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What do I do if a professor at a foreign university doesn't respond to my emails?
I want to know about appropriate actions to take when not receiving an e-mail reply from professors after 2 to 3 weeks of sending an e-mail.
When writing my e-mails, I try to highlight questions and important points leaving other details in normal style to make the reader quickly understand what am I asking for. Additionally, I start the e-mail with Dear Professor , I conclude with a respectful salutation form and I proof read the text of the e-mails multiple times. I am sending e-mails to professors asking them for a graduation project proposal.
E-mails are sent to professors responsible for European or North American funded research projects.
Professors to whom I sent e-mails are from various institutions and countries (USA, Canada, Switzerland).
The same problem is faced in previous occasions when I needed to send e-mails for various purposes but I don't receive replies except for one or two times.
I tried twice sending reminders after a reasonable time (one to two weeks) of sending the first e-mail but no response is received!
N.B: if it's helpful to mention, my field is not covered by any research lab and not taught in any university in my country.
And this is what makes the problem more complicated!

I'm afraid I find your question unclear. Are you trying to find collaborators, a post-doc position, or to become a PhD or Master's student?

Thank you for your comment.
I am trying to reach researchers in bioinformatics (affiliated to foreign universities and research centers) in order to get an engineering graduation project proposal as I have previous research experience in the field.
So it's about getting involved in a research project as an undergraduate engineering student.
Is it clearer now ?

As this is about an undergraduate research project, and because the answer would be different for postgraduate research projects, then this question is off-topic.

@EnergyNumbers I don't think so since I had previous research experience as a graduate student and research assistant !
I chose to do engineering studies for some reasons.
It results in an official status as an undergraduate student but in fact it's about doing research to enrich scientific literature and get a published paper (as I have done that before).
The issue here is about procedures to reach foreign professors for serious participation in research projects.

I have a hard time understanding this question. You are sending profs. in different countries requests for graduation projects? What answer are you hoping for?

@xLeitix I am expecting proposals from these professors to work with them on ongoing research projects related to my studies and research interests.

@ML_TN It is very ambitious to hope that profs. that you do not even know personally will offer you to work with them based on a cold email. The fact that they do not answer should presumably be interpreted as "not interested".

@xLeitix is there a more acceptable way to do that, knowing that I share some common research interests with some of these professors and it has been mentioned in the CV I attach to each e-mail ?

@ML_TN It is not the mail or the form that is a problem - it is simply that professors can't take up every student that "shares some interests with them", even if the student is not even enrolled in their university. Professors only have a finite amount of time.

@EnergyNumbers: Questions about getting involved in university-level research are almost always on-topic, even if they're asked by people who are undergraduates (or even HS students).

I wonder how different this is to other sales pitches? Yes it's a professor but you can treat him/her just like any potential client/business partner/employer. If there's no reply in a few days just assume that he's not interested at your particular pitch. On the other hand he could be too busy for you at the time. In the latter case, you can try pinging him again when you have something new.

You formulate a question about email contact with professors. But from the comments, it seems you actually want to know how to get involved in a research field that is not present in your country. Maybe you'll get more helpful answers by explicitly asking that question.

If it is Don Knuth, you should at least wait a year before assuming he didn't read it.

@silvado The goal was to know how to proceed when I get no responses then comments led to the greater goal which is getting involved in Bioinformatics.
Don't you think that asking the question as you suggested will lead to the same responses (being recommended, going through the university and official channels, applying to a M.Sc or Ph.D program, having a highly cited Paper in the field ..) ?

@ML_TN : Your problem is that you don't know a way to get what you want. Learning to ask clear questions in writing on a website like this helps you. Describe your situation and what you want and if you are lucky someone has a helpful suggestion.

There are many people that do the same thing. Some professors get similar emails almost daily. After reading some emails, CVs and proposals like that (even I, as a PhD student, get some) it quickly becomes clear that most are 1) unrelated to the adressee's research, 2) sent by unqualified applicants and 3) sent to anybody with a university address. Experience that a couple of times and you delete the next one without opening it.

Not enough for a full answer, but as a professor, I can tell you that these letters are essentially spam to me. You're trying to cold-sell me something, just like the spam emails, and there are a lot of you. I have no idea what a graduation project proposal is. I can guess, but it sounds like something that involves a lot of work for me. If you want to know about something, I'll be more than happy to answer. One thing I can tell you doesn't get answers is someone in a different field clearly just fishing for assistanceship money.

