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Has any scholar systematically categorized the types of bias found in sources?
I am preparing a lesson on bias in historical writings.
I have identified different causes of bias, for example:

Primary source written from by someone wanting to exaggerate their own accomplishments.
Secondary source written by a descendant.
Book commissioned by a town museum honoring the town's namesake.
A personal enemy writing negatively about someone.

There are also different ways the bias can manifest itself:

Soldiers exaggerating size of their enemy and enemy units killed.
Primary source neglecting to include servants or slaves in a list of people involved in an event.
Secondary source skips over events that shows a historical hero in a negative light.

My concern is I'm missing many potential types of bias. There are tons of lists on-line, but they're never comprehensive or organized. I'm wondering if there is a leading scholar in this subject who has come up with a comprehensive way to categorize or classify bias?

I'd wonder if it was even possible.  It seems like "motivations for bias" would be nearly as wide-spanning as "motivations".  It's a bit difficult to be comprehensive on something that extensive that's also that vague.

@BenBarden Maybe they won't be able to list everything, but at least create categories or naming conventions under which most or all types will fall?


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How to address students who do not attend, yet want to keep up with the course?
Recently, some students skipped some lessons without note (within the drop policy limits). I post basic instructions to a course Web site where any student can check, but since these students missed classes, the instructions are insufficient, so they send me E-mails or call asking me "explain what to do". As the homework involves on-going projects, such requests is occupying much of my time. I can demonstrate aspects in the class that require extensive writing to explain in an E-mail.

Is it acceptable practice to turn students away?
Is it my responsibility to assist students who fall behind in this manner to catch up with the other students?

Quite often I have found people miss class with an acceptable reason but without a note for whatever reason. That being they are too shy or don't think its your business so long as its within the drop limits. However, I do feel that providing a simple overview of things online is sufficient, so long as things such as "What to do" are answered, as you cannot expect them to suddenly know what question to answer and they may not have friends who attended or any friends who do attend to tell them. However, it is not expected you provide long detailed explanations of every step for them online.

"drop policy" -- I assume that this is a policy which states how many classes a student may drop before questions are asked?

I know instructors who as a general policy only accept these types of inquiries in office hours and not by email, which seems like a reasonable policy as long as you have it in your syllabus.

"Come to class".

I'll look at these two points:
1) Your course is structured in a way that there is no any alternative way to acquire the materials you cover in class; attending the lecture is the only way. AND
2) You have never expressed, either written in syllabus or spoken to the full class, that it's the student's sole responsibility to coordinate with other students/TAs to catch up with the materials they missed when they were absent.
If either of this is yes, I'd at least help the student once, and then make sure the whole class will know of point 2 as soon as possible.
If there are a lot of them waiting for you, try:

Name the chapters/sections in the assigned texts that will cover a majority of what you talked about in class.
Have them work in group to come up with a strategy on those "what to do," and meet with them as a group to go over their questions.
Group them and give a blanket tutorial. You can also make this a challenging task by asking each of the absentees responsible for sorting and summarizing the texts, or have them work on a problem set together.
Invest in either a cheap recorder or screen/voice capturing software to archive your lecture, so that you can prevent other situations like this from happening again.

It's hard to give a "should" or "shouldn't." Analyzing the situation case by case and contrasting with our teaching philosophy along the way should be sufficient to hint what to do.

Instructors often say/write in syllabus, "If you miss class, you are responsible for making up the work" - which students interpret to mean, "If you miss class, you must email the instructor to find out how to make up the work." If you want them to get the work from other students/TA and not the instructor you have to make that very, very, very clear.

During my student years, I quite seldom attended lectures. It clashes with my preferred method of learning: I always want to stop and think things through before moving on. Hence, I always fall hopelessly behind during lectures and am much better off spending that time reading the course material. I don't know how responsible the students who skipped your class are: whether they do their best to keep up with the course, but please be aware that some people just aren't suited for learning via lectures.
I don't know what kinds of courses you teach, which country/university you're in or whether your university requires students to show up for lectures to get a passing grade, so let me just state my policy when teaching courses: All information on what is required of a student to pass the course should be made available online. So should hand-outs and instructions for assignments etc. I claim no responsibility to remind absent students of deadlines etc., but in my view, a student who skips lectures but who is responsible and willing to actively keep him/herself updated on what is going on in the course, should have access to everything required to take part in it.

The added benefit of publishing everything necessary to complete the course online is also for those who did attend. They may want to refresh their memory or misinterpreted part of your lecture the first time. It would be interesting to see studies on how this would influence the average grade, but I think we can all guess the outcome.

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How to prove receipt/no receipt of work?
Last term, I collected some important projects from about 200 students. When I returned all of the work the next week, one student claimed that they had submitted their work, but never received it back. A misplaced project was highly unlikely, as they were individually bound in a uniform, bright cover and carried in sealed bags, so I assigned the student a 0. Still, I would like to have proof of “no submit”, especially as my supervisor occasionally wants an explanation for failing grades. But not having something is not proof of never submitting. What method can I use in the future to prove that a student did not submit their work?

There's a blog post from a few years back about giving out actual physical receipts with cryptographic signature (to prevent forgery). Likely unfeasible with a class of 200, but still worth a read.

I actually did the cryptographic signature technique that @waiwai933 promotes with a class of ~30 students and it worked fantastically. If you have a TA and do this only for important assignments, then I think this will work very effectively if you split the class up into two. Should only take 8-10 minutes in-class if you take the time to organize the slips of paper to give them.

@waiwai933 I thought of this, too, but you'd have a signature from them. That's harder to set up.

Would it be possile to additionally have them hand in an electronic copy, even if you for whatever reason need or want to have the physical copy? The electronic system (Blackboard, Turnitin, whatever...) will make it easy to prove (for both parties!) whether something has been handed in or not.

I doubt this will work with 200 students, but the first thing I do when I collect assignments is check to see whose assignment is missing, and send the relevant students a message via the class messaging system. This does two things:

if there was a slipup at either end, this catches it quickly. Most often, the student says that they're turning it in late (I have an automatic submit-late-and-get-deductions policy).
By using the class messaging system, I'm on record as having asked the student about the missing assignment. If they complain a week later that they did turn it in, I can point to the message and ask why they didn't respond to it.

