text:
What has the effect of publishing salaries been?
In the US, many (most?) states have laws which require the publication of full salary details for all employees of state universities.  For example, California has a full online database of all state workers  it seems which includes UC Berkeley amongst others.  Salary details to varying levels of approximation are also available for public university employees in some countries outside the US.  In which countries are academic salaries published? has more details .
What effect on state (or public) universities has this publication of academic salaries had? Specifically,

Have they had to pay more on average in salaries because private sector competitors (including private universities) now know exactly how much to offer someone to entice them?
Have they found it more difficult to recruit people from the private sector (including private universities) who might not want their financial details to be public?
Have there been any other negative or positive side effects?

I am not sure knowing how much someone makes in academia tells you all that much about what will take to lure them to the private sector.

Are these figures for real? Professors at UC berkeley in the biology department make $180k a year? Or does this also include total income outside of the UC salary?

@StrongBad You are right although I was including private universities in the private sector.

Have they had to pay more on average in salaries because private sector competitors (including private universities) now know exactly how much to offer someone to entice them?

I've occasionally heard of these lists being used to identify woefully underpaid faculty members who might therefore be disgruntled and easier to recruit.  However, I don't think this has had a substantial effect overall on salaries at public universities.  Most faculty members don't inspire bidding wars between universities, and recruitment is based on many other factors beyond just salary.
For context, note that average salaries vary substantially between universities, and these differences are sometimes pretty widely discussed in the community.  Even in the absence of data on individuals, that's potentially useful information for recruitment.  However, there seems to be no trend towards salaries evening out.  Instead, they tend to end up balanced with factors like desirability of location.

Have they found it more difficult to recruit people from the private sector (including private universities) who might not want their financial details to be public?

Not to a noticeable extent, at least for ordinary faculty positions.  This could be more of a factor for mid-level administrators, whose salaries might come under greater scrutiny.  (By contrast, the salaries of top administrators are public information for every non-profit university in the U.S., public or private, because they must be reported on IRS Form 990.)

Have there been any other negative or positive side effects?

Transparency about salaries has a weird mixture of effects.  On the one hand, it makes the overall patterns clearer, and anyone can judge for themselves whether the results are fair.  For example, it's easy to gather data on whether women are being paid less, whether there's salary compression or inversion, whether different people receive comparable salary increases upon achieving tenure, etc.  I don't know of any formal studies (which could be interesting), but there's at least a fairly widespread belief that this transparency helps cut down on abuses.
On the other hand, it can also increase disgruntlement.  The actual salaries are almost guaranteed not to align perfectly with what would seem just to any given person (because of course different people have different visions of what would be appropriate).  I've certainly looked on occasion at salary lists and wondered why on earth X was being paid 15% more than Y, and I once talked with a friend who had discovered that he was Y in such a case.

Thank you for this great reply. I am very interested in a few things you said. Can you explain to this non US person why only senior administrators have to report on IRS Form 990?  Also, for the first question, if we narrow it to academics on over 180,000 dollars say, so very successful ones, would the answer be any different?

Form 990 requires tax-exempt organizations to list the compensation for trustees, officers, directors, and the five highest paid other employees (above a certain salary threshold).  I think this is intended to balance employees' right to privacy with the public's interest in making sure non-profits aren't using donations to pay outrageous salaries.  For example, Harvard in 2011-12 listed four medical school/public health faculty and a law professor making over $500k, in addition to a number of deans.

How high the threshold is for what would attract attention varies a lot between universities, so it would depend on the context.  At a cash-strapped public university, a 180k salary for a professor might stand out as offensive, while at Harvard it would be average at best.  (Nevertheless, not everyone chooses Harvard given several offers.  Many other factors are relevant, and one is that some people find working for a public university more fulfilling than making more money at a private university.)

The UC system has made a concerted effort to keep salaries at its flagship schools (UCLA, UCB) competitive with those at other R1s (including private ones) in order to attract and retain top faculty. They haven't always succeeded. If you look at AAUP faculty salary data, UCLA and UCB salaries are close to but are rarely higher than their peer private institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, etc.).
That being said, this has largely been possible through the large scale shift in funding at the UC from the state to private funding sources (tuition+alumni gifts+research administrative overhead+endowment+sports franchising).
Other state schools have not privatized as much as the UC system and have kept salaries and tuitions modest.
Now as to whether the publishing of salary data of individuals has had an effect, this is unclear and to my knowledge no one has analyzed it in great detail. However, there are some side effects to publishing  faculty salaries:

Greater legislative and voter scrutiny of faculty salaries (i.e., "why does a professor at a public school make $180,000"?) puts pressure on chancellors to either reduce salaries and risk faculty flight or to move towards privatization of income
Salary compression between ranks becomes much more visible
Salary inequity between genders and disciplines becomes more visible

Thank you. What is "research administrative overhead"? It sounds like something that comes from grants but that wouldn't be private funding would it? I find it interesting that you don't seem to regard having your salary published as something that would put off even highly paid faculty.

Here's a link to info on research overhead. I'll link it into the answer as well: https://research.usc.edu/for-sponsors/frequently-asked-questions/

It might if you understood your school to not be willing to match external offers from private schools; but otherwise it might actually increase salary inflation as if you are anything but the highest paid, you know what the highest wage possibility in your bracket is.

Thank you. I didn't quite understand your last point though. What I meant to ask was whether there are people who choose not to go to a public university just because they don't want their salary to be released.


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Are there no footnotes in Vancouver referencing?
I just wanted to check if Vancouver referencing does not use footnotes. I saw online that the citations are just numbered and then the reference list is put at the end of the essay instead of footnotes throughout. Is this correct?

This is correct. See the last page of this pdf for an example of a Vancouver references section:
http://guides.lib.monash.edu/ld.php?content_id=14570618
In response to a comment below about the in-text citations coming after the punctuation, here is another example where they use brackets but don't mention if it is in-text citations (but the references section/end of essay references match the guide above). When I use Vancouver style in my own writing, Mendeley defaults in-text citations within the period.
http://editor.citationstyles.org/styleInfo/?styleId=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zotero.org%2Fstyles%2Fvancouver

The in-text references in square or round brackets go after the punctuation? Very weird.

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text:
How to refer to a method from a workshop in a conference paper?
I had a paper accepted in a workshop that only publishes its proceedings on its website; one of these workshops that tell you that submitting to the workshop does not prevent you from submitting elsewhere. The paper proposed a new method A, and applied it to problems B and C.
Now, I want to write a conference version of the paper. The conference version will present method A, apply it to problems B and C with extended experiments, and additionally to problem D.
How do I refer/cite the method A in the conference paper? Does the workshop count at all? In my field (CS), I have been told that the workshops do not count. Yet, it feels wrong to call it a novel method. Is the method A contribution of the conference paper or not?

Side note: Never claim that something is novel. (The APS even has a memo about this.)

I think you are mixing up a few different definitions of "count" here.

Workshop papers typically "count" very little on your CV. That is, having a few workshop papers will not make you graduate much sooner, and they are pretty much useless when you start looking for e.g., a tenure track position.
Workshop papers, but only those with no formal proceedings, don't "count" as publications. That is, you can hand in the same material again at a conference or journal without being accused of self-plagiarism. The workshop paper on the website of the workshop is basically a preprint. Hence, formally, the work is still unpublished and you can submit it wherever you want.
Workshop papers, no matter if they appeared in formal proceedings or not, can and should be cited. Clearly, if you use this citation to, e.g., support the validity of a statement, this carries less weight if the cited source is a workshop paper than if it is a well-known journal. However, if you want to apply method A, which you have already presented in a workshop, it seems correct to cite the workshop paper. Note that you will still need to describe the method, as you cannot assume the reader of your conference paper to go back and read the workshop paper first.

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text:
Finding a journal for specialised, interdisciplinary research
Assuming I decided what specific thing I want to research, how I can find journals suitable for my research?
For example, I am interested in query by humming in computer science. Will a signal-processing journal accept such a paper? Will a pattern-recognition one do, assuming I actually use pattern recognition algorithms?
Seems like there are very few (2–3) computer-science–music journals available. Can I only publish in these?

You are getting way ahead of yourself. First, you do the research. Then you figure out which journal will be suitable, since that will also depend on how string the results are.

In which journals are the papers you are citing published? Which journals do these papers, in turn, cite? Which conferences and workshops have been around on your topic and where were the contributions to them published? These are all potential venues for your paper.
Also make sure to ask around among colleagues who work in the field and ask your supervisor.
You can always informally inquire with the editor of a potential journal outlet whether your paper falls within the scope of that journal. They might perhaps even be so kind as to suggest alternatives, in case they don't deem your paper pertinent.


text:
PhD final grade on CV
In mathematics, is it common to put the final grade of your PhD on your academic CV, for example for

your personal website
funding/grant applications
short research stay applications
postdoc applications
tenure track applications
etc.