Much of what you write is unclear. a) "I email professors asking them for a graduation project proposal." Does that you mean you suggest a project to them, or you ask them to suggest a project to you? To be funded by who, supervised by who, conducted in which country? b) First you say "graduate project", then you say "getting involved in a research project as an undergraduate engineering student". Which is it? c) You say  "my field is not covered by any research lab and not taught in any university in my country" Then it isn't your field; it's your proposed field, or desired field...

...but since you're not even their graduate student, nor are you applying to be their grad student, why on earth would they respond? What form of response exactly are you even expecting? This sounds like a waste of both of your time. Much better to try to write a (draft) paper in that area, then try to submit it to publications which at least give decent review feedback.

Or, apply to their Bioinformatics courses as a grad student, already. Or else get a job in a Bioinformatics company and work your way up.

I get emails like this all the time and never reply.  I can't imagine that anyone would give you a positive response, and I don't think there is anything you can do that will result in you getting what you want.
I think that my policies for responding to email are pretty typical.
Aside from "professional business stuff" (e.g. invitations to speak, referee requests, inquiries from the media, etc), I generally only respond to emails from strangers in the following situations.

Technical questions about my papers (or related things, e.g. my answers on math overflow).  These always get a response, though sometimes I can take a little while if I'm particularly busy (e.g. when traveling).
Mathematical questions.  I'll always answer these if they are close to my research interests and are at a high level, and otherwise it depends on my mood.  The speed is similar to questions of type 1.
Questions from students at Rice.  These always get some kind of response, usually very quickly (sometimes that response is a request that they come to my office and chat).  I'll also usually respond to questions from students who have some kind of indirect connection with me (e.g. I'll respond to questions from students of my collaborators).
Inquiries about our graduate program.  For specific question, I'll usually quickly respond.  For things that seem more like requests to work with me, if they sound serious then they get a very short reply with a link to the webpage saying how to apply to our PhD program (and a sentence about how I don't take students until they have been accepted and passed their quals).  Sometimes they sound ridiculous (e.g. someone who has an engineering background and is clearly emailing everyone they can find on the internet), and they get no response.

Other than that, I just don't have the time.  I have enormous amounts of stuff that I have to do that is directly related to teaching (at Rice; I'm not paid to teach anyone else) and research.  I'm sorry that you can't get help from your own university, but sadly there just isn't anything that I can do about that.

+1 for first paragraph of your answer and [...] otherwise it depends on my mood.

@Andy Putman
Thank you Professor Putman for your answer.
What do you suggest as a solution to overcome Professors' rejection of such e-mails ?
I want to approach professors working on Bioinformatics who are concentrated in anglo-saxon universities.
This continuous rejection, even though being enthusiastically willing to participate in the research efforts is frustrating.
Additionally, being a student from the North African region will reduce my chances to get an answer to zero !
How are we supposed to work with renowned scientists while the unique available way to communicate is cut-off?

@ML_TN : I don't think there is anything you can do (the only thing I can think of is applying to graduate schools abroad in the usual manner).  You are asking people to do a large amount of unpaid work to help you.  It just isn't going to happen.  And it isn't being from North Africa -- you would get a similar response to unsolicited requests like this no matter where you lived.

@AndyPutman usually when someone will be supervised in a funded research project Ph.D students or other group members will do the supervision and the Professor (responsible for the project) won't generally get involved in this task and he will get later all the praise when his name will appear on the paper containing the research results.
I am just trying to reach the director to get me in the group and give me a general description of my task and I am not asking for more than that.
What about "enthusiastic students could contact me on this e-mail" that we could find on professors pages?

@ML_TN You are truly missing the point. What you are asking for is never going to happen. You are not a student attending the school where these people teach. You are not a student of a colleague. You are a complete stranger with no apparent credentials. It will never happen. As I see it you have three choices to get noticed: 1) Go invent something/write a paper in bioinformatics that gets everyone's attention, 2) change schools where there is a good program (and that only slightly increases your chances as there is a lot of competition), or 3) pay someone a lot up front to help you.

@ML_TN : As par says, this simply isn't how academia works.  Period.