This is what we do at my school. Luckily, we have admins who handle this for us so the teachers do not need to track who did not submit. If you want the information and nobody will help you (as the OP's comment on Raphael's question implies), you'll have to do it yourself.

It's easy to given students the ability to prove that they submitted (some form of receipt only you could have authored). The other direction, however, is harder.

Hightech
Have them submit electronically with a system that you don't control and that stores timestamps with submissions. It does not show up there on time, you did not submit in time.
Lowtech
Have them sign when handing in (make sure to announce that submissions are only valid if signed off). You receive their submission, they sign some form for you (and you sign their receipt). Have witnesses.

In the end, there is no way you can make sure it's their fault; they can beat any system ("I lost the receipt!", "That's not my signature, somebody must have forged it!", "You never told me to sign!", ...). As far as I know, German courts typically rule in favor of students (if there is any doubt), even in ridiculous circumstances. That may be different in other countries, but you may want to check back with your university's legal department to be safe.

The first method will not work in my case, as much of the content is not electronic. If I tried the second, it would take too long to wait for them to stand in line and submit the work one-by-one.

@Village Do you have TAs and/or colleagues that can help you out for 20 minutes?

No, I do not have any TAs.

@Village That's too bad then. I guess there's no free lunch here.

A few thoughts in addition to the above:

Is there a departmental office or library that can help with accepting submissions and giving receipts?
Can the department hire a temp for a day to handle the submissions?
Strongly suggest to the students that they copy and/or photograph their work, in case of disaster.  Provide a means for them to upload their photo albums to the department.

For a large class, without or with receipts, set up 4 (or more boxes) split alphabetically. Students drop off the work and possibly sign a sheet. Either give them a quiz immediately while you double-check that you have all work, or check it later that day and query for any missing work.
If you're using a sign-in sheet, and a student wants to turn in someone else's, he or she discusses it with you directly. That way you don't get, "But I had Lisa turn in my work for me!"

If you use coversheets:

acknowledgement of all policies and adherence thereto, is checked and signed by the student,
a QR or barcode, containing their student number and name, course number and assignment number, and a timestamp is generated,
the QR or barcode forms part of the coversheet, and is scanned in when they submit, then out when it is returned or collected,
an email gets sent to the student confirming their submission for that assignment.

While it takes some thought to set up, the implementation is as simple as taking a picture on a smartphone, and scales extremely well (increasing returns on effort expended per assignment/course/student/year added).

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How to prevent students from having an unfair advantage on exams, when they are held on different days?
I teach a writing course to different sections, across different days of the week. From the schedule, some students will take their mid-term exam early in the week, while others will take it later in the week. Recently, I found one student who was “just checking to see what the exam was like”, but was planning to go to another session to actually take the test. I realized there might be a variety of ways that students taking the exams on Friday would have an advantage over those taking it on a Monday.
I've taken the following steps in an attempt to address this problem:

I build multiple tests, e.g. "A", "B", "C", etc., which are of similar difficulty, have the same types of problems, but different subjects. "A" is given to one section, "B" to another, etc.
Provided a sample test that students can print and practice with and discuss with me in class.

Note that, there are several challenges to administering this:

The classes are large, and the school offers me no assistance in managing the exams.
Many students regularly attend my lectures during sections that they did not register for, so I will not easily recognize who belongs in which time.

Are there any additional steps I should consider to make sure the test is administered fairly?

Do a real exam timetable, so that all students that take an exam does it at the same time/day regardless of the section that take the course in.   It is not hard, the software to workout the exam timetable is on the open market.

@Ian that's not allowed at many universities.  You have to get special permission to do that at my institution and it's really only given to certain freshman level courses for finals.  Space is one of the hardest considerations.

@guifa, is it a space problem, or unwillness to buy good exam scheduleing software?   UK universities cope, buy they tend to think that it is important to get that sort of thing right.

What I do is pre-print the student's name directly on the test (and only have 1 copy of each), so that this is basically impossible.

Many students regularly attend my lectures during sections that they did not register for, so I will not easily recognize who belongs in which time.

This is handled as follows at my university:

Students entering the exam room go to the exam proctor before they sit down
Exam proctor has a list of students enrolled in the class
Student shows a photo ID to the proctor
Proctor notes on the list that the student attended the exam on that date, gives the student an exam book, and tells him where to sit.

This way, students can attend only one exam (and if you want, you can enforce that they attend the section they're assigned to).

I build multiple tests, e.g. "A", "B", "C", etc., which are of similar difficulty, have the same types of problems, but different subjects. "A" is given to one section, "B" to another, etc.

This is OK, although if students aren't sure what types of problems you're going to give they'll still gain an unfair advantage if they hear about the exam from earlier sections. However, you can avoid this if you...

Provided a sample test that students can print and practice with and discuss with me in class.

Giving plenty of sample exams ensures that students thoroughly understand the type of questions to expect. Then, if each section is given a different exams of the same type, but different problems, there is no advantage to hearing about the "type" of the exam from earlier sections.
Sometimes you can avoid having to build many exams by giving everyone about 80% of the exam "content" ahead of time. Then vary the remaining 20% between sections.
For example, in a writing exam where students have to read some text and write an essay in response to a "prompt": give everyone the text ahead of time, then give every section a different prompt to respond to.
(You can do something similar in problem-set type exams, such as those given in science and engineering, by giving everyone the problem scenarios ahead of time and then asking each section to solve something different about the scenario.)
Depending on the exam type, it may or may not be possible to design an exam of this type. However, if it is possible, it certainly reduces the likelihood that students will gain an advantage from hearing about an earlier section's exam.

