then add notes based on what I highlighted. I then write a summary of the paper in my own words.

great, you should consider writing this in a on-topic question, so it can be Favorited and others can benefit.

@ksm001 I'm in a very similar situation as emmalgale: PhD in engineering (paid well enough through industry) in Austria/father of 3 small kids/not overachieving, but solid contributor/no academic ambitions/35h per week. My professor would like to squeeze more out of me, which quite often makes me feel bad, but I consider family more important. They suffer enough when there are conferences/paper deadlines when I do not keep the 35h/week self imposed limit.

Full disclosure social science Ph.D. program.
First weeks in a Ph.D. program... here's what's going on.
You're in the hazing period of grad school. People are over-exagerating.

Your peers (cohort) are all hyper competitive with each other right now. There's still very much that need of many to show that they are the smartest person in the room. This usually comes from a place of insecurity (i.e., needing praise, not wanting to feel the impostor syndrome, etc.). Overtime, this will fade. Then it will become like most other working environments... there will be lots of honest water cooler talk, less competitiveness, etc. However, within your lab it will also mirror the corporate world, where your peers will agree with everything your boss says, fake knowing things they really don't know, and generally try and win favorability.
Everyone needs to say how hard graduate school is and how much work it is in the beginning. It's a mantra that no one ever questions. You get the same kind of thing in corporate jobs. The truth is, I haven't found the work of it to be that hard at all! Sure, I've experienced lots of frustration in feeling held-up due to delays in feedback, new directions in the lab and a lack of face to face time with my advisor, but the work is quite easy. The people who do spend way too many hours of their life doing work I have found to be one of four types:
1) Obsessed with perfection as a means for impressing. This is the typical OC type you surely have encountered through your entire life.
2) Has no defining personal life that gives them sustenance outside of grad school. This is the student who will answer his/her's advisor's email 5 minutes after it arrives in his/her mailbox, as such sets the expectation that this is acceptable. Most students are like this their first year, but there will definitely be people around you that stay this way.
3) Not very competent. When I arrived in graduate school I was really surprised at the amount of incompetence I saw in my peers. I'm certainly of average intelligence, but have always been a self-doer, so I wasn't expecting everyone be a genius. However, there's just a lot of incompetent people in the programs. Ironically, these are the ones that seem to fare the best in terms of getting through the program. I still scratch my head with this one.
4) Inefficient. This can involve having poor time-management skills, but I find it's more about workflows. My peers spend a lot of time every week doing repetitive tasks that they could streamline and automate in so many different ways. My favorite was a student who needed to run a series of descriptive and regression analysis on newly available data every a week. The task literally took this person over 10 hours every week because this person manually entered everything into SPSS (a point and click statistical software). In 2 hours of research on simple coding skills this student could have learned how to automate nearly the entire process, and had the task finished in seconds. The fact that the advisor thought this was a good use of time is a whole other issue! The point is, I find that what my lab mates finish in 20 hours a week literally takes me under 5 hours to finish. Just work smart!

Your question seems more about work-life balance. This applies in graduate school too. Let the program run your life, give up all the small things you do outside of school, and you'll be saying hello to depression in no time.
Yes, you can have a life while being a Ph.D. student. In fact, I'd say as soon as the Graduate Program becomes how you describe yourself to others it's time to reevaluate your life.