(and if they have something asking students to contact them for positions, almost certainly they mean students at their own universities; if you want to work with someone, apply to go to graduate school at their university)

I work(ed) and live with a number of academics (aka my family and friends) and agree with the above with one caveat; it is possible (but not easy at all) to get responses to requests from professors whom you do not already work with by "networking" with them at conferences and impressing them in that situation. This method is hard work, costs a great deal in conference fees, and has a very low success rate. @AndyPutman has given you by far the best advice (+1)

What do you suggest as a solution to overcome Professors' rejection of such e-mails? — I suggest a stiff drink, a walk on the beach, and an adjustment of your expectations.

@ML_TN One way that might work: create an actual, original, decent piece of research, write it up, put it on arXiv and pitch it to the people you write to (mail only such that are very close to your topic!). If they open your mail and if they skim the article and if they like it, you have given an indication that working with you may be fruitful. Under these circumstances, you may get a reply. (I've seen it happen. Once.) Be interesting, not desperate.

It sounds like you are e-mailing strangers and asking them to tell you what to do. This seems almost certain to fail.
Also, I don't know what a "graduation project proposal" is -- keep in mind that these professors don't know and don't care what the requirements of your university are. They might be willing to help you with their scientific expertise, but you should not ask them for help with anything that doesn't directly relate to what their expertise is in, or where it's not clear what exactly you are asking for.
Here is an e-mail that might get a reply.

Dear Prof. X,
I am a student at University Y where I am interested in bioinformatics. I have to complete a senior research project [... brief details]
One topic I was considering was XYZ. In particular, I was thinking I might try to investigate the effect of ABC on DEF under conditions GHI. [Note: do your own homework here, this should be something intelligent and then they might be willing to provide helpful input] I hope I can ask you two questions: In the first place, do you believe that such an approach is feasible?
If so, since University Y doesn't have much in the way of resources, do you know where I might seek guidance as I work on this?
Thank you very much.

Thank you for the proposed draft.
The template of sent emails are generally as follows:

Saying a word about my current studies
Asking for an opportunity to participate in a specific project (that I give the exact name) in which the professor is involved in
Asking for a proposal in the field (as a graduation project proposal) that he is specialized in
Talking in a small paragraph that I have done previous work in the field without available resources (lack of funding and supervision)
a sentence about the attached C.V
It's almost the same template that you are suggesting

@ML_TN No no no. Not only it's not the same template Anonymous is suggesting; it's very far from it. It's not even remotely close. Detach yourself from your current ideas about what to do, and then reread the comments and answers here.

Too long for comments: both the earlier answers are very apt.
The original poster's comment to the later answer reveals a misapprehension about how things work, and the relative work-load to accomplish certain things.
First, cold-calling is a bad start on anything... unless it is extremely polite, is clearly completely specific to the individual addressed E.g., I respond badly, or, simply, not at all to emails with no "greeting" whatsoever, or do not address me (politely) by name, and/or that give no indication of anything specific to me or my actual work, etc. My reasoning is that I should spend no more effort on a response than is visible in the initial email... especially if I'm being asked to do someone a favor.
Second, asking to participate in a project whose existence is unknown makes the inquiry sound very spam-y, so will invariably get a bad reaction. Already it'd be an uphill battle to get a spot on a project whose existence was known and relevant... since most likely there are more people wanting such spots than there are spots available. Again, you should "do your homework" about existing projects, and their specifics.
Third, asking for a "proposal" is asking for quite a lot, in fact. That is, a coherent, viable, state-of-the-art proposal is something that takes quite a while to craft, and has considerable value of various sorts. In many subjects, the writing-up of such is a major activity. Such things would not be donated to anyone, much less cold-callers, much less cold-callers who send "reminders".
... and this isn't "ungenerousness", it's that many academic research situations are very competitive, especially for funding, and people work full-bore to get that funding, ... leaving not a lot of energy left over to donate to unknown people.
Even if you're cold-calling, giving no or scant information about yourself (except that you're looking for participation in a project in subject X) gives the responder little ground to respond reasonably... and I, for one, am disinclined to go through several emails to extract information that should have been available up-front, etc.
In summary, there simply isn't any powerful way for you to induce responses of the sort that'd directly help you in the way you wish, understandable though your wishes are, and as unfortunate as your local situation may be. Some different path will most likely have to be taken.

Is starting an e-mail with Dear Professor  considered as a "cold-calling" ?
Second, the projects I've asked to join are existing and they are regrouping many participants of the same or different universities !
Well, I start the e-mail with presenting my self and I speak later about my work in few words and I attach a CV to the e-mail: isn't that enough as pieces of information ?