I have faced with all of the above situations this semester alone! I teach two different sections spread over all 5 days of the week. How do I ensure heterogeneity of examinations? By administering different versions (different questions) of the examination.
Throw into this mix, my need to "accommodate" students with "needs" and different time frames that they require. The only way I managed this was have different versions of the exam and had to invigilate these examinations myself (no help from uni) at different times of the week and well into 6pm on a Friday. I ended up having 5 different versions with varying number if questions but potentially the same difficulty level.
Yes, some students cribbed at the end of the day about them not solving the same problem set as their peers but I had to (politely) ask them to deal with it. If they are thrust into a real world situation, outside the safe confines of a university setting, they may have to face non-homogeneous conditions on a regular basis with difficult time lines.
I self-tested these different versions and all of them took the same amount of time withing +/- 5 minutes for me. Yes, perhaps not the best metric but fair enough, I supposed. However, a lot of teaching may be subjective. You can try to use a grading rubric that you publish after the examination so that the students feel that it was a fair metric/yard-stick.
This was for a first year engineering class on Engineering Mechanics.

If they are thrust into a real world situation... The University IS a real world situation and I wish more students would realize this.  Unfortunately, it just so happens that Uni is typically the first time a student enters the 'real world' so the transition is difficult.

@LordStryker Well my uni is not quite real world. We seem to coddle students and give them second chances for some egregious offences.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what exams for writing courses even look like, so this is a general answer.
Students will talk to each other and thus information about the contents of the first exam is going to leak, no matter what you do. Therefore your goal should be that the information about the content of the first exam does not give any advantages on the second exam (keeping both exams at the same difficulty).
There are basically two ways to achieve this (and you do not need to consistently follow one throughout the exam):

Make information that could be obtained from the first exam available to everybody beforehand, e.g., clearly state that there will be a question of a given type.
Make information that could be obtained from the first exam useless in the second exam, e.g., by not asking a similar question.

The main difficulty is now to recognise useful information. One pedantic example to illustrate this:
Suppose, there is a topic which is not central to your course and which is considered difficult or unfit for exams by your students to the extent that students have a good reason to assume that it is not relevant for the exam. If you (do not) ask a question about this topic in the first exam, students taking the second exam have a better estimate of the probability that you ask questions about this subject and thus have an advantage if you (do not) ask a question about it in the second exam – even if it is entirely different. So, if there is such a subject, you either have to announce beforehand that there will be a question about it in each (none) of the exams or you have to ask about it only in one of the exams. The latter case is however problematic considering the difficulty of the exams, unless you have two such topics at hand.
Some further aspects to consider:

Another not so obvious information contained in the first exam is the general way you ask questions and what general aspects you consider important. Giving a sample test is a good way to provide this information beforehand.
Neither somebody who focusses on the questions of the first exam nor somebody who focusses on everything that was not asked in the first exam, should have an advantage. Thus some deviation from the rule of not repeating anything without announcing it is ok in my opinion.
No matter what you do, somebody will complain about it.
In some cases, you can compile a huge catalogue of potential exam questions beforehand (part of this can be the exercises to your course) and give them to your students sufficiently long before both exams. Announce that you will pick questions randomly from this catalogue for each exam (under the constraint of equally difficult exams) and do so. This is very fair, but a lot of work and if your catalogue is too small (which is unavoidable for some subjects), it encourages learning without understanding.

A few of my math profs really REALLY didn't want their questions being posted online as they reused them.  Their strategy to make sure no one left with a test was usually a variation of the following.
1) When the student enters the exam room, he or she goes up to the prof at the front and turns in everything to the prof.  The students name is marked off the list of students.  Book bags are left at the front of the room where everyone can see.
2) The prof or TA hands the student the exam along with paper, pencil, calculator, etc.  The student takes a seat and begins the exam.  Each student receives the exact same thing, and is not allowed to bring outside paper, notes, calculators.
3) Leaving the room constitutes finishing the exam (i.e. no bathroom breaks).  When the student is ready to leave the room he or she turns in ALL materials handed out at the beginning of the exam.

I cannot imagine one could ban bathroom breaks legally.

Probably not legally, but profs do it anyway.  I've also seen profs have the "bathroom TA" whose entire responsibility is to escort people to and from the bathroom in case of emergencies.

A relatively simple way of making sure that people take the exam only once is clearly telling that once a student receives the exam questions, they have to sign it with their name (and possibly an identifying number assigned by your institution to avoid ambiguity), and when leaving, they absolutely need to hand in the exam (even if they did not complete even a single task). In practice even people who would cheat if given a chance won't write a fake name (especially given that writing a fake name could be considered forgery in many, if not most countries).
However, you can be almost sure that if people take the exam on different dates, at least one of the students will take a picture of the questions and share with the later group, or at the very least tell them what was on the exam. If you can't have all of the students take the exam at once, this is something you need to take into account - so at the very least, avoid questions which are too similar, unless a variation also appeared on the practice exam.

I have had this issue occasionally when a student is sick and sits an exam at a later date from others.  Obviously you can write them a new exam, but that is quite onerous, and it is preferable to be able to use the same exam that other students have undertaken, so that there is consistency in the assessment.  To deal with this, I always instruct students that if they want to sit an exam at a later date than other students, they need to avoid finding out any information on the content or structure of the exam.  This puts the onus on them rather than the other students in their course.  Additionally,  whenever a student needs to sit an exam at a later date than other students, I have a (pre-prepared) statutory declaration attesting to the following:

I am scheduled to sit an exam for ____________ (course) at ____________ (time) on ____________ (date);
At the time I am scheduled to sit this exam, other students in this course have already undertaken the same exam;
Except as detailed in point 4 below, I have not received any information from any other student in this course about the content or
  structure of this exam, including information communicated to me
  indirectly through a third party.
I have received the following information communicated to me about this exam (use additional page if you run out of room):
  ______________________________________________________________   ______________________________________________________________   ______________________________________________________________   ______________________________________________________________   ______________________________________________________________   ______________________________________________________________   ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________
I do not believe that I have obtained any information about the content or structure of this exam that would put me at an unfair advantage over other students in this course.

When the student applies to sit the exam late, I ask them if they would be willing to fill out this form, to satisfy the university that they are not at an unfair advantage over other students.  So far, all the students I've dealt with have been happy to do this.  Students fill out and sign this form, and as part of the form, they disclose any information they have heard about the exam.  Some will say things like "I heard it was hard", etc.  Based on their answers I make a decision on whether they have received any information that would disqualify them from taking the exam.  Assuming everything is okay, I let them know that based on their answers I am satisfied that they are not at an unfair advantage and they then sit the exam.
So far as I can tell, students seem to take this document pretty seriously.  I cannot say for sure whether any students have lied on this document to sit an exam, without disclosing information they have found out about it.  Still, they take care when they're filling it out, and I make sure to advise them that it is a criminal offence to intentionally make a false statement in a statutory declaration.  So far I have not had any student who did not want to make a declaration, and I have not had any occasion where I have discovered a student who has given a false declaration.