I have found that for some reason people really dislike it when other people do things for reasons that aren't "noble".
I posted a question on here a while ago asking about doing a post-doc, and I said that the main reason I would want to do one is because it seems like it would be a fun way to spend my time for a few years.  I got a lot of negative replies along the lines of "If that's the reason you want to do a post-doc, you clearly aren't the type of person who should be doing one" or "I hope no one wastes research dollars on you".
Similarly, anyone who creates a start-up with the goal of "getting rich" is harassed.  If they had pretended their real goal is to solve some great problem in the world in order to make it a better place, they would have gotten a lot of positive feedback instead.
In the programming community, a lot of people say "you're not a real programmer" if you don't have side projects that you work on in your free time.  How can you possibly be passionate about your work if you don't do it in your free time as well?
In my opinion, all of the above is a lot of baloney.  Who cares what your motivation is.  We're all going to be dead in the next hundred years, and the only thing that matters now is the tangible results you can provide to your employing agency.  If I can produce high quality research publications in a post-doc that I'm doing for "all the wrong reasons", who cares?  Life isn't fair; there are people who slave away and have little to show for their work, while others hit upon a lucky discovery with little effort and are set for life.  If you would rather spend your free time drinking beer and socializing with friends instead of reading articles, but you're still able to make good progress on your PhD, who cares?
I've found that most people who brag about working hard and being at the office all the time are normally wasting their time in other ways anyhow.  Sure, they may be "working" 10 hours a day, but they're not actually accomplishing all that much.
So I wouldn't let other students' opinions on whether you're "passionate enough" have any bearing on what you do with your life.
EDIT: Having said that, I will point out that probabilistically, those who are more curious and interested in their work will tend to do better than those who aren't.  If you're forcing yourself to work 60 hours a week, you will probably not do as well as someone who has to stop themselves from working that many hours because they're having so much fun.  For instance, I spend my research time performing molecular dynamics simulations, writing programs to analyze the data, and writing papers on the results.  But then I spend my free time learning about quantum mechanics.  Maybe what I do in my free time could somehow help my research; then again, maybe it won't.  But I don't get burnt out, because I'm splitting my time up into divisions of what I can handle without anxiety.

If you are limited to "several hours of research in the morning" this is going to make completing a PhD in a reasonable amount of time difficult. While part time students can and do finish PhDs, it is a long and difficult road. If your interest in the research wanes over time such that several hours becomes a few hours, it is going to become an even longer and more difficult road which may cause a downwards spiral. While many students fail to carve out personal time, completing a PhD does not require you to not relax and have fun. One can be passionate about research and still take a break and relax.

Since you're only a few weeks into your PhD programme I suspect you have a somewhat limited understanding of what research is and how varied it can be. I'll give you my perspective, as a PhD student.
I think a lot depends on how excited you are about your topic. When I did my MSc, I was fortunate in being able to propose any topic I liked within a broad range of areas. So I ended up doing research developing some of my own ideas, with a lot of freedom to follow my own path. I got good results, and now I'm working on my PhD. I love it. I'm not sure how passionate I'd be about doing research based on or forking off of someone else's idea. But since it's my own "baby", I'm very passionate about it, and would do it for fun even if there wasn't a PhD at the end.
But let me put this into perspective by pointing out that I'm not equally passionate about all parts of research. I actually enjoy writing, so I don't mind writing papers, but I wouldn't say I'm passionate about it. Sometimes I find paper writing tedious. I love thinking about my research, doing it, and talking about it. I do not love writing proposals; it gets easier over time, but it's not something I would do for fun. As for reading the literature, it depends on how well-written it is and how relevant it is to me. I don't mind it, and I recognise the value of it, but I'm not passionate about it. When I get home at the end of the day, I'm not tempted to read papers or write proposals.
I found the first six months of my MSc to be a struggle, and I suspect most people do. I read papers, but found it very difficult to concentrate on what I was reading because the language was so stiff and formal. I spent too much time reading things that weren't that useful. I made false starts. Research is a skill that takes time to develop, and although others can help you, ultimately it's something you have to teach yourself.
You're in the PhD programme now, so unless you're truly miserable, I suggest not to worry if it's right for you until you're further along, and have a broader picture of what research really is.

This is a difficult one, but my impression of having spoken to people who write a lot of papers (some of them very good math papers) is that it's necessary to take breaks and not think about research all the time. This is to prevent mental (and even physical) exhaustion.
I want to comment though that you should not necessarily judge what the correct ''work schedule'' is from professors and other people with permanent positions, these people have much more experience in the game and probably work more efficiently.
I also knew someone who published two articles in good journals and then went to work in finance after the PhD as they didn't want to carry on in academia.  I guess if you work 24/7 you are increasing the chance of burn-out early on and not wanting to continue in academia.


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Automatically download Zotero group library
Zotero group libraries provide a way to share and collaboratively manage bibliographies. I would like to use an existing group library as BibTeX references file (or any other format supported by pandoc) without having to install and configure Zotero and manually export BibTeX. How can I download all references from a Zotero group library via command line?

I haven't tried what you want to accomplish, but there's zotero-cli for the command line: https://github.com/jbaiter/zotero-cli and various python packages.

Just FWIW, there's a new Zotero automation software library: https://github.com/hack-r/pyserpZotero

If the machine you are working on does not have Zotero installed, the easiest way to export a group library is through the Zotero web interface - when logged in just choose the group library, select all items and use the Export button with the format of your choice.