It's better than spam to write "Dear Professor ", but still "cold-calling", in that you have no prior acquaintance, and you are asking for something. Attaching a CV is appropriate. Good that you check projects exist and are relevant. Still, people do get many such requests, and many take the view that an inquiry cannot/does not create the burden of response. I myself try to give a brief "thanks for your interest, but sorry, ...", but, mercifully, I don't have to spend too much time doing this each day. Others may feel more pressured, or feel that a brief turn-down won't help anything.

So what to do if sending reminders is not recommended ?
The topic (Bioinformatics) I want to work on is attracting attention of researchers in my country but they are no institutions to recommend or encourage people willing to get in touch and work with prominent researchers abroad.

For the researchers abroad to take inquiries seriously, it would invariably work better (even if not easily accomplishing all desired goals) to have institutions (such as your university) do the inquiring in some quasi-official way. This might not necessarily help you yourself, individually or immediately, but would surely help you and your peer group collectively, and in the long run.

I agree with other respondents that you cannot expect unknown professors to respond to your emails.
Could you join an online community (email list) for your area of research interest?  After lurking long enough to understand its culture, could you send a post explaining your situation (being interested in the topic and having nobody to discuss it with in your country) and ask if someone would be willing to comment on your proposal?  Alternately, you could send your proposal to the list (although be prepared for it to be torn to shreds).  The administrator of the list may be able to advise you on what is appropriate.
Good luck!

As the other answers already tell you, asking for a project proposal is asking for a very big favor, such that cold calling isn't likely to work.
The following piece of information is missing from the discussion as of now, however: many established researchers receive many cold-call requests for doing an internship with them. It is common practice in some countries to have them included in the students' curricula, and thus, it is not uncommon for students to aim high and try to get one at good schools abroad. Quite often, these mails are not very well targeted and researchers getting many of them are quite quick at pressing the "delete" key here.
Your request for a thesis topic/proposal may very easily be seen to fall into this category, even if it does not! Because such a request is so uncommon, people may expect that you would be asking for a (possibly paid) internship or (paid) PhD position in the second mail, and thus may not want to risk to be embarrased that they invested time on the matter if it turns out later that their suspicion was correct. So hitting the delete button quickly is a safe course of action for them.
I second the commenter's suggestion to ask your institution to build the necessary bridges for you. Does your institution already have a scheme for spending a semester abroad? Perhaps you can consider actually doing that?

One additional factor which I think may be useful at least as secondary background information: This sounds a lot like you are trying to bypass the regular admission process.  You should start by finding out what it takes to become a student at their Department and follow the same enrollment process as everybody else.  If your background and skills are a good fit, you could find yourself in a project even as a junior student (but this is arguably a very optimistic outlook).

I try to be responsive as much as possible, even if I cannot help. However, if I see that the person clearly has no idea what I am working on, tags on some keywords that seem to fit my profile or similar, and I am under time pressure, I won't respond. They haven't spent the effort finding out who they are addressing, and cannot expect effort of politeness in return.
Sometimes, I get what is effectively advice request from students from another university. If they work on something I am interested in, have done good work and bring something to the table, I consider this a collaboration across institutions, and I am happy to engage in it to some extent. However, if it is clearly a supervision request with no benefit to research that I am able to productively carry out, I am not prepared to invest my department's resources (i.e. my time) for this. Supervising my local students, for which I am paid, takes precedence.
I do give, however, brief advice where I can help with a little effort. This should not be extended into a back-and-forth discussion, to not abuse the time of the responder.


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Is there any reason to get paper reprints of your articles?
Is there any reason to get paper reprints of your articles? Some journals charge for reprints others give them for free. Should I save the trees and not ask for the free ones? Are reprints so important that I should be paying for them?
I guess I should add I have only seen reprints offered in bundles of 100 (maybe 50) and getting 10 does not seem to be possible.

The only time I've ever been asked for journal reprints was by the American Institute of Mathematics. (Yes, that is how they build their reprint library.) I got a stack of 100 (for free) for the first paper I ever published; of those 3000+ pages I managed to give away fewer than 10 so far.

I did it initially so that I would have a nice paper copy of my paper. In principle I could hand these out to my colleagues and other people who were interested in my work.
This is rather out-dated these days. You can just send interested parties a pdf and they can read it on their iPad. Save the trees.
I don't see any reason at all to actually pay for reprints. You have a copy already, right?