There seem to be more standards for deciding final grades than there are universities, and some universities are more committed to stopping grade inflation than others. (Whether grades at the PhD level are a good idea is a can of worms I don't wish to open.)
If one should only show off "good" grades, is there a common cut-off? For example, the German system uses the following grades (approximate descriptions in parentheses)

summa cum laude ("with distinction")
magna cum laude ("very good")
cum laude ("good")
rite ("pass")

Who are you showing the CV to? If its for internat. academic positions in mathem., I have never seen something similar and would thus not recommend it.

By the way, you might want to add to this question if those grades are good and how good, if possible.

I'm not in Germany so won't answer formally. The US also marks some degrees "Summa Cum Laude" etc. I think most people here would include such designations if they are higher than the minimum.

My recommendation would not to have a general-purpose CV to begin with. You might have a master CV with every conceivable information, but you have to trim it down depending on the purpose, target audience, etc.

@Wrzlprmft OK, I agree and of course welcome more nuanced answers — (within academia) do I put it on job applications, on grant applications, on applications for short research stays, on my website?

You need to keep the intended audience of that CV in mind. If you are just interested in a German audience (non Germans can read your CV if they can find it, but you just don't care), then you can add those grades. If you aim for an international audience you need to give them a metric by which to evaluate those notes. For example, in the Netherlands a PhD can only get two grades: a regular pass (about 95%) and a cum laude (about 5%). So if a Dutch person sees a CV with a cum laude for a PhD (s)he will be very impressed, which is not what that note means in Germany.

Forget the labels and show me the data : )

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What does a brief quick referee report mean?
A rather prestigious mathematical journal asked me recently to referee a paper.
More precisely, they asked me to provide "a brief (but relatively quick) report".
Does this mean that this is only a pre-referee report? What should be included in such a report?

"Does this means that this is only a pre-referee report?" We have no idea what the editor intended when they asked you for a report. But they surely know -- ask them, not us!

I'm surprised that the question about pre-referee reports hasn't already been asked here but I couldn't find anything. That part is a good question, so I hope we get some good answers.

It sounds like the referee wants to know if the paper is good enough to have a reasonable chance to be accepted, since for very prestigious math journals chances are a full refereeing would be a waste of time since even pretty good papers can be rejected based on a cursory evaluation. So, what is probably expected is a few paragraphs, maybe 1/2-1 page, with your summary of what the paper does and whether you think it's worth evaluating in depth given the high standards of the journal. But as @DavidRicherby said, we don't know for sure so you might want to just ask the editor.

@DavidRicherby please ask a new question instead of changing the meaning of this one.

@AnonymousPhysicist What's the point? I removed the unanswerable content from this one and kept the part that can be actually answered. Why do you think it would be better to ask a new question, and then close this one as being an unanswerable question plus a duplicate of another? Editing is one of the things you're supposed to do to a question that should be closed in its current form.

Were there no other instructions?  I think when I've been solicited for brief opinions, there's usually a paragraph saying what they want.

@DavidRicherby You might not be able to answer the question, but other people on this site apparently can.

@AnonymousPhysicist Yes, and the answers to that part of the question are purely speculative: they explain what the editor might have meant, and they're great answers to the question "If an editor wants me to do X, how should I do that?" but they don't answer the question of what this editor wants. That question can only be answered by the editor in question.

Some years ago, a few of the top mathematical journals began asking for "quick opinions" (or variants of this wording) on submitted papers, and this practice has spread a little since then.  A quick opinion is not a full referee report, but just an indication of whether the paper looks like it could plausibly meet the journal's high standards.  For example, are the main results truly exciting and important?  The idea is that separating the high-level evaluation from detailed examination of the proofs greatly speeds up the time until rejection for most papers.  This is good for authors, since nobody likes to wait nine months to hear that their paper wasn't remotely exciting enough for the Annals of Mathematics to accept, and it makes it easier to recruit good referees (offering a quick opinion is relatively easy, while full refereeing is harder but at least the paper is likely to make it worth your while).
Given that you describe the journal as "a rather prestigious mathematical journal", I'd bet that this is what's going on.  In that case, all you need to provide is a single-page report offering your conceptual evaluation of the paper (interest, importance, novelty) and whether it merits further, more detailed consideration.
However, I'd recommend asking the editor if there's any ambiguity, for example if they used the word "referee" to describe you (which to me would indicate a full report).  As an editor, I'm happy when referees ask for clarification, since it indicates that they are taking the process seriously.  And it's safer to ask than to spend time writing a report that may not be what the editor wanted.

In my experience, requests for preliminary assessments of this sort often include something along the lines of "If you think the paper is good enough to be thoroughly refereed, please suggest some suitable referees."

A very likely possibility is that they have already contacted two referees, but have received no answers from one of them, or conflicting answers. So what they want from you is a quick general opinion on the paper to help them make a decision; someone has already looked at the technical parts in more detail, so you should focus on evaluating the level of the paper. Since the manuscript has already been sitting on their desk for a while, they want it fast.
Another possibility is that the paper has just been submitted, the editor looked at it quickly and it seemed a quick reject, but he/she wants a confirmation. So in this sense it may be a "pre-report"; if you don't answer negatively, you may be asked to write a more detailed report. But the other possibility seems more likely to me.

And the only way to know which case it is is to ask the editor who asked you for the report!


text:
Why not design the proposed online survey using the actual survey tool?
Question:
Assuming no school prohibitions on doing so, why would you not design the proposed survey in the proposed survey tool, and include screenshots of the survey in the proposal?
Background:
I edit dissertations and students are increasingly asking for formatting guidance for their proposed surveys. The handbooks from the schools of interest have no guidance other than that the design be approved.
Consequently, I am wondering why I've never seen a proposed survey presented from screenshots of the actual survey tool; but I've also never seen a prohibition on it. Instead, I always see a mock-up using Word or Excel.
My guess (and that's all it is) is that maybe no one mocks it up in the actual survey tool because--as part of the proposal process--the reviewer(s) might recommend another tool. So mocking it up in the actual tool could be a waste of time.
Note: I realize my question is rife for opinion rather than a black-and-white answer. But I couldn't think of any other way to ask it. To recap, assuming there are no school prohibitions on doing so, why would you not design the proposed survey in the proposed survey tool, and include screenshots of the survey in the proposal?

The question is in the title of the post. But I see your point. I'll edit the text to repeat the questions.

@Bryan - I'm glad you asked, because when I was rewriting the text, I realized the question needed expanding. See the updated post. I hope this helps you and others help me. If not, well, I'll edit again!

Thanks for the update; you may still want to edit your title to make sure it has a clear question, since this tends to attract better attention that is more helpful. I think this sort of question could possibly be seen by the community as too opinion-based, but I think it's possibly answerable enough to stay, and survey research is not in my area of expertise so I will defer to everyone else.

@Anyon - sorry I did not see your title edit before making my own. In any case, I'm confused by your reference to "rarely" in my post because I did not use that word anywhere.

Because it is easy to edit the text in Word or Excel and copy / paste into whatever tool once cooments from the supervisor are included.

Students use the tools they are most comfortable with. If the excercise does not limit the tools, then that is only right. In my field (sociology)  most of them have put many many many more hours in Word or Excel then in some survey tool, so if this were an excercise for my students I would expect to see the pattern you report. If I wanted them to get experience in the survey tool, I would need to change the text of the exercise to require them to use that tool.

@ Maarten Buis - Excellent logic; i.e., to tie it back to the learning objectives.

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text:
Citing Data That Was Compiled From Many Sources and Then Summarized? (Updated)
The Problem
The author of the dissertation (PhD) collected publicly available raw data from the websites of over 40 universities. The data itself spanned 40 years. After compiling the data into a spreadsheet, the author diced it and sliced it to create well-summarized figures and tables. For example, one figure is a graph of the number of hires over time; a potential figure is a map showing where the hires occurred. And a table shows the hires by name, year, and location. (Anonymity at this point is not an issue. All data are publicly available.)
The manuscript needs to comply with APA 7 standards. The APA 7, 6, and 5 manuals go into great detail with examples about meta analysis for experimental purposes, but nothing I read "clicked" for how to deal with this situation.
Based on other posts at this site, the author's summary is a type of meta review (not a deep-dive analysis as described by the APA standards). The purpose of the data is only to present the situation as it has been over time to put the background for a qualitative case study into context. Maybe you'd call it a demographics meta review or demographic meta report?
Potential Solution
Given that the guidance in the APA manual did not seem to fit this situation, my inclination was to suggest the following:

an appendix that lists the university names, locations, and URLs, with an explanation that the data shown in the tables and figures were compiled from data at the university web sites
figure notes and table notes that refer to the appendix.
a entry in the References for the manuscript author (i.e., the author citing himself because he compiled the data in unique ways).