Signing serious-sounding documents may be a good idea to inhibit (if not truly actively "prevent") certain behaviors. But I'd still want to reduce the possibilities for benefit from side-channel information by structuring the exam(s) to minimize it, to put less pressure on people to keep secrets, etc.

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Do all US schools provide the same access to e-journal resources?
I recently took courses from several different schools, with different semesters in different parts of the US. When visiting the schools' library Web sites, I noticed that each offered a similar "search all resources link" with a login, eventually leading to EBSCO. I expected the significantly larger and more expensive university to offer more "premium" access. I could not find any difference in the available results and down-loadable articles from one institution or the other. Do nearly all schools pay for nearly the same access? Can I expect nearly all schools to use EBSCO and the search results for electronic resources to be identical at each institution?

Short answer is no.
Although EBSCO appears to be ubiquitous, the level of access you can find across ALL schools definitely varies. As undergrads at a community college, my classmates and I would occasionally visit nearby university libraries just to access their larger online databases. Not only did they subscribe to more databases, they also had greater levels of access than my home institution.
Community colleges may be somewhat of an outlier in this respect because of their typically limited funding/resources. Across other institutions-of-higher-learning, you can expect greater similarity in the databases provided at the general level. However, many institutions, or colleges within them, will have a specialty focus and will provide access to journals specific to that specialty. Those specialty journals are not available across all institutions, especially those with limited funding.


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How to offer fair exam retakes?
Within my college, teachers generally allow any student who earned a D or lower on an exam, to retake the exam. While I do not need to follow this policy in my courses, many students expect their instructors to offer retakes.
I would like to offer retakes, but see two problems:

Setting a fixed cut off at a "D" seems unfair to students. If a student earns a single percentage point more than this, they cannot retake it, but the student who retakes it stands a chance to earn a full A.
Allowing all students to retake would create too much extra work for me. Some students who earned a 95% would still try to retake it to get 100%.

If there a fair method of allowing exam retakes that discourages every student from taking them?

How about allowing the students who earned a D to retake the exam and the best grade they can get for the retaken exam is C?

If you don't need to follow this policy, then my suggestion is don't follow it. If the student performed poorly on the exam, then they need to retake the course not the exam.

I think the OP is referring to situations where there are multiple exams in the course. Plus, I disagree with the idea that a student who does badly on an exam needs to retake the whole course. The student may have had a bad day (sick, misread a question, or whatever).

One option, particularly if there are more than 3 exams in the course, is to automatically adjust the weighting of exams. Say there are 4 exams, each worth 20%. Adjust it so that for everyone, their lowest scoring exam is worth 10%, and the highest 30%.

@chmullig: A variant I've often seen is that the lowest scoring one is worth 0%.

A lot of the answers give different schemes for enabling retakes. My 2 cents, is that I distinctly remember as a student, being very frustrated with grading systems that were very complicated and "gamified". To me, fairly or not, it always felt like the professor was making a reality show out of something that felt serious to me at the time. Personally I responded much better to either (a) what you get is what you get (no retakes), or (b) we will try different weightings of your exam scores and give you the best one (a special case of this is dropping the lowest exam grade).

I think the easiest way to handle this is to allow anyone to take the exam again. However, the caveat is that the retake replaces the previous grade, whether or not it's a better grade. A student who got a very high grade (such as 95%) on the first exam is unlikely to retake an exam to gain five points, when there's every chance the grade could go down by taking the exam a second time.
What one other professor did in a similar situation was to make us choose between keeping the grade on the exam or taking the repeat exam before we saw the grade on the first exam. That is, you could either get your exam back and take that grade, or leave it sight unseen and take the second exam.

One common strategy is to let students split the difference: if they got a 60% on the first exam and an 80% on the second then the final grade would be 70. This can be combined with aeismail's advice, if you are so inclined.
Another option is to cap improvement: the scores that can be obtained on the second exam are bounded. This could be a maximum improvement (e.g. 10%), half the distance to 100%, or a course-wide threshold (say 80%). All of these options discourage people who already did well from taking the exam again, in some cases prohibiting them from doing so.

Exam retakes are inherently unfair, and doubly so when the criteria for allowing them account for the amount of effort on your part.
There are different causes for the inherent unfairness, including at least:

Exams are inherently unfair for various reasons - not the least of which being that some people do poorly on timed exams but are better able to exhibit command of the subject matter in other settings.

People who are taking more courses or have to work to finance their studies have a lot less free time to prepare for an additional exam, so they are less likely to take it even with all other things being equal.

It is not obviously the case that command of a subject matter (in general, or the subject matter of a course) is quantifiable. Hell, it's not obviously the case that the command of a subject matter is properly comparable among individuals.

Retakes are an exception to the default uniform grading policy. Making exceptions is already problematic for those who relied on the uniform policy being applied.

... so if you're already making the exception that is retakes, and regardless of what retake policy you choose, be open-minded about making exceptions or changes so that your students feel they're not getting screwed.

Exams/Exam retakes are inherently unfair - I'm not convinced.  E.g., it's true that exams measure something different than projects or papers, and written exams measure something different from oral exams.  And people who have less time to prepare for an exam would also have less time to work on a project or any other assignment.  What is true is that exams don't necessarily measure what you're trying to teach, but I would think that allowing makeups would help the people who aren't good at timed exams.

"be open-minded about making exceptions"  Exceptions to the grading structure in the syllabus are a recipe for disaster.  "You  made an exception for Charlie, but you won't make one for me?  I'm off to see the Dean!"

@BobBrown: Exam retakes are exceptions to the grading scheme. You could well argue for no retakes, period.

@einpoklum  Correct.  If I were going to allow retakes, which I did not, the criteria would have been in the syllabus and would have applied to the entire class.