If by "automatically" and "command line" you mean that you want to be able to non-interactively run a script that exports a Zotero library to BibTeX using a computer that doesn't have Zotero on it, I'm not aware of a tool that does that for you, but the Zotero Web API is published and documented. Exporting items is just a command line call such as
curl "https://api.zotero.org/groups/$ID/items?format=bibtex&limit=100" > references.bib

where $ID must be replaced by your Zotero group id.

Thanks, that's enough to start with! I keep the question unanswered until there is a more detailed description of how to use the Web API.


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Ideal contents of a reference letter for PhDs seeking industry jobs
The majority of PhD holders do not stay on in academia, but rather move on to jobs in industry far away from the area of their PhDs. Given that the content of the PhD is not directly relevant (the common wisdom is that a PhD holder has "learned how to learn"), what should one include in reference letters for an academic applying for industry jobs? What qualities are those in industry looking for? Does the answer vary for newly minted PhDs vs more experienced researchers?

Are you asking from the perspective of a letter writer? Note that there are very different kinds of "industry" jobs. Some are a lot like academia, others not at all. There are probably distinctions by field, as well.

@Buffy the question came up in a discussion and I realised I didn’t have a good answer. Answers addressing any fields of academia/industry would be welcome!

"Industry" is a big place, but in my experience, industry employers do not ask for letters of recommendation at all. Instead, they will ask for "references," which they will contact by phone or e-mail. If you are in a field or part of the world where industry employers really do want written letters of recommendation, it might be worth specifying.

There are a lot of examples of recomendation letters in Internet for both, industry and academia. So, you can take any of them and present your skills and experience in the corresponding way.


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How should LinkedIn summary look like for a person seeking PhD positions?
There are many intros, how-to's and guides about writing professional summaries for LinkedIn accounts over the net; however I can not find a good guide to write a summary for academics.
I also tried to write one for myself but I think that this is so vague. Because in the profile we list most of our previous activities such information about our education, career experience, skills, voluntary activities, etc.
If we have detailed information and our CV listed in the profile, what information should explicitly be written in the summary part? Should we summarize the profile in a format like "I have a huge number of publications and thousands of years work experience!"? How brief this part should be? Or is it a bad idea to leave it blank?
What's the purpose of a summary part in a LinkedIn profile for an academic person?
Also, should we mention that we are looking for a PhD position or not? Something like the objectives part in the normal CVs?

I use linkedin to spy on my previous (mostly non-academic) colleagues. Always nice to know what other people are doing for a living.

Look up some of the professors you are applying to. Unless they work in fields that have strong connections with industry, they will probably not have a profile at all; and if they don't have a profile, they won't even think of looking you up on it.
Even if they do, your application has a lot more information about you, and structured in a way that is more familiar to them (since everybody that applies has an application, but mostly do not have a linkedin account), so it is quicker to look up the information they may interested in.

Although useful I can find any answer to the multiple questions asked. I say so because I am looking for a Ph. D.in the industry (in a program from my country) and I am also unsure what to write there.


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Updating my resume for industry. I switched labs in grad school - what to put on my resume for this time period?
I went to graduate school in the United States for biological sciences. The first year was coursework + graduate rotations. I then spent 2.5 years in a lab and left (on good terms) but did not complete any research requirements with this adviser. I started over completely in a new lab and new field (neuroscience and bioinformatics) in the same school/program and finished with a PhD. Up to this point, I have always been in the biological sciences so I would simply list the biology-related work I performed prior to the lab switch on my resume.
However, I am now leaving my postdoc in computational neuroscience to pursue a career in industry as a data scientist. I am restructuring my resume to include relevant information. Everything I did prior to my lab switch is irrelevant to this industry and takes up a lot of space. I'd like to remove it but I am not sure what to put here so it doesn't look like I have a gap in my work experience.
One option is to have separate sections for "Relevant Work Experience" and "Work History" but this is redundant and takes up too much space.
What is the best option in this situation?
(The tag says C.V. but I am aiming for something more like a 1-2 page resume rather than the typical, much longer academic C.V.)

Perhaps this question is better suited to Workplace than Academia SE?