The Question

Would the above potential solution be APA compliant?
If not, what is the APA solution?

Whatever the answer, it would be helpful to have a pointer to the page or pages in an APA manual (version 7, 6, or even 5) that support the answer.

So what is the question?

Which thesis it is? Graduation or masters?

For Solar Mike: The question is in the title of the post. I will edit the text to repeat the question. For hanugm, the first sentence of the last paragraph states it's a dissertation. In the U.S., a dissertation is at the graduate level. Though I'm not sure why that matters for this question.

What you have described is your data collection procedure, so I would put it in that subsection (within a methodology section). Describe the procedure of creating the combined dataset clearly, in a way that another researcher would be able to reproduce it.
There you can refer to all your sources, directly in the text, even though it is extensive. Then you should add the reference for each published dataset they've used to construct the large dataset in the reference list (which should be in the APA-handbook, see https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/data-set-references). I would not reference in the form of a self-reference to what is basically the current work.

The data the author collected was for Chapter 1, to provide historical context for the study justification. (Truly, I am not the author.) The data was not part of data collection for the study itself, so doesn't feel right to put it in Chapter 3. That said, the solution is valid for Chapter 1. Am glad to also have a name for it: data set.

For those who have APA 7, see also Section 9.52 and Figure 9.4.

@RJo - If those chapters occur in the same manuscript, it probably would make sense to then, in Chapter 3, refer back to Chapter 1.


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Format of In-Text Citations for Military Publications?
Though I've scrutinized the APA 6th Edition and online examples, I remain confused about how to format military publications for in-text citations.
In text, is it sufficient to cite just the military branch as the author; or should the citation also include the type of publication; or something else?
Example 1
... (U.S. Army, 2005) ...
vs.
... (U.S. Army, Army Mentorship Handbook, 2005)
vs.
neither of the above; format as [your example] instead.
Example 2
... (U.S. Army, 2012) ...
vs.
... (U.S. Army, ADP 6-22, 2012) ...
vs.
neither of the above; format as [your example] instead.
Added Background 10 Sept. '16
I'm the editor; not the author. This is my first experience with a military-laden dissertation.
As best I can tell, the only APA guidance is the first sentence on p. 174: "References...are cited in text with an author-date citation system..."
I did find more information at
  http://libguides.gwumc.edu/c.php?g=27779&p=170369
  where Example 4 affirms APA p. 174.
That would indicate that "(U.S. Army, year)" and nothing more is sufficient. But the sheer quantity of similar citations (i.e., the lack of variety) makes any one in-text citation seem somehow insufficient.
Maybe I just need to ignore my discomfort?

I think it should be as any other publication by an organisation. Doesn't the APA cover it?

Yes and no. "...cited in text with an author-date citation system..." (p.174)

See the additional background I added to my original post.

Apart from the guns and stuff, the United States Army is an organization just like the American Psychological Association. The United States should be abbreviated when it is used as an adjective and not when it is used as a now. When it is abbreviated, it should be abbreviated with periods but no spaces. Further, it does not need to be defined prior to using.
One then needs to ask who/what is the author and who/what is the publisher. If available, I prefer to use an Administrative (e.g., Headquarters Department of the U.S. Army) or Operational (e.g., U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) unit as both the author and publisher (unless the document has something more informative). See wikipedia for some possible units to look for.
This means in text citations might look like Headquarters Department of the U.S. Army (2016a), Headquarters Department of the U.S. Army (2016b) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2016). Not that APA style is pedantic about making sure in-text citations are not ambiguous and has rules about how to handle "twin" (use a, b, c, ...) and "not-quite twin" citations (expand the authors until the ambiguity goes away while being careful with et al.).


text:
Global university ranking for graduates, not research
I work at a university that gives a small number of scholarships to PhD students to pay their fees and tuition.  Currently, the decision for who to give these to is based on their undergraduate transcript and the global ranking of the university they attended as an undergraduate.   If you don't get a scholarship, you have to pay full fees and tuition.
Unfortunately, one consequence of this system is that graduates from certain countries, for example India, are grossly disadvantaged.  The highest ranked Indian university is ranked below 250 in the main international tables (and below 400 in Excellence at http://www.webometrics.info/en/Asia/India?sort=asc&order=Excellence%20Rank*) . As far as I can tell, this is mostly because the ranking measures research output and many of the top Indian students go on to graduate school in the US.
Now we can all say how ridiculous it is to be doing this in the first place but that isn't going be helpful. I feel that in order to help address this question I need to give them an easy alternative.
Are there any more relevant league tables that might measure the quality of graduates on a fairer global basis, rather than the quality of research output from the relevant department?

How would you measure the quality of graduates worldwide in a standardized way that is unrelated to research?

@Bitwise I suppose some options are by a) reputation as given by experts b) historical data on how well graduates do later c) some sort of adjusted figure that includes research but takes into account national differences such as the one I mention in my question d)  something I haven't thought of ... :)

I doubt there are any global rankings that will rank Indian universities much higher (it also doesn't help that most rankings are done by Western organizations).  I think your best chance is to argue that it is more fair to use national or regional rankings instead of global ones.

Of course even better would be if MIT leaked their internal system for judging applicants to their PhD programs ...:)

@eleanora there isn't a single MIT system, but in my experience it involves sitting around a table arguing and hemming and hawing.

@StrongBad Ah OK.. but they must surely have some basic data to argue about with respect to non-US universities... ?

It is not clear what rankings your university uses or what you think is a fairer ranking. The QS World University Rankings ranks on:

Academic reputation (40%)
Employer reputation (10%)
Student-to-faculty ratio (20%)
Citations per faculty (20%)
International faculty ratio (5%)
International student ratio (5%)

I would think that "research output", whatever that is, would impact both academic reputation and citations per faculty. I am not sure if any of the other factors are fairer for judging academic success, but the nice thing about the QS rankings is you can sort based on any of their factors.
If we look at a couple of the IITs
                 Overall     Academic     Employer     SFR     CPF     IFR     ISR
IIT Bombay         222         160          60         400+    301     400+    400+
IIT Delhi          235         199          90         393     329     400+    400+
IIT Kanpur         300         229          229        400+    345     400+    400+

Despite any impact of loss of PhD students to international schools, the "Academic Reputation" is still helping the ranking. The Citations per Faculty are hurting them a little, but they are most hurt by a lack of international draw at the faculty and student levels and a high Student to Faculty ratio.

This is a very nice answer thank you. Do you, or anyone here, know how in practice leading US universities judge applicants for grad school from outside the US?


text:
Must meta-analyses or systematic reviews have more than one author?
My colleagues argue that a meta-analysis / systematic review needs at least two data collectors (or authors according to them) as a "must". I have not found any reference in the PRISMA (or any other sources about meta-analyses/systematic reviews) that confirms this claim.
Do you know any such protocol or consensus?

It seems to me I am missing a lot of context for this question. For instance, what field are you talking about?

Thanks for the input. I asked my question as a completely general question regardless of fields, as e.g., PRISMA is already regardless of fields.

Answer: Although PRISMA does not require such a protocol, Cochrane Handbook does. However, it too does not "necessitate" it, but encourages it (at least to my understanding).
Check out the Chapter 7 of the Part 2 of this online Handbook: http://handbook.cochrane.org/

Sure, added to the post.

From the perspective of an Epidemiologist, with some published meta-analysis experience:
Must is a very strong word. Some people have pointed to where, for example, the Cochrane Collaboration requires it, and PRISMA might not, but generally speaking I've never really encountered a situation where having a single author on a meta-analysis was a substantial barrier to publishing a review.
On the other hand, I would say that a meta-analysis or systematic review should have a second person on the study team. Rarely is the literature being reviewed so clear, so well-laid out and so utterly free of ambiguity that a single person can read, digest and abstract the literature without making any judgement calls. Without having any papers where they search and simply cannot find what they're looking for. Without hitting that one paper they simply cannot make heads or tails of. There should be someone there to double-check your work, or a sample of it at least, to make sure what you described as the system in your paper and what you actually did match up. To look over those papers you've set aside in the "Problem" pile to see if they can see things you don't.
I leave whether or not that person should be an author as an exercise to the reader.
I know some colleagues who essentially begin all reviews with a parallel, blinded double-abstraction of the papers once they've been found - or even begin all the way at the search being carried out twice. I don't know that I'd go that far, but it is extremely helpful to have someone to double-check your decision making against. Despite being careful, reading closely and reviewing my own decisions, I have yet to work on a meta-analysis where I haven't been glad to have a second reviewer (or to be said reviewer).