Yeah, I rather like paper reprints, but they just aren't very useful.  (I've never managed to give away the full set of reprints of any of my older papers, back when they all came with reprints.)  It would be nice if one could order, say, five reprints, but that wouldn't be cost effective, and it's certainly more sensible to order no reprints than a lot.

+1 There really is no need for reprints when you can just print your own on a high quality laser printer.

I still like getting a few reprints if possible, because I post many of my papers on the wall outside my office and I think the reprints look nicer than simply printing the pdf (since they're on the paper size that they are typeset for, rather than generic 8.5x11).  But as Dave and others have noted, reprints are really a relic from a pre-internet age.

@DanC have you ever been able to get a "few" reprints. It seems like it is always 50 or 100.

@DanielE.Shub I think I typically get 30.  The best outcome was when I had a paper with multiple authors.  Together we got around 30, of which my share was about 5 or 6.

"save the tree" -- I guess you can view libraries as (useful) CO2 storage facilities, which are sorely needed. ;)

Some journals in chemistry are starting to offer a limited number of downloads of a high-resolution (print quality) file of your paper instead of reprints. Then you can print just the right number that you want to hang on your office door, your mother's refrigerator, etc.

@Raphael, not to by picky, but I would guess that the production of a sheet of paper produces more CO2 than it stores... :)

In the 20 years since I published my first paper, I have been asked for actual paper reprints exactly three times: Twice by researchers, who each asked for one paper by sending a postcard, and once by my tenure committee, who required paper copies of everything I'd ever published.  In the latter case, it was much easier to just download and print new copies than to hunt for the official reprints, which are still hding somewhere in the back of some disused filing cabinet.  (My university finally stopped requiring tenure applicants to kill forests about two years after I got tenure.)
So I'm gonna go with NO, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to get paper reprints.

In Italy, when you apply for a position, you often have to send together with the paperwork one to three dead-tree copies of your $N$ best papers (or sometimes even of everything you have published).
This can easily amount to several hundred pages; multiply it by the number of positions you will apply for. It may be costly and troublesome to print them from a university printer. And, you know, printers are always low on toner the day before the deadline.
So in this case reprints are handy to have. I assume Italy is not the only country where this happens.

The answer to this question depends on which timeframe you are concerned with, and how optimistic you are about modern technology.
Finding copies of old, paywalled papers can be a problem. Nowadays, most papers are freely available on the web or at least in preprint form from the author's sites. DOI provides a robust way to link to them, even if the actual storage place should change. As the other answers state, you have probably no use for prints now (or in the near future).
However, what happens in the remote future? Once you stop caring -- maybe you switch career or (eventually) die -- the situation is similar with old papers today: readers are at the mercy of publishers. Is your paper still paywalled? Is the publisher still there? Has some search engine cached a version? Can PDF still be read on modern devices? In the worst case, your paper is practically inaccessible.
Does an archived paper copy help? Depends. There is no way any one place keeps hard copies of everything published. You can give your students and close colleagues hard copies for their own use, and maybe they keep so that maybe even in 50 years, an interested student who can not access your paper (easily) can get a copy from their professor that has undiluted value.
For example, Flajolet died. I am certain my boss (who works in closely related field) knew whom to ask for his academic remains. My boss has himself inherited all the paper accumulated and written by his late advisor (one of which I actually retrieved from the archive to check out for an answer on cs.SE; because it was impossible to find on the webs). This is stuff that does not exist on the web, but in real-world networks. For such, paper is important. Maybe that model is doomed given our technological advances, but I have the feeling that it will have its place for some time at least.
As far as I know, the issue of how we can keep our rapidly accumulating mass of data and knowledge at all and also accessible and organised over time is unsolved. It may be useful to keep that in mind.

For archiving reasons, it seems certainly more important that libraries continue to buy print journal versions, than individual researchers ordering reprints?

@silvado: True. Fact is they can't afford most of them, that approach doesn't scale and it creates few points of failure.

Many of these answers look rather unimaginative a few years down the track, and are obviously provided mainly by mathmos and scientists. With the proliferation of digItal and documents circulated by email, your pdf is less likely than ever before to be read. In my experience - having ordered and posted (yes posted) paper offprints - I had a greater response from recipients than if I'd sent a pdf,  which people now routinely ignore. Offprints are handsome and suggest thoughtfulness. Save the electronic copy for your promotion application.