Just list it in brief. A single sentence will do it. You say 1-2 pages, so unless you’ve filled 2 pages, you should have room for one sentence (one line) to account for that time period.
What you see as irrelevant might give interviewers some insight and a good opening for questions. It might also give you a competitive advantage over other candidates and is unlikely to put you at a disadvantage.
This kind of C.V. doesn’t have to be rigorous and exhaustive. Responsibilities/work experience is sometimes (usually) listed chronologically from most recent to oldest. The most recent is often the most relevant but it all paints a picture. As an interviewer, I would definitely ask for clarification on any gaps. Gaps can be seen as deceptive and might cause a C.V. rejection.

(I used to work in academia and work in data science in industry.)
No one is (or no one should) care about the details of where you studied or worked. They care what you know, and what you can do. You didn't even change universities. Just put something like: 2011-2016: PhD studies in Subject X at School Y.

Certainly, you want to include the time, the position title, and any skills that were picked up.
Most employers want to see a complete time-line, as an empty time-line is a 'red-flag' for them.
If you have a colleague there that you feel comfortable asking for a reference, do so.  This will help you formulate what exactly you should put for this time in your life.


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Do I need to explain or justify sources that I use to build an argument? (Academic Philosophy)
I am writing an essay to outline one of my philosophical theories. My current argument builds upon the work of others that are in the fields of neuroscience, statistics, epistemology, and ethics. If I want to explain my argument am I expected to provide a summary of the two works I am building off of? They are by no means popular so I intend to provide a basic summary but how long would one typically make it? Does this differ in the case of a book v. an essay?
Additionally, am I expected in any way to justify my belief in these works as a basis for my theories? My argument is based on the assumption that aspects of these theories are correct (and they may or may not be). Is it common in modern academic philosophy to explain to the reader that the assumptions in my argument rely upon the theories expounded in these works and then move forward from there? Or do I need to provide justifications of my own?
Other Information: I do not have any sort of degree in philosophy but I have been writing some essays and have been trying to follow the general academic guidelines used in the field. I don't know if any publisher will take it seriously but it's a personal project so I may just self-publish.

What do similar papers (published papers in the field) do?

Your citing standards are not just defined by the standard procedures of your journal or the literacy level of your audience, but also by whether the source you cite argues the point, assumes the point, entertains the point as one of many possibilities, or even whether the source exists solely to address the point you are making.
If you wish to quote Douglas Adams to argue that life is meaningless, very little summary is required. As we see in Douglas Adams's parable of the supercomputer and the meaning of life, "meaning" is not a property of life, and requesting a calculation of "meaning" results in meaningless answers, such as "42".
This is a summary not of a book or a story, but of a paragraph of a book. It is a tiny story within a larger story. Those who have read it will appreciate a chance to chuckle, but everyone will see the connection whether they've read it or not, and there will be no need to summarize further.
But if you need to challenge the straightforward interpretation, for example if you're disagreeing with another author who cited the source, more detail is required.

"The anti-meaning school of thought emphasizes the results of Douglas Adams's supercomputer", - summarize opposition,
"which was asked to calculate the meaning of life, and which concluded that life is meaningless." - summarize opposition's summary,
"But in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" it was understood that meaning can exist even when it cannot be calculated, which is why the story called for an organic invention (earth) to discover the meaning of life" - re-interpret the source,
"indeed, what is "meaning" if not "value which defies quantification"?" - summarize your interpretation of the source.

Your style and level of detail should walk a delicate balance between risk and rigor.
If you publish a correlation between lung cancer and smoking, hardly anyone will care what the more rigorous points of your argument are; the established topic lacks the risk to be interesting. You won't get published unless your writing breathes new fascination into the old question.
Don't worry about being fascinating or risky if you're presenting a correlation between chocolate consumption and IQ though; a fifth of your audience will label you a clown or classist before they read your work, so everyone will have plenty of energy to read every sentence and citation you write as they scan for technical mistakes. Just focus on accuracy and rigor, that'll be your bottleneck to even being published.
So my final answer is, if you justify too much, you'll be boring. If you justify too little, you'll be stupid.