Thanks. You outlined what was in my mind very clearly. Unfortunately, in the field I publish, people are not usually familiar with things such as statistics or different types of review. So I have seen reviewers who throw recommendations they really should be silent about (since they know nothing about) and editors who are not competent enough to decide what is right and what is wrong. So I have seen such issues. I agree two or even more parallel observers "might" (might) favor the reliability, but I am also aware of the bias it introduces as well as the false sense of safety that can lead

to potential errors (since each observer might become less careful, thinking that the other one is already doing the job)... Besides, a single observer can always double check the work.

@Vic - All I will say is that I've been under the impression I've double and triple-checked, only to have something found by a second reviewer.

There is no such requirement. It is frequently helpful to have multiple authors to help sort through the vast amounts of literature being covered, but is by no means a necessity. For instance, a colleague of mine recently published a fairly substantial review article on his own.
However, in medical research, a meta-review serves a rather different purpose than the usual review article in other fields: it is collecting the results of a bunch of different experimental studies, and trying to reach an overarching medical recommendation. That's a rather different research function than a review article in other fields. In medicine, you would want to have multiple people reviewing the data to make sure that it's not one person unilaterally deciding everything independently.

This is what I say to my colleagues. However, I think you are confusing a simple review with a systematic one. Besides, there is a database in medical research which collects the systematic reviews, and that very database (Cochrane) encourages more than 1 observer in one of its resources, and does not say anything about it in another source it publishes (meaning that it sorta contradicts itself).

I've updated my answer. Medicine is not the same as other fields.

Thanks. I should add to your new response that in medicine too there are many single-observer systematic reviews, and it is not a "must" according to any authorities. But some colleagues incorrectly argue that it is a must. I am trying to prevent a wrong message.

Not a must—but almost certainly a "really, really should!"

according to whom? Can you name an authority? or are you explaining your "own" personal view? These two hugely differ, and we should avoid practicing one when sounding like the other one. "but almost certainly a "really, really should!" " sentence does sound like you are a director member of Cochrane ;-) or some other authorities. Maybe you can be a journal chief editor, but that does not suffice to infer your own personal view as a globally accepted consensus (or at least to sound like an authority). :-)

(this is exactly what my colleagues incorrectly trying to infer. They too try to necessitate their own personal view, since they see it right. I keep saying to them if it was a serious issue, why wasn't it already included in the globally accepted guidelines for systematic reviews?). Though I agree it is a should, but not a certainly really really should. :-)

I'm an engineer, so any comments I have with respect to medicine are purely personal opinions. Here's my logic process, for what it's worth. I would presume that in a traditional medical study, you'd normally have multiple people review the data before publication. Given the nature of a metareview in medicine, which is functioning as an "über-review," you'd want to apply a similar level of data review as in the original studies. If one person does everything alone, there are no checks and balances before the peer review process starts.

Thanks for the clarification. Please let me add that a single person can double check his/her results for multiple times, after proper washout intervals.


text:
How to politely negotiate PhD funding offer?
I have been fortunate enough to get accepted with 5 years guaranteed funding to my 2nd choice graduate school. While the guarantee is great, the funding is only for 9/months out of the year. Would it be rude to ask them to guarantee summer funding to me for the first year until I can write a grant to get on a RAship? I know I should be more appreciative, since not everyone gets funding, but just an increase of about ~3k a year would make living there so much better and I do not want to accept an offer at a lesser institution just because of money.
What would be the most polite way of doing this?
I want to make it clear that I am not trying to get more money for the sake of getting more money, moreover that I am just not comfortable with so little money and such a high living cost in that area.
Thank you for your time.

You can always ask, and the polite way to do it is simply to ask politely, while indicating that you have a strong interest in enrolling in the program.  The best circumstance is that you have a financially superior offer from another program which is of equal or slightly better quality.  Then the graduate program in question may see a small amount of additional funding as a reasonable expense to ensure your enrollment.  (If the other program is more than a little bit better, then everyone will be expecting you to go to the better program...unless you have personal reasons to want to go to the less good program, in which case you do not need a financial incentive.)
user45756 "guaranteed" that such a request would not lead to summer funding.  Of course no one person could possibly make such a guarantee, and I have very occasionally seen additional funding given to graduate students to help attract them to a program or keep them in a program.  But user45756's answer is still accurate in spirit: in the overwhelming majority of cases you get what you get.
However the expression The squeaky wheel gets the grease is very applicable to academia: people who ask for a little bit more* tend to get a little bit more.  Your request for summer funding is unlikely to magically result in a higher starting salary, but it may well result in your being placed higher on lists for various summer funding opportunities.  I think it is a good idea to say something like "I understand that additional funding may not be possible, and I very much appreciate your offer.  However, I am sincerely concerned about quality-of-life issues while enrolled as a graduate student, and I would very much appreciate being told of any other funding, scholarship or teaching opportunities that are or may become available."
*: It is true though that people who don't know the culture well enough sometimes ask for a lot more when they think they are asking for a little bit more, and that often causes them to be taken less seriously or ends negotiations.  (Imagine if you had an assistant professor job interview at a public American university and, after shaking hands with the department chair, told them that you were holding firm at a $100K starting salary.  It is more than likely that you've just talked yourself out of any possibility of a job offer.)  There is a real art to asking for something in a way which makes clear that you will be grateful for any response that you get, not that you feel absolutely entitled to getting your precise demands.  A graduate student asking for extra funding should make extra clear that they are "just asking" and will be grateful for any response they will get.  I remember one long-ago friend who was hoping that the MIT mathematics department would "get into a bidding war" with some other department of comparable quality.  Of course that didn't happen, and though he did start a PhD program somewhere quite good, I could tell from this behavior (I was a first year graduate student at the time) that he didn't quite get the academic culture.  I believe he dropped out within a year.  (And then I lost touch with him, but I am willing to guess that he now makes much more money than I do...)

Thanks for the response; I am quite grateful for their offer after all. It's a bit of a tricky situation; the higher ranked school (top 15) is a public university so it cant offer the same funding package as the lower ranked school (top 30). The funding package from the weaker school is double, and is in an area where cost of living is considerably lower.

@Neo: If you have a better offer from another school, you should include that information in your request.  However, since the university in question is both public and more highly ranked, in my opinion that means that they are very likely to tell you that you have to decide between short-term quality of life and the long term well-being of your career.  (And I would advise you to take the pay cut and go to the better school.)  Still, as I said, asking nicely may help you get to the front of the queue on future funding.  Good luck.

I think your right, probably the better thing to do is devise a plan (and a grant) with my would be advisor and hope for the best. So thanks for answering my questions/advice.

I'd like to add that they guaranteed me 21 months of straight funding. so... plenty of time to work on a grant.

First off, congrats!  That is very good news.
I can commiserate with you on the expensive living in grad school (I'm in NYC...).  Maybe in other fields it is more common, but I haven't seen very much negotiation in Economics.  It seems that there is sometimes a little talk between the student and school to make sure that they even get the funding, but the funding packages we receive seem relatively fixed.  I do know that we can get more funding by working as research assistants or teaching assistants.  If your funding is a fellowship (basically no catches, you get the money without being required to do anything extra) then you should ask about getting funding by working as an RA or TA.  Also, have you received your funding letter?  A lot of the schools that I have friends at only have a month or two that you don't actually receive funding.  Your best bet is to check with the secretaries or PhD coordinators at your school.
All that being said, probably the best way to find out more is to email some of the other grad students at that school and ask what they have done to stay alive during the summer months when there isn't funding.

I have never heard of graduate students negotiating salary. Where you go to graduate school matters a lot in your career; I have seen many sub-par people from top graduate schools obtain pretty good positions afterwards just on the merit of the fact that they go to a great school; so, another student on your school's waitlist would be just as good as you would be in the future, if they were admitted in your place, assuming that you are not exceptional (which I am assuming, since you said that you are thinking of going to your 2nd choice school). That is, the institution holds all the cards.
At postdoc or tenure-track level, negotiation happens because you have expertise that no one else can replace. But right now, you are quite replaceable, so it doesn't make sense to negotiate.
You could ask, but I can guarantee right now that negotiation will not happen.

"You could ask, but I can guarantee right now that negotiation will not happen."  Come on, you can't guarantee it.  Many graduate programs offer different levels of funding to different students and make various other efforts to recruit students of one kind or another.  And the OP is not asking for a higher salary per se but rather for one year of summer funding.  If someone who was accepted to the department of mathematics at UGA made such a request, then it is possible that it would be granted, especially if the applicant had a better offer from an equal or better program.

@PeteL.Clark Fair enough. I suppose it depends on the field and the level of school. Personally, if a student made such a request to me, I wouldn't see it in such a positive light, but depending on the circumstances, I could also see myself trying to secure some funding for the student.