Why are you sending your papers to people who did not ask for them?

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How to automatically retrieve journal ranking and quartile from article list
For a grant application I need to generate a list of my supervisor's publications (hundreds of articles) sorted by date, and for each publication they want impact factor, ranking, and quartile ranking of the journal in the year of publication. If I have to look up this manually it will take me a week. I only have the list of the publications in a CV, not even in a citation manager.
Can anybody help? How can this be done semi-automatically?

Sorted by date, is trivial if you have a bibtex file. 100 publications are not usually published in 100 journals, but in a lot less, since many people publish in some "favorite" journals.

Is this your  scholarship? If yes, what does it have anything to do with your supervisor's publication list? Are you sure they want his list, not yours?

Are you sure they don't want only the 10 most relevant? Or that there isn't a page limit?

@Alexandros I don't have a bibtex file and they ask info for each year! so it changes every year.

@scaaahu it's a scholarship part of a joint doctorate, they ask specifically "Qualifications and scientific output of the supervisor" divided by category.

Have you asked your supervisor? Most authors have their publication (even partly) in bibtex format.

@Alexandros does bibtex solve the lookup of IF and ranking? I already have their publications sorted by date.

@Alexandros I'm not convinced, for academia as a whole, that "Most authors have their publication in bibtex format". I've used it all of...once...in my entire career.

The typical place to obtain journal IF and ranking data in a searchable and sorted format is your institution's library. They usually subscribe to commercial ranking services that provide spreadsheets (typically Excel).
If you are a member of the institution (researcher, student) this should be made available to you. Depending on the type of subscription, the library might be reluctant to just share the file via email (in my experience, they are usually allowed to do so). In this case, ask if you can use one of the library's computers to extract the information you need.
Once you have the list of journals sorted, it'll be a bit of legwork to match articles to their respective journals, but a hundred should be doable in a few hours

@user405 well a question about how to code a script or use Exel macros to automatically match journal metrics to the bibliography should be on topic on other websites on the SE network.

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When is it appropriate to contact the editor before submission to avoid rejection without review?
Manuscripts submitted to a journal are often directly rejected by the editor without going out for review. I find this acceptable with the caveat that it's a huge waste of time having to reformat and readjust word length. Journals with high rejection rates should have an abstract only submission as a first step.
Anyhow, given this current situation: should I contact the editor of one or more journals that I think would be a good target for my manuscript before formally submitting my manuscript?
Some journals offer this option but others don't. So I am not sure if it is acceptable to or if just by sending an abstract I will somehow limit my chances of getting to the review stage.

This would depend on the culture of the subject of the papers, but in mathematics I expect that this would just annoy the editors.

What area are you in?

Why do you think that a rejection without review is a bad thing and should be avoided? How is it different from "contacting the editor before submission"?

@Dmitry: if it is a lot of work to format the manuscript to the standards of the publisher, an immediate rejection wastes that work. It would seem reasonable to want the ability to inquire if the paper has enough interest to make this work worthwhile. (This is perhaps an argument in favor of journals that don't require formatting to their standards until after acceptance.)

@Andy: Of course, math journals also rarely have strict word limits, and are often flexible about the formatting of the initial submission, so a formal submission is only a little more work than an informal inquiry.

I wonder if you could put together some reusable macros to make it easier to move back and forth between the various formats....  Also, a more experienced colleague may be able to help you judge the best fit journal for you to submit to.

@aparente001 the only thing I can automate is creating the bibliography. But when you have to trim a paper from 7000 words to 4000 words just to see it rejected after a few days, that can't be automated.

I've voted to put this question on hold until the author specifies field, because it is critical for getting a good answer to this question.

I've contacted journals before submission, but usually only to check how long they take to do a review, and to confirm/check that they do quick rejections. Quick rejections are good - it's horrible when they keep you waiting six months only to send you a review telling you your manuscript sucks or is unreadable. I always wonder that, if it is so bad, why didn't they reject it quicker? I don't think they can tell you whether it will be sent to review without actually seeing the manuscript. You could also ask them how much they care about formatting. Perhaps they don't, then you don't have to bother with any special formatting, you can just use a generic template, like the LaTeX article class.

If they tell you that "your article sucks" and they're true, then it's probably your mistake. But what's really annoying is if they reject it after several months for "not fitting" -- which is something a bit harder to decide.