I don't have any idea what your specific competencies and training are (though you point out it's not philosophy) nor what the goals of your book are. My main thought reading your question is that you might not grasp what it is academic philosophy does.
In terms of your summarization question, my answer doesn't differ much from the others already present (2 at time of writing). I would say summarization is not important per se but if you're integrating works across multiple disciplines or depending on idiosyncratic readings or esoteric claims, then you need to spell those out.
To put it another way, if I'm writing something that builds on Kant, no one needs to read my summary of the Critique of Pure Reason but I do need to spell out the claims I am getting from it. Odds on these claims will not be universally accepted by Kant scholars, so I will need to explain where I'm getting these interpretations relative to his text.
The basic rule of thumb is that you need to state everything you need to make your argument and preferably nothing further. Anything further, such as debatable readings that don't affect your argument cuts the number of people who will look at your main point (being sidetracked by other things).
This gets even harder if you're working with philosophers from disparate fields, because I may be up on my Kant and Hegel, but I'm not up on my neuroscience. So if you write a book on Kant and neurophilosophy, I"m going to need way more neuroscience than Kant where as a neuro-philosophy scholar may not be so familiar with standard interpretations of Kant.
My best guess based on the list of fields that you're integrating is that what you want to write would probably not be publishable within academic philosophy. It sounds too big and too off about what philosophy does just from the field list. I would guess you're grouping together some things you believe into a whole you think makes sense of a lot of things (I could be completely wrong about what you're hoping to do by integrating so many fields). If the goal is in part a personal project, you're probably better off avoiding academic philosophy.
Later, you ask about "essay" versus book. As an element of academic writing, I don't know what a "essay" is per se. You might mean "journal article", but journal articles need to be very limited in scope to fit within publication lengths. Books, on the other hand, can be longer and integrate more ideas together. But again, generally these sort of integrative works should be written by people who are experts in at least one of the areas (not experts as in possessors of degrees but experts as in thoroughly knowledgeable).

My training is in neuroscience/bioinformatics; I am in the final year of my PhD. You might remember me from that post you deleted about Georges Bataille on the philosophy SE (post was too meandering). I am writing a critique of his philosophy by comparing it to other fields in what I hope is a unique interpretation. This includes complexity theory, neuroscience, and machine learning - fields I am familiar with in my work. It surprises me that such cross-disciplinary integration is uncommon to academic philosophy since empirical evidence from the sciences can support philosophical arguments.

Even if I cannot get published by an academic press (which seems likely), I would still want to follow as many academic conventions as possible. It's a personal project but I still want it to be professionally done.

I don't remember that re phil.SE, but there could be any of a number of reasons a question isn't a good fit there. If your hope is to write like a philosopher, then you should take some courses in the philosophy department at your university while you can (or at whatever university you do you post-doc).

The level of detail in which you should explain work upon which you base your own is fundamentally given by the following consideration: How much do you need to explain so that your anticipated reader gets a complete picture?. In other words, when writing anything at all, your first question should always be "Why is my audience?". If you know this, then you do not need to worry as much any more about what the "standard" is in a field, what is "expected", etc: you know how much is necessary to make your readers understand where you are coming from.


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A graduate program has botched the current online semester. What recourse is there, if any, for the students who have paid tuition for the year?
I am writing this post on behalf of a number of students who have had a challenging experience with this past fall semester. I myself am a former graduate student who has taught 7 semesters of classes during my PhD. In these sorts of situations things can be subjective; I am hoping my explanation of the details will be more neutral than some of the students since I have experienced things "from both sides" in my past teaching. There is a lot of nuance here so I am hoping the extra detail will help to clarify exactly what issues are present.
Context
A number of students were set to begin their masters in a well-respected international multi-university European program. This program consists of over 10 different universities and students (from all over the world) will attend different semesters at different universities depending on their program track. This particular fact has caused a lot of complications since it requires the coordination of many different institutions. In light of recent events with COVID-19, many international students could not move to Europe. The program offered these students the opportunity to take the program online while other students who were local could take it in person. This required a lot of work on the part of coordinators who got volunteer administrative staff to set up an online platform and then volunteer professors to add content for a course. This has resulted in a few different challenges:

The content of the online class and the in-person class differs significantly (more details in the issues section below). Nobody has offered a straight answer as to why the in-person classes could not be live-streamed or at least loaded online after they were taught. But the fact of the matter is that the in-person classes are taught by professors who were supposed to teach the classes in the first place while the online class is taught by volunteer professors only from many different academic institutions around Europe.
The fact that the professors volunteer for the online content means that nobody "owns" a class. They simply put content online and leave it. Most classes are taught by anywhere between 6-10 professors who generally refuse to answer questions about their posted lectures or clarify anything. Due to the decentralized nature of each class it is essentially taught my multiple professors and nobody at the same. Coordinators have no real sway over these professors as they may or may not be a part of their academic institution.
The volunteer professors have no knowledge of the program scope, content, or prerequisites, and have just posted material that is relevant to their field of expertise regardless of whether students were really expected to know it according to the program's standards.
This is a masters program which will be rigorous and means students must become independent learners and researchers. However, the administrative issues force students to waste most of their day with "busy work" and trying to decipher unclear instructions where this time could be better spent reading textbooks on their own.