Based on the additional information provided by the OP about his/her situation: in my opinion, it turns out that you are almost certainly right.


text:
Are colleges prepared to offer a PhD position to one who already has a PhD
I am a PhD holder in Analytical Chemistry from Iran and now, I am very interested in applying for a PhD program in a somewhat different field like Nanotechnology in the US and Canada. I have invested much time and effort on preparing for taking GRE and TOEFL exams and I have a strong research background, but now I heard recently from one of my professors that most institutions are not prepared to offer a PhD position to one who already has one PhD. Could you say more about this issue? Is this true?

See Is doing two PhDs a good path

Another issue to consider is whether immigration authorities will be willing to grant you a student visa to study for a second PhD.

Certainly, it happens. I am currently pursuing a second PhD myself, in a field very different from my first. I just learned that one of my fellow graduate students in our department also has an earlier PhD, and hers is from a field very close to our department's.
As the thread linked by ff524 notes, there are many people who wish to earn a second PhD for all the wrong reasons. But you didn't ask whether it was a good idea to earn a second PhD, you asked whether Universities would admit you. The answer is that many will, but they certainly may be wary of this aspect of your application. As commenters have pointed out below, some universities flatly will not consider your application. Amongst those that will consider your application, some admissions committees will not like your previous degree, and others will not care. In my case, I felt the admissions committee did not really care about my earlier degree; they cared about my ability to demonstrate potential in my new field.
Furthermore, before applying to my current institution, I emailed roughly eight departments asking whether an application someone such as myself would be welcomed. Every single one of them replied to me to say that yes, it would; and several were encouraging about my prospects if I did apply.
Nonetheless you should be prepared to accept that some admissions committees will not like your previous degree, and you should be prepared to explain to them your good reasons for pursuing a second PhD.

Actually, some universities do have rules that a person who already has a PhD may not be admitted into a PhD program (even in a different field), regardless of how well qualified they are otherwise.  Exceptions may be possible, but I think a blanket "they will" overstates the case.

As @NateEldredge comments, some universities in the U.S. will simply not consider admitting anyone into a PhD program who already has a PhD. My own large state R1 university will not, for example.

@NateEldredge: I agree, but why not?

@NateEldredge Fair point; I have edited to make that point clear in my answer.

It depends. For example, in CS, some top schools don't allow this, like stanford MIT berkeley, etc. You should look carefully at the websites.


text:
What is the proper method of citing from a video
I have been thinking for a while, some time especially nowadays, you want to cite some interview, documentary or any such material available online as a video or audio. For example I am writing about a cure for AIDs, and there is an interview of some famous scientist on the issue on YouTube or other source, and I want to refer to some part of that interview actually say 15th minute and 23rd second.
Is there any proper way for referencing such?

Sidenote: if he/she is a scientist, try to find a publication of him. If he/she is not, avoid to use it as a source.

yeah best thing is publication, but sometimes you get exactly what you looking for in his video or his recorded lecture.

If you are using (La)TeX, this question may be of interest to you.

It might sound odd to use video material as a source, but this is a frequent issue in modern History, to name one area of research. 20th-century propaganda is an example of a topic that would include primary sources that are videos, posters, or radio material.
The Havard citation includes guidelines, see here for a guide from the Open University. From page 33 on video sources:

The Apprentice (2008) BBC 1, 14 June [Online]. Available at www.bbc.
  co.uk/iplayer (Accessed 16 June 2008).

On page 55 on (unpublished) interviews:

Interviewee, A. (year of interview) Unpublished interview conducted
  by Interviewer Name, date of interview.

If you have the time, you could transcribe the interview yourself to make it easier to trace back the source. A good term to google is "Harvard Referencing for Visual Material". (Or whatever the appropriate referencing style is for your publication). I would cite it as an interview that you accessed online. The more you know about who conducted it, the better.
Imperial College London have an even more extensive guide on this, see page 12 here:

Example:  Kirk, T. Interviewed by: Picard, J. News Night Live. (24th June 2001) 10pm Channel 6.

My approach would be to see which referencing is most common in the area that you work in, to ensure consistency.
Edit: including time-stamps:

[...] the contribution of water damage can be seen at 2m33s in to the
  video (BBC, 2009).

See page 14 here.

yes that's true that in todays world you found yourself bound to cite video lecture, the thing is that [online] is also used for any material online. i meant if we can precisely cite with the time stamp from where the person speaks the sentence of interest.

thank you for the comment. I included another source dealing with time stamps. From my personal experience, time-stamps are only referred to in text (if at all) - but it might differ from discipline to discipline.

Answer Accepted :) , but i am not sure if supervisor will accept that in the report

In my field, it is not necessary to refer to the video at all if it is a published(!) interview. Find the interviewer and see if you can find out more that way. In addition, if this is a Youtube video for example, it probably shows dates/time and the TV channel it was aired.


text:
Does a preprint include revisions made in response to peer review?
This is related to but not answered in this question about the difference between various stages of a manuscript in the publication process.
After an author has submitted a manuscript to a journal for peer-review, very often the journal asks the author to revise (and resubmit) the manuscript as a precondition for its publication. I am wondering whether the term preprint refers to the manuscript before or after its authors made these revisions.
If a preprint includes revisions made in response to peer review, then there is only a slight difference, mostly regarding layout and style, between the preprint and the article that is published in the journal. From a reader’s perspective, there would be no point in paying for access to the article, since they can simply download the preprint free of charge. A publisher would probably want to prevent their authors (by publication agreements etc.) from publishing preprints that differ from the respective journal article only in form.
As a side question, what kind of preprints do publishers tolerate, as a rule?

There is no consistent terminolgoy in this respect. Sherpa/Romeo, a database for publisher’s pre-print policies and probably as close to an authority as you can get on this matter, writes about this:

The terms pre-print and post-print are used to mean different things by different people. This can cause some confusion and ambiguity.
One usage of the term pre-print is to describe the first draft of the article - before peer-review, even before any contact with a publisher. This use is common amongst academics for whom the key modification of an article is the peer-review process.
Another use of the term pre-print is for the finished article, reviewed and amended, ready and accepted for publication - but separate from the version that is type-set or formatted by the publisher. This use is more common amongst publishers, for whom the final and significant stage of modification to an article is the arrangement of the material for putting to print.
[…]
To try to clarify the situation, this listing characterises pre-prints as being the version of the paper before peer review and post-prints as being the version of the paper after peer-review, with revisions having been made.

Publisher’s policies on what authors may post on a preprint server vary a lot and Sherpa/Romeo maintains an overview over these policies. However, authors may not adhere to these policies or make the most of them when publishing their papers. Thus it is usually not possible to tell which version of the paper is published on a preprint repository.
When you want to publish your own papers, I recommend to check both, Sherpa/Romeo and the copyright agreement – most of them are suprisingly human-readable.

I've never heard the term "post-print" used in math, and etymologically it makes no sense.  Any version prior to the published one is called a preprint for us.  (And some people abuse the term preprint to also mean offprint/reprint/eprint.)

I am using Elsevier as example since they are often picked on for many of their policies. Elsevier attempts to be clear about their sharing policy and allows both preprints and accepted manuscripts to be shared. In "Elsevier speak" (which may not agree with standard usage of the terms in academia)
Preprint

This is the author's own write-up of research results and analysis that has not been peer reviewed, nor had any other value added to it by a publisher (such as formatting, copy-editing, technical enhancements, and the like).

Accepted manuscript

An accepted manuscript is the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which typically includes author-incorporated changes suggested during submission, peer review, and editor-author communications. They do not include other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination.

Elsevier allows for "accepted manuscripts" to be made available via "preprint" repositories (e.g., ArXiv) which of course speaks to how confusing the terminology is. So at least for articles published by Elsevier the difference between the published version and the version in a preprint repository might be limited to "copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements".
That said, and one of my pet peeves about preprint repositories, is that the "preprint" may have any number of non-peer-review changes. Maybe during the review process some controversial data or conclusions were removed from the manuscript. There is nothing preventing the authors from re-inserting this into the "preprint".

Until the legal paperwork is signed, the author has ownership of the paper. The words the author uses in revising the article are a product of their own brain and creativity, not direct editing by journal/publisher staff or the referee. IANAL, but my advice to those who do use the arXiv is to whip the revised article on the arXiv quick, and many people do, before signing anything.

An anecdote that probably won't generalise: I published a paper in a Springer mathematics journal, and after refereeing-related revisions, put that version of the article under a Creative Commons Zero license on the arXiv (it was there already, before submission), and then told the publisher that I couldn't legally sign their paperwork giving them exclusive right to publish the article. We came to an agreement, and they published my article. Again IANAL, and I did this as a gamble and don't necessarily recommend it unless people are confident they won't be summarily rejected.

@DavidRoberts Springer's policy allows archiving post-prints after the embargo period. Putting things on arXiv quick is likely not the way to work around restrictive publishers as they may call it a prior publication and not allow you to publish with them. The best thing is to publish with publishers that have rules that you are willing to follow.