Follow your university's policy.
If your university has a policy on how to handle exams retakes, I would say that you should follow that policy. It will ensure fairness and consistency across the university, ensuring that students won't be especially advantaged or disadvantaged as a result of who is teaching a specific class. Additionally, by following the policy, you'll avoid disrupting whatever scheduling your university has developed by assuming that X% of students will wind up retaking the exam, by giving them significantly more or less exam-retaking students.
If you disagree with your university's exam retaking policy, I think the correct course of action would be to lobby the university administration to change it - or to work towards joining whatever committee is responsible for deciding it, so that you can express your opinions I'm that context.

In my former institution, the policy on retakes was that if you retake the assessment(s) for a module then your mark on that module is capped at the minimum pass mark. So if you need 40% to pass, then even if you get a perfect score on the retake exam, your final mark will be 40%.
This means there is no detriment to students who passed with, say, 42% and who think they could do better if they took the exam again. They are not allowed to retake, but they could not get a higher mark from retaking anyway because their retake mark would be at most 40%.
That said, this is a policy which should exist at the institution-level. You should find out what your institution's policy on retakes is, and follow that policy.


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How much can one download from databases before it is too much?
According to this article, a student was arrested for downloading ~4 million articles from an on-line database.
I want to review all existing articles in my interest area before writing my paper, so I need to download and skim through several thousand articles. I read the terms of service of my school's database, but it just says I should avoid trying to make a "collection".
At what point does the downloading become enough that the databases start to complain? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Do they send out warnings?

His case was different. He downloaded them to distribute them. That's not fair use. Your case is.

Do you really want to skim through thousands of articles? 5,000 articles at 2 minutes each comes to 167 hours, four weeks of single-minded article skimming with no distractions or other responsibilities. I would assume that a more targeted approach (starting with reviews or more recent papers, going through references) might be less mind-numbing.

I suggest you ask for a clarification on "... avoid trying to make a collection". Any half-decent scientist will tell you that you need to have a collection of articles, in order to keep yourself up-to-date, and be able to backtrack and refer to prior work.

also note the following keywords from the article linked above (emphasis mine): "The indictment alleges that between September 24, 2010, and January 6, 2011, Swartz contrived to break into a restricted computer wiring closet in a basement at MIT and to access MIT’s network without authorization from a computer switch within that closet." Assuming that you are using a normal university computer, with proper authorization (which you should have as a scientist there) this article has no real relevance to you.

In a general sense, this is an interesting question.  Someone downloading millions of articles to then parse the text and analyze large datasets could benefit from this knowledge.  WOS has some interesting citation download issues on the network

The wording of your school's TOS is awful. I can't tell whether they are misleading or misled.

FYI, the guy mentioned in the article, Aaron Swartz, later committed suicide during the prosecution. He was an internet pioneer and activist; among other things, he was the co-creator of Markdown, the markup language used (also) on Stack Exchange posts.

If they have limits, things can get quite fuzzy. With my Eduroam credentials from my university I can physically travel to a different university and access journals that are not available from mine. The host university knows who I am, but if they wanted to block me they would have to go through mine.

You can never download too many if its relevant, i think. If you need to include 40,000 papers in your meta-analysis, by all means. By the time your done the copyright owners might not be around to confront you anyway!

According to this article, a student was arrested for downloading ~4
  million articles from an on-line database.

That was an extreme case. He had history of downloading and releasing large amount of information. In this JSTOR case, I don't think he had actually released the articles, although the indication was strong. He was charged with "unlawfully breaking in a protected computer," which I guess he probably downloaded the paper with unusual means, perhaps using codes or hacks. Overall, the whole case was very politically charged and I will not use that as a benchmark in your case.

I want to review all existing articles in my interest area before
  writing my paper, so I need to download and skim through several
  thousand articles. I read the terms of service of my school's
  database, but it just says I should avoid trying to make a
  "collection".

When there are several thousands of articles that are pertinent to your research interest in ONE paper, I would suggest you to refine your research interest. And no, you don't need to review all existing articles, just pick the important seminal works, and then trace the major works along a very well define research interest. You can also use a few prominent modern works as seeds and use their reference list to snow ball your library.

At what point does the downloading become enough that the databases
  start to complain? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Do they send out
  warnings?

You should be able to download as much as you want as long as you follow the instructions and rules. For large download volume, I'd check with the librarian to clarify:

What the institutional limit is. There may be a download limit and if you'd get a warning letter it's likely from your school because your thousands of download could have cost them a lot more than usual. Some school libraries may ban accounts associated with a large download volume as well; it's better to give the librarian a heads up.
Your student account payment scheme. Some schools may have limit and beyond which the students may have to pay. I know that this is certainly possible for inter-library loan (which you may have to do if a few thousands paper is your goal.) A peer of mine got billed for more than US$500 because she ordered about a hundred papers through inter-library loan.

I would suggest to contact the database team, tell them about the project, explain that are you doing, so they would have chance to say is it ok for them or not. You are much less likely to face restrictions if the project is known and approved by your scientific supervisor.
The database website should contain the terms of use page where these acceptable limits should be listed. If nothing is listed, usually a good rule is to wait three times the duration it took a server to serve the previous query but no less than one second, and stop immediately if the server returned the unexpected error message.
It may be much more important not to violate other terms of use.


text:
How to motivate students to complete low-point homework?
I teach a course consisting of about 50 assignments. These include readings, many short writing assignments, and group projects. Additionally, students complete 2 large projects as the mid-term and final, entirely covering all of the material.
I noticed many students skipped lots of homework. Some skipped 6 weeks of work completely. I assumed the workload was too high, but I surveyed those who did the work and nobody reported spending more than 2-3 hours per week. Some students had determined that each assignment had such a low value, they did not bother to complete the work. These students all did very poorly on the final.
My supervisor will not be happy to find that I am failing 25% of the students. For future terms, how can I motivate students to complete everything?

You are getting good responses, but this question might be more permanently useful if you gave more info about the course. I would like to know how many weeks for 50 assignments and how they are graded (ungraded, completion only, careful grading?) and what proportion of the final grade each (or all) represents.