Obviously COVID-19 was unprecedented and put unexpected strain on professors and admins who have many responsibilities including those to their families. The students appreciate the quick turnaround to put the classes online and understand that this was challenging. However, a number of issues have emerged that I feel are unacceptable and some compromise should be provided for the students as they have paid a lot of money for this program.
Issues
The program has suffered from numerous problems throughout the semester. Some issues are bound to happen due to COVID-19 and the nature of online learning. However, the following are, in my opinion, particularly egregious.
Classes

Classes are not really classes. Many professors started off providing lessons with voiceovers and then gave up after week two, instead posting powerpoints with no context: missing legends, color-coding on figures absent, tables with no explanation, paraphrased bullet point paragraphs, "fill-in-the-blanks" in sentences since they were supposed to be answered in-person by the class during a lecture, essentially making them useless. Other professors have just posted hours of YouTube or Khan Academy content, many of which are the first result from Google.
The content of posted videos often contradict one another or have superfluous content. Sometimes videos use different terms for the same concept. It is unclear what students are responsible for, which definitions they need to know, and since classes are decentralized, those writing final exams may have different terminology than the videos. There is no syllabus so nobody knows what content they are actually responsible for in the videos.
Video content is often in excess of 8 hours per class with 2-3 class per day. This differs from the in-person students who simply have one 2 hour lecture. The coordinators have stated that each class should not take more than 3 hours per day but this is impossible when the content is always longer. This leaves no time to revise or do assignments and with no clear guide about what to study, students end up having to watch all 8 hours of videos per class (i.e. no way to "work smart, not hard").
Content is spread everywhere. There is no syllabus and assignment due dates are in 3 different places, sometimes contradicting one another.
Prerequisites were not adequately communicated to students and volunteer professors have ignored this. Some professors have content from upper-level undergraduate engineering topics (e.g. fluid dynamics, differential equations) and this was never indicated as a requirement anywhere in any course content. This is clearly because these are volunteer professors.

Assignments

The semester ends in 3 weeks but so far less than 10% of assignments have been graded. Student have had no feedback on anything and within a few days of final exams have no clear idea of their standing in the class.
A student may sometimes get a response from a professor who claims an assignment is optional but then never communicates this to any other student and fails to change the "optional" status on the online platform where assignments are submitted. Additionally, a professor may claim an assignment is optional and not be on the final exam but it appears those that write the final exams were never made aware of these changes.
Assignments sometimes switch from optional to not-optional without notice. Grades switch from out of 10 to out of 20 for no reason and nobody will answer why this happens (a 100% is now a 50% and nobody addresses it).
A few hours before a deadline an assignment's prompt may change but if you've already turned it in before this point, you will be penalized because the grader will think that you didn't follow the prompt.
Some assignments marked down because professors wanted something in a specific format (but this was never specified anywhere). However, since they waited 2 months to get to grading and to express this fact, multiple assignments have been turned in in the wrong format, all receiving penalties.
No way to contest grades if there are errors. Nobody responds to emails, some professors have 3 email addresses and can take weeks to respond.
Graders are not those that write the assignments and often ignore rubrics or prompts. They give one sentence feedback on assignments that are clearly incorrect (e.g. say something is missing when it is clearly there) but even in the case where there is a miscommunication there is no response to emails for clarification.

Other

On the occasion that professors actually show up for a live stream they were assigned to by coordinators they are generally quite hostile and respond to feedback by saying to "just Google it".

Major decisions about moving overseas given only 10 days notice to decide and unclear emails about how to get clarification take nearly a week for a response.

To prevent cheating, final exams online are designed so that if you move to the next question, you cannot return to a previous one. This destroys any attempt at pacing or providing an opportunity to revise a question if you think of the answer later in the exam.

Around a month in, coordinators and professors essentially gave up and ignored all feedback from students.