I've never heard of a maths journal rejecting a paper for 'prior publication' for being on the arXiv. In some other fields I know it happens if you so much as tweet about the results. Needless to say, I agree with your last sentence!

The term "pre-print" generally refers to the author's final draft of the manuscript, usually the version that the author intends to submit to a journal. Thus, this draft is not peer-reviewed. For instance, Peer J defines pre-prints as follows:

A PeerJ 'PrePrint' is a draft that has not yet been peer reviewed for
  formal publication. Similar to preprint servers that already exist
  (for example arXiv.org), authors can submit draft, incomplete, or
  final versions of articles they are working on. preprints are not
  "publish ahead of print" articles, or articles that have been accepted
  and shown online before it has gone through typesetting, etc.

The term "post-print" is often used to refer to the revised version of the article, after the suggestions based on the peer reviewer comments have been included. In most cases, this is the version that has been accepted for publication. Thus, the post-print is very similar to the published article, with the published article including minor changes incorporated during copy editing.
Most publishers prefer to have pre-prints rather than post-prints on a public repository. Once the author has signed the copyright transfer document, he or she gives away a lot of rights to the publisher. As far as I know, copyright extends to the accepted version of the paper. Therefore, I think it is best to put up only pre-prints that have not been peer reviewed on public repositories. If you are planning to put up the revised version, that is, the version that has been accepted, it would be better to write to the journal and clarify before doing so.

Can you provide links to publishers that do not allow "post-prints"? I know the NIH requires post-prints to be made availble after the embargo period.

@StrongBad: Sherpa/Romeo has its own category for such journals. I never encountered one and I haven’t checked those journals’ policies in detail, but it may serve as a starting point to answer that question.

@Wrzlprmft nice resource, but I think blue allows post-prints and yellow is pre-print only: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/definitions.php?la=en&fIDnum=|&mode=simple&version=#colours

@StrongBad: Indeed, my bad.

Therefore, I think it is best to put up only pre-prints that have not been peer reviewed on public repositories. – I do not consider this good advice. Many journals allow uploading the post-print, but there are some that do not allow uploading either. Hence, you cannot simply default to uploading a certain stage – you have to check the copyright agreement or at least Sherpa/Romeo. Also, asking the journal seems like overly complicated in most cases, where there is a human-readable copyright agreement telling you what you can do.


text:
Is there any advantage of putting source tex file on arXiv?
I don't really like other people seeing my source file. Are there good reasons to upload the source file (.tex) on arXiv over uploading just the PDF?

If your PDF was generated from Latex, arXiv will not allow you to upload the PDF by itself, and will require the source. They give some explanation of why they do it (saving space, etc.)

By source file, do you mean LaTeX source or the source code for the simulation through which the results are obtained for your research?

@ÉbeIsaac I mean LaTeX source.

May I know why are you sceptical about submitting your LaTeX source? It would be easier to answer based on your opinion.

http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex

@ÉbeIsaac There are a lot of irrelevant comments in it. Maybe I should take the time to delete them though :)

@Alexi: There are scripts out there that do this for you.

http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex suggests the one-line script
perl -pe 's/(^|[^\])%.*/\1%/' < old.tex > new.tex

Sometimes you see a paper and it has some styling/notation that you don't know how you would implement. I would have no problem if people picked up tricks from my LaTeX source code, as often it takes a while to initially figure it out. At the same time, I happily grab snippets of useful formatting code for later use (leaving a LaTeX comment with where I found it originally for the benefit of anyone reading the source). This form of sharing is beneficial to the community as a whole - otherwise everyone would have to spend hours trawling through forums to find how to work around some bugs.

Without the .tex sources we wouldn't have Overhead on AstroPh

@RanG. Can you please turn this comment into an answer, so that I can vote it up?

@Wrzlprmft: There are scripts that selectively delete all irrelevant comments and leave all the relevant comments in? (Speaking as a software developer who considers it a virtue to leave well-commented code, including in TeX ;) )

Why don't you like other people seeing your source file?

Arxiv mandates uploading the source of any PDF file generated from Latex code. You will not be able to upload only the PDF version in this case (unless you succeed to game the system).
Why do the require the source? This saves quite a lot of space (50k-100k source vs. 500-900k PDF) and there are some additional reasons. As the other comments mention - the full explanations are in http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex

At the start, I'd like to direct attention to @Noah Snyder's comment on the OP: http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex
If for no other reason, I'd be happy to see ArXiV and others steer away from the ubiquitous PDF format because it's proprietary (see various places in the Wikipedia article).
One GPL alternative I've had experience with is the ultra-lightweight DjVu format.

@NajibIdrissi I thank you for your comment. I think this is an excellent place for a discussion for and against the use of PDF as the standard in Academia. Especially from arXiv, I'd expect to rule out any proprietary tools, right off the bat.Replacing the PDF format may alleviate some of the reasons which make the OP feel (half-heartedly) that he needs to upload the TeX source.

I agree with Najib that the last two paragraphs are not an answer to the question.

DjVu is made for scanned, raster format documents. It's wholly unsuitable as an alternative to PDF for scientific papers.

I think this is an excellent place for a discussion — Nope.  StackExchange is not an excellent place for a discussion.  This is a question and answer site, not a discussion forum.


text:
Alternative to google scholar in China
Are there any valid alternatives to google scholar?
I am currently living in China. almost the whole internet is blocked, including Google. I tried to bypass the firewall, then google scholar tends to deny my access claiming that the traffic is suspicious.
Are there other valid alternatives to google scholar where I can easily search for random scientific papers from different fields and trace their citations Thanks!

you should change title to "... in china". Really surprising to me they block GS, even at chinese universities? Looks like huge disadvantage for chinese academia, as to my knowlegde other search engines like web of science or scopus only index the abstract, not full text of papers...

Microsoft versions of stuff typically works there (bing, skype, outlook). They also have something that looks like google scholar called microsoft academic. I'd expect it to work in china too.

It actually worked. Still, need to see how good it is... thannks!

How is your Baidu experience? Mine is fine, it does find stuff I want. But, I may not be in your field, mileage may vary.

What's your field?

Look into VPN services asap, otherwise you just can't work properly. Also check out shadowsocks servers. I was a postdoc in China for 2 years.

@Scientist I think the OP is saying google is blocking their access through the VPN they tried. Also china continually adds VPN's to their blocked sites and the legality of using them is unclear, particularly if the OP is a chinese national. Plus the VPN's themselves may be risky to use. So one must be careful with such advice.

For a mirror of Google Scholar:
https://scholar.glgoo.org/

thanks, it worked even without a VPN! However, I can not trace the citation easily. Clicking "cited by" has no effect...

The only other thing I can suggest is that in my experience google scholar doesn't block all VPN traffic, so if there are alternative VPN servers available you may have better luck with them.

You might be able to use Tor to access Google Scholar, which can be downloaded with the following link: https://www.torproject.org/.  You'll probably need a mirror to access it: https://mirror.oldsql.cc/tor/.
There is something called the Great Firewall of China that would need to be bypassed, though.  Apparently, this can be done using obfsproxy.  There is a paper on usenix that goes into much more detail about it in the Circumvention section of the paper.  https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci12/foci12-final2.pdf
The benefit of using Tor is you would be able to access a lot more of the internet that is blocked off except for websites that block Tor nodes.

I wonder if we should really suggest doing something illegal here on Stack Exchange (even if myself and, I suspect, the vast majority of users strongly disagree with the law in this case).

http://xueshu.baidu.com/
This is the Google Scholar alternative.

Need to use keyword in Chinese for better results, as suggested by scaaahu, the mileage may vary.

you are right, for Chinese maybe, for papers published in English, not that useful...

It is not China that blocks it, it is Google. China's autonomous routing domain drops in transit all requests to the top level domain "google.com". If you access google scholar through a private VPN on a server that belongs to almost any American company (e.g. Digital Ocean in my case), then google will block your IP because apparently they are afraid their "free" service will be mined for free by an industrial competitor:

We're sorry... ... but your computer or network may be sending
  automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request
  right now.

You got to use one of the lower quality free vpns on the phone with multiple rolling servers that use ips not flagged as commercial by Google. Beware though those free VPNs can scrape your personal sensitive data from your phone as well.
By the way you can still see your profile through the link
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=your scholar account id
you just can't view who cited you or run any search.
Pity because I just want to check who is that one person who just cited one of my papers that I thought no one would ever cite...


text:
Is a hypothesis necessary for empirical research?
Suppose I would like to do an experiment that compares two existing methods for solving a certain problem, and decides which method is better (in some predefined metric).
I can start with a hypothesis: "Method A performs at least as good as method B", and then do the experiment and refute the hypothesis by showing that method B performs better and the difference is statistically significant.
Alternatively, I can just do the experiment without any preliminary hypothesis, and find out - again - that method B performs better and the difference is statistically significant.
Is there any advantage to the first approach? Why do I need to start with a hypothesis if I end up doing the same experiment and getting to the same result?