One thing to note - while those who did the work might have spent 2-3 hours per week, it's likely that those who didn't are weaker students who would have had to spend much longer to get the same results

Distribution: homework (40%), mid-term (25%), final (35%) (per department requirements). Grading is very detailed, with rubrics provided, but ~30% of the small assignments are complete/in-complete.

If someone is foolish enough to blow off something that's 40% of the grade, making it impossible to pass even with excellent exam scores, I don't see any reasonable way to put the blame on anyone except the students; especially since the distribution is department wide meaning they can't claim to've thought it was only worth a small fraction of the total.

As a student, one thing I do is when I'm busy to the point that I can't reasonably accomplish everything, I skimp on is low-point homework. If I have enough time to sleep, hang out with friends briefly, get a large project done, or do 3 hours of homework worth 5% of my grade (pick 3), I do the first three. But this doesn't continue for an entire semester, so there is something else going on for students who don't do any of the homework.

Chiming in as a university student here.  50 assignments over a (presumably) 15 weeks semester seems incredibly draining.  Basically, I often feel like coursework comes in "waves", especially around midterm, where having to hand in a few assignments consistently every week feels harder than it actually is because it's so inflexible.  I personally prefer fewer, larger assignments for which I have more time, this way I can schedule better around other coursework and complete the assignments at my own pace.

Time flexibility is extremely important. Homeworks that are due less than a week after being announced can be a serious problem, especially for students who are both working and taking multiple courses. Finding three hours over a complete week may be easier than finding half an hour that must be between noon on Monday and 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

Some students had determined that each assignment had such a low
  value, they did not bother to complete the work. These students all
  did very poorly on the final.

One important way to combat this attitude is to show the actual statistics from the course you just completed.
"Here is the distribution of homework completion across last semester's course.  And here is the distribution of final course grades.  Notice that every student who completed less than XXX% of the homework failed the course."
Repeat this exercise after every midterm, showing similar statistics for the current class.  "See, here is the distribution of homework completion so far, and here is the distribution of midterm grades.  Notice that every student who completed less than XXX% of the homework failed the midterm, which is completely consistent with last semester."
In other words: "I am not bluffing."
If you want to be even more direct, you can announce in your syllabus that anyone not completing XXX% of the homework automatically fails the course, regardless of their performance on the final exam.  Be sure to read this sentence out loud in class on the first day.
Of course, you also need some carrots to go with the stick.  The homework should not only be useful, but also interesting.  The students should have access to any resources they need to master the homework material, including rapid and useful feedback.  The homework should be realistically tuned to the skill and maturity levels of the students, and you should carefully discuss your expectations with instructors of any prerequisite courses.

My supervisor will not be happy to find that I am failing 25% of the students.

I assume you mentioned the abysmal homework completion rate to your supervisor as soon as you noticed it, which was relatively early in the semester. Right?  So how did your supervisor respond?

An additional technique that some of my professors use is to offer an incentive for completing all of the homework. Like if you complete all of the homework you get an extra point overall in the course

A combination of JeffE and @BobBrown is great.
Sell the homework by showing that students who do it do better in the course, and reward hard work by giving points for completion or having a weekly homework quiz.

Correlation may not be causation, but it will certainly give them a good scare to share those statistics!

I like the idea, but you should make absolutely sure, that the students cannot deduce who failed and who didn't. I am assuming that (like in Germany) the grades of the individual students are not public. Then there might be students who want to portrait themselves as "you don't see me do or discuss any of the homework, but that is because I really don't need to". If you then show a statistic that shows that everybody below a certain percentage of homework assignments failed the other students might deduce that this one person must be lying.

I would suggest not to give too much information. Eg. create categories (eg. in steps of 25% of all the homework handed in) such that every category still contains students that passed the test and then only give a number like "90% of the students that did 75% or more of the homework passed, while only 20% of the students with less than 25% of the homework got a passing grade".

Naah. I suggest giving absolutely complete (but anonymous, of course) information and assuming the students are smart enough to understand what it implies.  And telling them that they are smart enough.

Taking

Some students had determined that each assignment had such a low value, they did not bother to complete the work.

serious, it's tempting to suggest that you assign exactly the same work for exactly the same fraction of the course credit, but packaged into a smaller number of assignments so that each assignment looks more important to them.
But there are two issues:

Frequent feedback is often alleged to be good for student learning, and your many small assignments support that while fewer large assignments do not.
I'm also with the others: students who can't figure out that they have to do a large fraction of these assignments to pass are unlikely to be very successful no matter what you do for them.

So, perhaps you should just check progress at some early point in the course and lets the slackers know that they are on the road to poor grades if they don't shape up.

I agree with this the most so far.  Comparing the large assignment from one class to the tiny assignments from another, the large one will always win out as more important.

I typically make homework 40% of the course grade and divide the remaining points among midterm, final, and class participation.  Then, on the first day, I tell students that they cannot pass the course without doing at least most of the homework.
I do not assign grades to reading assignments; instead, I make an assignment that can be assessed, but that cannot readily be completed without having done the assigned reading.
In a 16-week semester, I might have ten graded assignments, but each one will have multiple parts, so the students do perhaps 50 things, but they perceive that they have ten assignments, each worth perhaps four course points.  I also require students to attempt every part of an assignment in order to receive any credit.  In other words, half-done means not graded.

Could you explain the rationale for requiring every part to be attempted? I would think getting full understanding of three out of four parts to be better than half-heartedly completing four out of four.

I grade using a satisfactory/unsatisfactory "scale" and allow students with a grade of "unsatisfactory" to resubmit their work (one time only) for re-grading.  Thus, the student who makes the half-hearted attempt gets to do it over again right, and I get to grade that student's work twice.
I explain this bargain at the beginning of the semester, telling students that the way they earn that second chance is to make a reasonable effort on the first pass.  I also tell them that the only way they can fail to get those 40 points is to skip homework or make a halfway attempt.

I've decided to change my grading policy.  The student who makes an honest attempt (as determined by me) on all parts of an assignment may revise and resubmit.  If there are parts missing, or parts with a half-hearted attempt, I'll grade what was turned in and that will be the final grade for that assignment.