@yo' Well, if they don't like it that is fine. But in that case, it should not take them months to arrive at a decision.


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Is it acceptable for professors to listen to music using headphones in the workplace when expecting student contact?
In my institution, I see a lot of research students and staff members listen to music using headphones in the workplace. It is a matter of personal preference, and I cannot see a problem in that while it doesn't interfere with communications at work.
Is that behaviour acceptable for a professor during a time in which s/he expects students to approach her/him?

Yes it is acceptable.

Sounds reasonable. Unless you are talking about playing Sir Mix-a-Lot over speakers.

Once while I was student I had to meet a faculty member; I went to their office but their door was almost (but not quite) closed. So I knocked, and I was told to come in - they mentioned that they had been playing Diablo 2. I found that perfectly acceptable.

That depends. Are they listening to some kind of modern trash or something classical, like Zeppelin..? :-)

True story: One of my professors asked a student to postpone their scheduled meeting later in the afternoon 'cause the professor was reading a novel at that time.

I have to admit, I'm confused by this question. I'm still a human being. If no one's here, why can't I listen to my jam? I might get up and dance a little, too.

@Fadecomic, this confusion lead to asking such a question!

Yes, of course. As long as they turn it down so that they can talk over it when the student comes by, why would it be unacceptable to have music on while they are waiting? If they are listening on headphones while waiting, it would be preferable if they could see the student approaching, but there's nothing unprofessional about it even if they don't. The student can knock on the door, wall, floor, desk, etc. in order to get their attention.

You assume that they use crappy headphones that let through ambient noise, or speficially by open ones (that annoy coworkers, if any) for the purpose. I think if you listen to music you should have a note on the door prompting an appropriate visual cue.  Furthermore, I think cutting yourself off completely (i.e. no eye contact possible without entering the room) during visiting hours is unprofessional, but that's just my opinion. Not turning off music and/or putting down headphone when in a conversation, on the other hand, is clearly not only unprofessional, but also rude.

@Raphael, I think your standards of professionalism are too high and I think your are reading waaaaay too much into what I have assumed. If the professor has their back to the door and headphones on when waiting for students to come by office hours, I would find it mildly annoying if I had to knock, then knock louder, and then walk over and tap them on the shoulder. I agree that it's rude not to turn down music or take off headphones when actually talking to a student. But having a little light classical or whatever on in the background while talking is definitely not unprofessional.

There seem to be two issues in the question and the answers, one is if it is ok with headphones on and the other to play music in the office during hours when student contact is expected.
Headphones. Wearing headphones is not exactly inviting to conversation but signalling "I want to be undisturbed" so clearly not the best way to have students approach you during office hours without invoking some extra discomfort to at least some.
Music. Music is a personal taste. What is soothing to one person may be almost intolerable to another. During a meeting one expects full attention from, in this case, both parties. Thus having music on does not signal that focus is on the potential visitor but that it is divided and hence that the visitor is of less importance and maybe intruding. Turning it down when a visitor arrives, anything less would be rude but why insist on music when expecting visits? At other times, no problem.
A professor-student meeting is not less professional than, say meeting your bank representative or meeting with public officials. How would you feel if you were met under similar circumstances in business of public servants? that is the sort of question one would need to ask and sometimes even what other would think.
So, acceptable? Well, it depends on what signals one wants to send. It will be up to each person to figure out the optimal meeting atmosphere. As for the case portrayed in the question, I vote for far less than optimal.

Having headphones on is in general not a signal that I don't want to be disturbed. Having my door closed is, at least in France. At my Czech university, I'd probably simply lock the door to signal that.

The point is not how you see it but how you are perceived by others. Having good intentions is one thing but how others see it another.

This is my experience with one university in Prague and one in Paris. In both places, many people listen to music, either loud (if they're alone in the office) or in headphones. If someone walks in, you simply mute the music or put off the headphones,

Headphones used to have that connotation, but I feel like that's gone away with the advent of pretty much everything under the sun being able to play music. I would wager that the millenial generation certainly does not find wearing headphones to be "do not disturb" more than a "I'm enjoying music."

Put a sign on the door. 2) Closed headphones don't disturb anybody, but also cut you off quite well.