If you do not have a "preliminary hypothesis," then you cannot do hypothesis testing.  If you do not do hypothesis testing, then how do you find out "that method B performs better and the difference is statistically significant"?

Is this question about empirical research in computer science or in natural sciences? Things can be quite different when the object of study is the method instead of the data.

@JouniSirén in computer science. The object of study is indeed the method (the algorithm).

You fail to recognize you already had a hypothesis. You have method A and method B, so clearly both are important And you knew that a priori.
That said, you can remain agnostic as to the direction or non-direction of the effect (better? Worse?) - and that is the difference between one-tailed and two-tailed tests.

Your question itself is very hypothetical, because as soon as you need funding/grants or conduct experiments with costly infrastructure you have to argue for others or your self, if it is reasonable what you are doing.
Just comparing two methods and looking what is better afterwards is not how planned research is working and experiments like hubble space telescope or CERN particle accelerator could have been never started.
If your "experiment" is computation time like pointed to in the comment of Siren, then it's up to you but maybe also up to computation infrastructure you need to start with a hypothesis. But I doubt as a physicist that CS is less hypothetical than natural sciences, because you can do very much cheap computation experiments and need a reason to start a specific one. So you also end/start with a hypothesis before doing the computation.
Research is planful thinking, what you describe would be random trial and error, this is also practiced for instance in superconductivity research, labs put together for decades random materials to test for high-temperature superconductivity because this was/is the only way without a theoretical base for long time. But you only get funding for such experiments, if at all, as long as the topic is trendy.

“I doubt as a physicist that CS is less hypothetical than natural sciences” It actually can be, because a decent chunk of it uses artefact-oriented research using methodologies like the Design Science Research Methodology.

Why is conducting an experiment for comparing two well-established theoretical methods, without assuming beforehand which of them is better, considered "random trial and error"?

@ErelSegal-Halevi if the two methods are already well-established (experimentally), I don't see the need to compare them again. If they have been only theoretically suggested so far, then the motivation/hypothesis maybe should at least be why you assume a difference maybe due to exptrapolation, estimations, error analysis... I don't want to read a paper where someone just compares empirically two methods and ends with X is better/more accurate than Y empirically. I guess you have a hard time to submit such a paper to a good journal, but you can try of course.

@user48953094 You are confusing the initial motivation with the final paper. For various reasons, theoretical predictions in CS are often inaccurate. It makes sense to do reality checks to see how the methods perform in practice. While implementing the methods and experimenting them, one usually finds ways to improve them. Then the real contribution of the paper is not the initial evaluation but the improvements and their analysis.

It is not necessarily true that you will draw the same conclusions when doing experiments with or without a hypothesis. This is because a good hypothesis contains an expectation of the outcome which you can and usually will formulate - in text or in thoughts - due to your expertise. So you already have an idea what to look for. The conclusions you draw from the data is therefore biased by your previous knowledge. You might even overlook some other unexpected important result due to this bias.
The last sentence already tells you how you can describe results you obtain without a previous hypothesis: They are chance encounters you find when carefully analyzing your data you collected for another purpose.
You could in theory of course collect data without any intended purpose. However, people usually prefer to follow a systematic approach with hypotheses allowing them to plan their research. And this is the primary purpose of hypotheses: Planning the research. The necessary experiments are then deduced from the hypotheses. Therefore it is next to impossible that you would perform the same experiments with and without a hypothesis.
But results cannot be planned, and chance encounters are not so rare. Then often a new hypothesis is formulated afterwards which is used to generate some common thread e.g. in a publication.

Yes. "in text or in thoughts". Writing it down, gives you a better chance to examine and refine it, of course.

In some sense, there is always a hypothesis, but this is not always a useful way to look at the situation.
A key thing in experimental work in computer science is that the specific results rarely matter. We are measuring the performance of implemented methods, but the implementations are imperfect realizations of theoretical methods, which in turn are imperfect realizations of some key ideas. We are measuring the implementations, but we usually want to judge the ideas. If the ideas are worthy, somebody may eventually come up with a better realization of them.
There are often huge systematic biases in the measurements. The implementation of one method may be of higher quality than the other. Or maybe one method is a straightforward realization of the ideas, while another contains many tweaks and details that improve its performance. Or when we are interested in computational performance, the relative results may depend on hardware. Then we are measuring the performance on yesterday's hardware, but we are really trying to make predictions about the performance on unknown future hardware.
Because of the systematic biases, experimental computer science is often only interested in large differences in performance. If you have to think about statistical significance to see the difference, the difference is probably not significant. In such situations, the choice of the method often depends on other factors, such as the ease of implementing, using, and understanding the method or adapting it to solve a slightly different task.
While statistical significance has a role in experimental computer science, it is not as useful as in natural sciences. After all, statistical significance is a tool for dealing with random variation in measurements. But if we already know the specific causal mechanism behind the method, and if we treat the data as a fixed quantity that can be reduced to a set of combinatorial and statistical properties, there should not be much random variation left. If we see significant unexplained variation in measurements, it often indicates that we have not found the relevant properties of the data, or that there are some issues in the method, the implementation, or the experimental setup.
So what does this mean in practice? Often the first step is simply running the methods with various kinds of data to see what happens. This may already give decisive results. One method may be consistently better than the other, or maybe the performance of the methods is similar on all datasets. In such cases, we probably want to repeat the experiments in a more rigorous manner, but there is usually no need for formulating and testing hypotheses.
On the other hand, if the relative performance of the methods varies significantly from dataset to dataset, it probably depends on the properties of the data. Finding the relevant properties is clearly a place for hypothesis-driven work. Or maybe the results were not what we expected. Maybe we expected, based on our theoretical understanding of the method, that the method should perform well with certain kinds of data, but that did not happen. The issue may be with the implementation, the experimental setup, or the data – or even with the theoretical understanding. In such situations, it can be helpful to clearly formulate the hypotheses before testing them.

It depends on the type of research you’re doing.
There are three different general types of research: descriptive/qualitative, scientific/quantitative, and artefact-oriented. Only scientific/quantitative research uses hypothesis testing, and all three approaches are used in the IT space depending on what your research question is.
Artefact-oriented research involves the creation of an artefact and its evaluation against the state of the art, often using a methodology like the Design Science Research Methodology. Qualitative research involves gathering descriptive data that you then analyse to extract meaning from; in the IT space, it often involves asking users things like “what did you like/dislike about X” and then applying techniques like thematic analysis or coding to the results. Scientific/quantitative approaches involve creating a hypothesis, gathering numerical data, then performing statistical analysis on the data to prove or disprove your hypothesis.

Yes, for empirical research you should have a hypothesis. While review papers don't necessarily need one, you should still have one to outline the expectations going into it based on the literature. I would say "check the style guidelines" but I have never come across one that says a hypothesis is either optional or not required.
Some exceptions to this have been noted in other answers, but they are by-and-large just that, exceptions. I do touch on one potential exception later on.
If you are doing empirical research, a hypothesis is important for a number of reasons. If you absolutely have no preconceived idea regarding the outcome— which I find highly unlikely—a null hypothesis that there will be no observed difference is the go to here.

Context: A hypothesis clearly defines the context of the experiment, "what it is" that we're looking to determine, it's why you're doing the experiment. Yes, you will have a chance to postulate on observed phenomenon and discuss the results and their implications later in the paper, but clearly defining the scope in relation to a hypothesis is crucial to a quality paper.
Bias: When it comes time for peer review it is important to look for and consider biases in experimental design and outcomes. With no hypothesis—unless the abstract/introduction is so specific so that it might as well be one—there's no indication as to the perspective of the researcher. This is particularly important in clinical fields and other traditional sciences where there are real, sometimes large-scale human/environmental impact, but new(er) fields like data-science and A.I. are rapidly having as much if not more of an affect on society.

Even in validation studies where new equipment or methodology is being tested, you should state the expectations and whether they're based on similar models, testing, etc. This is really the only type of paper I would say could be an exception. Sometimes a papers only purpose is to answer the question: "Does this work?"
There is a peer responsibility to make sure conclusions and solutions resulting from empirical research is neutral in all regards except for the variable being tested. A strong hypothesis (or an introduction answering the "why?" and at least touching on expectations, if applicable) is where it starts.

IMO even reviews are much more readable if they have a hypothesis. Might not be as formal, but even if it's providing "both sides" it's easier to have an idea and produce pros and cons than to just arbitrarily summarize findings.