Sure, it is for their own good to do it. But frankly, college students are too immature to realize it, and even the ones who do realize it have to fight with very strong procrastination motivators. You can't expect them to deliver this kind of stuff based on internal motivation only, they don't have it.
If it is your goal to get them to pass, you have to give them external motivation here. The usual method is to make homework obligatory.
The idea behind it is simple. Anybody who gets less than 80% of the possible points on homework assignments is not allowed to take the final. If you want to be mild, or the homework is very tough, set a lower target in percent. If you want to include very interesting but very hard problems in the homework, mark them as "optional" and don't make them count towards the required points.
This also has the advantage (from a grader's perspective) that students who cannot muster the dilligence to achieve 80% correctness when working in a relaxed environment with little time pressure and with the help of their friends, their textbooks and the Internet, will not be present at the real written exam where they are only going to waste your time. But it also makes them learn for the homework, spaced over the semester, so the students who have the intelligence to beat the exam but procrastinate until the last two days to learn without deadlines are actually learning well and get their grade based on solid knowledge, instead of passing on bulimia learning or plainly failing.
You can alternatively declare a number of homework sheets which needs to be turned in. E.g. if there are 12 homework assignments for the semester, you can say that they need to turn in at least 10 to be allowed to take the exam. But this is more problematic - what do you do with students who turn in an empty sheet? The percentage system works, I have seen it employed by many departments at two different universities. I have been exposed to it on both sides, as a student and as a teaching assistant/grader. It is well accepted by students and staff alike, it is perceived as fair, and it works.
You will probably have some problems championing it, both from students and faculty, but once you get it established, everybody benefits.

In the US, you can't generally restrict people from taking a final exam based on not submitting assignments.

@aeismail interesting, I didn't know this. I wonder why not?

In the US, exams are part of a course, rather than a separate "event." The final exam period is also much shorter—the longest I know of is about ten days. And also courses typically have multiple exams. So it's just an evolution thing more than anything else.

In the US, you can't generally restrict people from taking a final exam based on not submitting assignments — Maybe not directly.  But you can certainly announce in advance that a certain minimum homework average is required for a passing grade, and then quietly inform anyone with less than that average that there is no point taking the final exam.

I think there's no rule in the U.S. that mandates that a course grade is purely additive. More complicated algorithms can achieve various effects, perhaps preventing students' negligence of any part of the course (for their own good).

In US, there's no problem failing a student for not doing the homework. We are in fact considering doing exactly that, automatic fail if the percentage before final is too low.

I tell the students that two exam questions will come from the homework: one exactly as it was on the homework, and one with only small changes.  Doing all the homework is like getting one question on the midterm/final for free.
In class, I mention that usually the one that ends up on the exam with no changes is whichever one the fewest people turned in.  Not always, but usually.
Added bonus: it seems to cut down on cheating, probably because if all you do is copy someone else's program, then you don't remember it well enough to reproduce it on the exam.

Make them worth more! You can do this by shifting more points onto them, or, maybe, by having less than 50 of them for what is presumably a 14 or 15 week semester.

It seems the problem is not "the homework is not worth enough", since Village said he is failing a quarter of the class for not completing it. Apparently the homework is a significant component of the course grade.

I disagree. I think that the implication that "[t]hese students all did very poorly on the final" and failed due to low grades on the final. If they'd done the homework, they'd have been better prepared.

I see, on re-reading the question I agree :)

There are a couple of downside to lumping the same working into fewer assignments (temping though that is). Principally it gives the students less frequent and less fine-grained feedback. It may also lead to fewer but more exhausting and demoralizing grading sessions.

I'm not an educator, but I have some experience on the matter of a course not engaging students enough to motivate them (I was one of those students).
I know I shouldn't place all the blame on the course material nor the instructor, but I cannot help but feel that if I failed sooner, I wouldn't have had to "suffer" as long as I did, hanging on to a diminishing sense of hope.
In my highschool, assignments were mandatory, you'd get punishment for not handing homework on time in addition to 0 marks, for disrespecting your teacher. However, the "freedom" I experienced immediately after entering university was too much for me to handle, and not handing in assignments was merely the first thing "to do" on my list of rebelliousness.
Different people handle situations differently, so I don't think having a blanket set of rules is good enough to handle all situations. I believe that each student should be treated according to their needs, but obviously that's a huge amount of resource needed, and is definitely not feasible... So I think there should at least be some sort of way to help groups of students with similar struggles, e.g. bored of class because they know it already, not knowing how to prioritise their work and ending up not finishing anything...etc.
Lastly regarding OP's question, my best advice right now is for the instructor to set aside some time to talk to their student's 1-to-1, at least once in a semester, before or after midterms (I'd say before is better, so they become more motivated for midterms). Student's who want to learn, will learn, but sometimes they just want to know that someone cares... a short chat (10min?) will let them feel that you care (whether you do or not... is another matter lol) And if that person didn't need a "pep talk", you can use it to learn from your students; yes, teachers should learn from their students as well, sometimes they have the brilliant ideas you could use.

First, I think it's important to note a difference between external motivation (carrot + stick) and intrinsic motivation (pride in the work + knowledge that it will help). External motivation can increase completion rates in your class, but has been shown to decrease intrinsic motivation so it may have negative aftereffects. Thus, I would try to avoid solutions such as competitions (which have also been shown to actually have a negative effect for girls)
I'm a strong advocate of fostering pride in the work itself. This can be done with 1 on 1 chats as mentioned by Populous, and if there is time, then I would recommend that in addition to the below advice.
As mentioned in dmckee's answer. Frequency of feedback can be an important factor in education, including motivation. When assignments are returned with comments and in a timely manner the students feel that the instructor or grader cares about their work. This support can foster intrinsic motivation. Conversely, when assignments are returned with no comments, returned late, or never returned at all, students can be strongly demotivated.
I know this both from personal teaching (and student) experience and literature on intrinsic motivation.
Also I'd like to make a few comments on jeffE's answer but don't have the reputation:
Statistics may be motivating for the students that understand them in some situations. However, often the simple statistics won't show what you'd like; the highest scoring students may have low homework completion rates because they already know the material and find the homework boring. I know, I personally didn't do a single homework assignment in Geometry, Algebra II, or Pre-Calc, but was the school winner for most of the math competitions in my High School. This is especially true in classes that aren't tracked where there can be a very large variation of abilities. Looking at the test grades vs. homework completion of an inner city public school Algebra 1 class shows a negative correlation. Trying to explain the confounding variables to a class that's not proficient in statistics is a futile exercise, and if they've made it to the point where they are proficient in statistics then odds are they've already learned to be self motivated.