In short, students simply want to just learn the content and they are not learning this way. They are wasting hours doing busy work for professors that could be spent actually learning. Further, the amount of clerical errors and mismanagement means that student's grades are represented incorrectly.
Questions
To reiterate, of course COVID-19 has been an incredible challenge for many universities. However, in the end this is a business transaction where students paid for a particular service and deserve a proper education or at least a fair compromise that respects them as well as the professors that have had to work overtime to provide content. The numerous clerical errors, mismanagement, and ignoring of communication is completely unprofessional and unfair to students.
The questions I would like answered are:

Given that students have been told that refunds are not an option and they paid for the year on week two of the semester, what can students do in this situation? How do institutions normally handle situations like this?
In the event that the numerous clerical errors regarding assignments are not addressed how can students contest their grades when coordinators, professors, and graders ignore all communication?

This question is quite long.

I'm not sure this question should be closed for "depending on individual factors".  The central gist of it has been repeated a hundred times over at many different institutions this year.

Question 1: there is no normal with which to compare the current situation. So there is no real precedent. The assumption on your question is that nobody responsible answers e-mails, so that makes informal complaints impossible (assuming your assumption is correct). The next step is a formal complaint. How to do that, differs from country to country. Moreover, details matter when dealing with formal complaints, and these tend to differ from university to university.
Question 2: again you could try a formal complaint.


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What is the value of participating in proposal-writing efforts, for a postdoc researcher?
I am a young researcher already having published several papers, and in the same time I have participated several times in bids for national and European (fp7, h2020) projects. So I could say I have some experience in proposal-writing.
I am now preparing my cv to apply for a lecturer position in UK. The question is: should I highlight this experience in my cv (i.e. provide more details about the bids in which I participated, my role, the outcome etc), or hiring committees are mostly focused on publications? How important is fund attraction at a lecturer level? I am asking because I see that this kind of experience is often mentioned in the desired (not the essential) qualifications of the applicant.
An other point of view over the same issue is this: If I have the chance to avoid being involved in proposal-writing efforts, should I? That is, of course, in order to continue with my research (i.e. focus on papers).
Moreover, how can one's claims be verified? How do you prove that you are telling the truth and not over-selling yourself, regarding your participation and experience? Isn't this part of your cv a part that is less verifiable?

Regarding the verification part: I would expect that usually whoever is the formal PI on the proposal you worked on will be one of your letter writers, and can thus point out there how much of a help you were.

... and even if the PI did not write a formal letter on your behalf, people know each other in academia, and people on a search committee can simply call the person you give as the PI on a proposal.

First, your titular question:

What is the value of participating in proposal-writing efforts, for a postdoc researcher?

Especially in Europe, and when applying for faculty positions, the value is huge. Successfully playing the grant game is nowadays what keeps the lights on in many European universities, at least research-wise. Having a track record in this dimension can easily be viewed as even more desirable than a great research track record (although, of course, you will still need at least good publications).

should I highlight this experience in my cv (i.e. provide more details about the bids in which I participated, my role, the outcome etc)

Yes, you should definitely highlight this somewhere in your application (not sure if the CV is the right place, though). Your letters may or may not be a good place, if LoR are considered important for the job you are applying to.

If I have the chance to avoid being involved in proposal-writing efforts, should I?

This is an interesting question, and mainly depends on what your grant and research track records look like at the moment. If you have not actually been involved in grant proposals, I would certainly recommend getting this experience. If your research track record is lacking, I would focus on research. Realistically, you will need a good record in both dimensions to be competitive for faculty positions.

Moreover, how can one's claims be verified? How do you prove that you are telling the truth and not over-selling yourself, regarding your participation and experience? Isn't this part of your cv a part that is less verifiable?

In the optimal case, you have won some grants in your own name. But even if this is not the case, the experienced recruiter knows what to look for and who to ask to figure out whether you are overselling yourself. Keep in mind that researchers are connected and EU projects are large - somebody in the hiring faculty will know somebody who was involved in your project and give them a ring to ask them whether you actually did what you claim you did. If that's also not possible, the recruiting faculty will just ask you a few questions regarding the claim they are interested in, and observe your reaction.

I think a critical component of being a scientific postdoc is to gain experience with writing and submitting research proposals and papers.  While I understand the concern that postdocs often do NOT get the credit they deserve when assisting with proposals, the benefit is more typically indirect and usually becomes critical experience when postdocs are writing their own research proposals for academic jobs or as independent scientists.