@BryanKrause Totally agree. I only point it out with the context of the question being their necessity. Even a review that doesn't state "my hypothesis is" is likely going to have a hypothesis. Did edit for more clarification on that point though, as they should be there.


text:
What is the German equivalent of "in press"
Just wondering if any German speakers can tell me how a manuscript "in press" is described in Germany. Writing up a German CV but I've never come across this phrase before. It could be a direct translation but I doubt it.
Vielen Dank im Voraus

You can write "Zur Veröffentlichung angenommen in...".
I think this is the most common phrase in Germany ("Im Druck" would sound weird).

@DVSA I don't agree. Most of the Google hits are in fact Austrian websites and Austrian and German grammar do not always agree. In Germany, "Im Druck" is correct and "In Druck" not.

Isn't "Zur Veröffentlichung angenommen in..." rather meaning "accepted"? I agree that "Im Druck" is right but I never saw this anywhere

Sure, but I think that "in press" (and "im Druck" as well) ist a bit s outdated as many journals are not printed (let alone pressed) anymore.

A shorter alternative to @Dirk's answer is "Erscheint in..." (literally, "to appear in...").
(Some journals also put manuscripts online as soon as they are edited or even accepted, but before they get an official volume and pagination; these are -- depending on the publisher -- also sometimes called "in press". In that case, I would just treat it as a terminus technicus and leave it as is, but the publisher usually explicitly states somewhere how these should be cited exactly.)


text:
Can I share an unpublished paper without this counting as prior publication?
I need to share a draft of a scientific paper with another person. I have the intention of publish it, but it is not ready for submission yet.
When submitting my paper, I would like to avoid accusations that it is not original work.
Do I have to take anything into account in this respect before sending it?

Do you have any particular concern why you should not just email the paper to your colleague?

More than a colleague, he is a person interested in the work.

I answered with "use dropbox", and you commented that you don't want to know the best way to share the paper, but rather the "legal consequences" of doing so. Since this differs from the title of your question, and both the title and your comment differ from the question in the last line, I've deleted my answer and flagged your question as "unclear what you're asking". Please edit it to make it explicit exactly what you'd like to know.

@siserte and what's the concern?

@henning it is an unveiled work that I expect to publish I would not like to read any subsequent review  saying that it is a non original work.

@Pont I hope it will be better now

As per your comment, your main concern is that your sharing the draft may count as prior publication and will prevent you from eventually publishing the final paper.
Sharing a draft does not count as publication.
Moreover, your draft is most likely going to change a lot before you submit the final manuscript to a journal for review. In general, it is a good idea to share drafts early and often, so you can collect as much feedback as possible.
Some precautions:

make the draft status explicit
ensure the paper can't be found online before acceptance, so as not to compromise blind review (may depend on the field)
ask that the draft paper not be cited or circulated without permission

ensure the paper can't be found online – This is not a sound advice for fields with an active preprint culture, such as those fields using the Arxiv.

@Wrzprmft maybe like this? I've had a paper rejected, because a draft with my name was online.


text:
How can I decide on taking four classes for first year in graduate school?
I just finished undergraduate degree from a mediocre liberal arts college. I am attending a graduate school ranked about 30. I feel that I am lacking a little in my basic knowledge. Therefore, I was thinking about taking three to four classes in basic subjects (two semesters each of algebra, real analysis, complex analysis and algebraic topology) during my first year.
Coming from a liberal arts college, I have never taken four classes in a single semester and my plan is to do exactly that for two consecutive semesters.
If it helps, those four classes would be 16 credits in a semester. Algebra and analysis are 5.0 credits each. Complex analysis and algebraic topology are 3.0 credits each.
Also I am on a fellowship for first year of my graduate school, which means I do not have to teach and can dedicate my time for studies.
How can I approach this decision? What aspect may I not have taken into account?

At my school, full-time grad students take three courses (the equivalent of 9 credits, or 10 if there's one class with a lab component). Taking four in a semester is uncommon.

If it helps, those four classes would be 16 credits in a semester. Algebra and Analysis are 5.0 credits each. Complex Analysis and Algebraic Topology are 3.0 credits each.

My opinion: Don't take 4; you risk early burnout like I did.  Take 3 (or only 2 if possible), and focus on those subjects so that you can pass the prelims. It's great that you want a solid background in multiple areas (this is what the prelim system is designed for), but in reality you're not going to use most of it in your research.

It's an excellent question. Since it depends a lot on individual factors, and the structure of the program in question, I recommend that you address it to the graduate director, and/or other faculty members, at the university where you will be attending. Good luck!

Totally suggest the above by @Anonymous. And if you do talk to someone in the program, make sure that they give you the correct information about what "full-time" enrollment is.

You might, but most people would suggest that you don't. Graduate course loads (in the US) tend to be lighter than undergraduate course loads by one to two classes per semester. You will likely have many other responsibilities as a graduate student that are more important than getting through classes quickly.

@David I am on a fellowship for first year of my graduate school, which means I do not have to teach and can dedicate my time for studies.

@HumbleStudent If your graduate program is anything like the norm, then classroom time should not be a major priority of yours. You will probably be better served by trying out a few potential research advisors, or getting started on reading into the literature around your chosen research field than will additional courses. Additional classes for the sake of more breadth is not valuable for you at this point- your undergraduate degree has given you a reasonable breadth education. Pick up topics and classes when you need them- it's time to start going deep.

@HumbleStudent Which country is this in?

Standard advice for PhD students in my (CS) department is to never take more than two "real" classes a semester; if you have extra time, or you need more credit hours in your schedule, spend it on independent study/research/advisor-hunting.

@owjburnham I am in the United States

Looking back at my own experience, I took 4 courses during my second semester of grad school, for approximately the same reasons as OP, and it turned out to be the right decision. I'm not sure whether doing so is a  good idea for OP, but I don't believe that it's obviously a bad one.

In the U.S., to have a fellowship as opposed to teaching assistantship really does free up considerable time each week, so four classes rather than the norm of three is completely plausible, if that's the way you decide to go.
I would want to strongly disagree with some of the claims, in comments above, that you'll never use most of the Prelim-level material "in your research". This is not naturally true, but can certainly be made true by being sufficiently ignorant, and/or sufficiently misconstruing the material in the Prelims and corresponding courses. (Also, one may encounter caricatures of Prelim exams.)
I would also strongly disagree with the claim that a (typical) undergrad degree in math (in the U.S.) provides sufficient breadth. This is even more crazily false than the supposed irrelevance of Prelim exam material. But, as with most things, clever people can contrive arguments for or against almost anything.
The genuine question is whether you should do four "core" courses, rather than take "electives", and/or self-study or group-study. First, this obviously depends on how effective/disciplined you are at self-study. If "very", then this is probably optimal to some degree, because it can be more flexibly scheduled, if nothing else. If you do better in a group setting, or with an instructor organizing things and making a schedule, then coursework might be better.
But there does remain the question of whether or not to try to do all the basic things (by which I don't mean standard U.S. undergrad math) prior to everything else. I generally don't think this is a good idea. Instead of all four basic grad courses, maybe do three and an "elective" in the/a direction of your curiosity. Maybe with less homework, and less "adversarial" feeling.
Over the years, I have seen many people "get tired" from (arguably over-assigned) homework, to the point that they have forgotten why they came to grad school, have forgotten their affection for math, and have lost a sense of genuine curiosity, from being "over-driven".
For that matter, much of the "basic" material is deemed essential-for-everyone (not only for general cultural sense, but) because it comes up all the time. (Sure, there is tradition, too, whose inertia sometimes swamps sense.) If/when people (especially novices, e.g, grad students) tell you that you "don't need to know" various things, you really should not believe them too strongly (because they probably don't know what they're talking about, or else, if nothing else, they'd have subtler opinions about it), even if they are your friends and/or peers.
It is true that thinking in terms of "research", especially if this means something opposite to the artificially over-ordered world-view of textbooks and established curriculum (and grades, and schedules), is a very good thing. Genuine mathematics is not as highly ordered/structured as one might imagine from textbooks and standardized course concepts. Nor are the questions/issues at the end of any particular chapter, so that one knows the relevant theorems! It is also not "graded". So, yes, experiencing something opposite to classwork is very good... but this is absolutely not an either/or.
That is, whether you acquire basics by self-study or guided study or coursework, that is just one thread. There is at least one other, the one where you make the decisions, based on your curiosity, etc, and are not graded or judged. We can call this "research", but that word has much other baggage these days, which is not immediately relevant to the practice of mathematics.

I will certainly discuss this topic with advisers in the department once I get there. I might go with three classes and if I have time left, I might go for self-study.
I have had 6 reading courses in my previous Liberal Arts Colleges and would like to believe that I am self-motivated and disciplined. Therefore, self-studying might not be that bad (Finding a couple of friends to accompany me will be even better).. Thank you for your valuable insight.