The best way to motivate students in this regard is to create some form of competition.
Post the grades of the top 5 or 10 students after each assignment. If they choose, you don't have to publish their names but only their numbers.
Update the statistics after each assignment deadline and offer bonus points for finishing in certain positions (e.g. 1st places gets a bonus 10 points etc).
The atmosphere in the class will change quickly.

That may only encourage the top students, that are most likely already doing the homework (or they don't need it whatsoever).

I disagree with creating an intentionally competitive atmosphere. This is not good for learning, and the weaker students might even give up, and feel bad about themselves.

Besides the philosophical objections, in the US it would be illegal to post grades with names or even student ID numbers. You could use randomly assigned tokens, but if nobody knows who the top students are, it sort of eliminates the competitive incentive.

-1 Competition might motivate those who are already motivated to do well in the course, in other words, the opposite group of those who you are trying to motivate here. Also, posting students’ personal information is unethical and possibly illegal.

First of all, I'm disappointed that you used the word "fail," which is a reflexive verb, rather than "flunk," which is the correct word to use.
You didn't state what level (college, elementary, etc) you're teaching.  For very young kids, I would simply send notes home saying something like "Your child didn't complete last nite/week's assignment.  Please make sure he completes it by XX date."  For high school and above, my view is that they can dang well sink or swim on their own. If they don't understand that the point of each assignment is to learn something (not to get a grade on it), then they're lost to the world.  It shouldn't be your job to babysit them.
If you have concerns about your supervisor's opinion of your teaching methods, the appropriate thing to do is talk with him a month or so into the term, not after the finals.
And finally, a personal viewpoint, but bolstered with a lot of reports from teachers and observations from other parents:   groups projects are crap.  They've always been crap, and always will be crap.  They invariably end up with a few strong players whose efforts are not properly rewarded because the overall project's quality suffers from the slackers or incompetents in the group.  School is not military training camp (where it might be justifiable to grade the group on getting everyone safely thru the course).

How is any of this an answer to the original question?  The only relevant paragraph is #2, which basically says, "don't worry about your question."

In case they make anyone feel insecure, it's also worth noting that the comments about "fail" vs. "flunk" are a personal opinion, rather than a widely accepted rule.  The OED lists this use of "fail" as dating back to 1884 with the comment that it's "colloquial" (while "flunk" is marked as "college slang").

@AnonymousMathematician thanks for the correction.

As long as we're in grammar fascist mode, you don't mean "reflexive verb" (people don't fail themselves) but rather "intransitive". (But I agree with Anonymous Mathematician that the transitive usage is well established, and "flunk" is unsuitable for formal writing.)


text:
Is there a tool for visualizing the geographic locations of research?
Many e-journals search tools contain much metadata in their database. For example, they have the "location" entry required for some citation formats, which at least shows the location of the journal, but the might also store the original authors' university name.
Is there any tool that can allow researchers to either (a) search a term and see a map of where the articles are coming from or (in some similar form or other) (b) see a world map showing where research in a particular area is geographically concentrated?

interesting question: could you try and rework it and explain why would you want to do so?

Here is an example use of this I am familiar with, Health GeoJunction. See HEALTH GeoJunction: place-time-concept browsing of health publications (MachEachren et al., 2010). The link to the interactive site appears just like a limited mock up though.

If the location entry is just the publisher location, it is probably rather misleading than enlightening, as it merely indicates where the company that produces the journal happens to be registered, or happens to have its headquarters. The journal itself might, but need not necessarily be composed and edited in that place, and the single articles published in the journal come from researchers all over the world and most probably not from precisely the publisher's location.

With that said, this other question and its comments might hint at some ways to retrieve such data: Where can I search for researchers in a specific field by location?

See http://journalmap.org

@mankoff: It is helpful to provide some context along with external links. In this case, the required context would be that JournalMap indicates locations associated with a limited number of journal articles (roughly 20,000) from about 1300 journals, seemingly mostly centered on zoology. The locations apparently do not indicate where the researchers or labs are based, or where the articles were written, but rather, where the objects of the studies were located (for instance, hundreds of articles about marine life are shown in the middle of the ocean).

Thomson Reuters' Researcherid includes some author-specific geographic search abilities. For instance, here's a map of people citing me.

this is an active aera of research in Geography of Science. We've been working with sociologists of science and bibliometricians to assemble a geocoded database of scientific publications, based on the Web of Science database.
We've not (yet) produced a publicly available interactive search tool like the one you describe, but it's a possibility. Instead, we have published several papers and an interactive tool to geovisualize the collaborations between co-authors of papers : http://www.coscimo.net/ (in french)
If you're interested in this question, i can provide a bibliography.

A conference paper :
http://sticonference.org/Proceedings/vol1/Grossetti_Geographical_348.pdf
A research paper :
http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/20/0042098013506047.full.pdf

I just found an interesting paper :
http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2793
Towards a Frontier of Spatial Scientometric Studies
by Song Gao
In this paper, the author cites several visualization tools :
http://linkeddata.org/
http://spatial.linkedscience.org/
http://semantic-web-journal.com/SWJPortal/
http://stko-work.geog.ucsb.edu:8080/map/

The closest I've seen to this is for Elsevier journals most (all?) have a journal insights page which among other useful information such as impact factor and review speed has the geographic location (country) of primary authors of all their articles. For example here is the page for Measurement. Its only on the country level and doesn't link author and location but it's a start.

For historical mathematicians: MacTutor (St Andrews) has some map tools.

It looks like I am a little late, but if this is still an unanswered question, I have built a web application that will extract research locations from a corpus of research titles and abstracts.  For a corpus of 1,000 public health articles we achieved sensitivity of 71%, accuracy of 85%, and precision of 97%. Also, inferential analysis of the data identified similar results with the validation data set.  The paper is currently in review, but I am happy to share the program with anyone interested in it.

authors: ɪdɪət strəʊlə