To expand on Peter Jannsen's answer, it dpends a lot on the setting.  If you are simply having office hours where students MAY come and ask you questions if they need, but do not have any specific scheduled meetings, then music seems completely appropriate, especially if you pause it when a student comes in.  If you have a scheduled appointment, unless it is soft classical (you know, what they call "elevator music") it is most likely not appropriate.  If you are working in a research setting with just the possibility that others may show up and want to interact, I would go back to the non-offensive music and pausing when someone desires to interact to show you are giving them your attention.  Headphones are not a good idea unless you are working on a solo research project and don't really anticipate others or welcome interruptions, unless you are using a single-ear Bluetooth headset where they cannot even tell if you are listening to music or not, with volume set low enough that if someone comes in and speaks you can hear them clearly.

I have a different opinion: no. First, the academia is an institution, so everybody work for academia represent the academia in each ambit.
Second, on the web (blog, social network and so on) we protect our privacy and we try to show an upright behavior, even more so we must do it in the academic world.
For these reasons I think that is not a good picture for a professors to listen to music using headphones or not.
I am not contrary because I hate music, I am contrary because I think that a student that see a professor listen music (the headphones are only an aggravating) during his work might think that his work is not important as he say. Of course this is not true, but... if the student go away without that the professor can see him?

I didn't downvote, but I don't see how listening music on a lonely job is a sign of unimportance of the job.

Maybe I have explained wrong: I think that when someone represent an institution he have to have behavior upright. Of course, during analysis of data laboratory, or other work of this kind, you can listen music. But if you are expecting students no. But this is only a my opinion.

When I expect a student, I only have to make sure I don't overhear him knocking. This is done by leaving the door open so that he doesn't have to knock. As soon as he arrives, I remove the music. I don't see anything unprofessional in that.

Yes, maybe you have reason. My attitude, maybe it's too rigid. And we close the doors only when we are absent. Like you.

authors: Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні


text:
Is Lambert Academic Publishing a reputable company?
I was contacted by the Acquisition editor of Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) to publish my bachelor's thesis as a printed book. Is LAP any good? I have no idea about it; I have just heard that it's a freelance publishing house.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing (and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_mill )

i got one day before yesterday :O

No.
Publishing a thesis this way has no academic value whatsoever.  (I.e., it will lead to no prestige, respectability, credit, etc.  For academic purposes, it will not count as a published book, except for interfering with other forms of publication.)  LAP's business model seems to be collecting as many theses and other unpublished academic documents as they can and then selling printed copies.  I don't see much value to this, but it could be harmless if you do not plan to publish the thesis in any other form.  If you like the idea of seeing your thesis for sale on amazon.com, then you should investigate other options as well and choose whatever seems like the best deal.  However, it's unlikely that you'll make any money from this, and certainly no more than a small amount, so you'll be contributing more to the academic community if you make the thesis available for free online.
See also I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis to a Print Content Farm for a detailed account of LAP's business practices.

+1 if you want your stuff to be seen/read, put it online for free, any other means will hinder accessibility.

thanks ... i will reconsider my decision and putting it online for free seems better

Note that putting it online also counts as publishing to some people and can interfere with preparing other scholarly publications based on the work.

To give more info i have already published 3 research papers in open access journals from my thesis

Agreeing: if your goal is accessibility, such a publication is not good. If your goal is "credit/status", it is completely worthless. True, putting things on-line (on your own web page of some sort, or arXiv) is sometimes (aggressively, for ulterior purposes) construed as "bad publication". But good journals, while occasionally quibbling in some essentially meaningless ways, will not object to, for example, a "preliminary version" being on-line. (They may object to the fruits of their copyeditors being put on-line for free...)

No, it is not.
See this review from Jeffrey Beall:
http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/05/lambert-academic-publishing-a-must-to-avoid/#more-921
(I highly recommend checking his list of 'predatory academic publishers' and reporting any new one you see to him).
Or this blog entry:
http://chrisnf.blogspot.com/2010/06/lambert-academic-publishing-continues.html
It's what people started to call a 'predatory publisher'
It will bring you nothing but an expensive hard copy of what you apparently already published. Your local printing joint will probably do a better job, for less $.

Although it may seem harmless at first, there is one thing that is very important to bear in mind when you intend to publish your work: You do NOT want your name nor work associated with any dubious publishers, editors, conferences, journals, etc, as it may be harmful, e.g. you may end up having your high-quality work published amongst several low-quality ones.
Therefore, in my opinion, you should not risk Lambert, as they do not have any peer reviewing nor seem to enforce any quality standards.

Good god, no, avoid anything from Lambert like the plague.I bought a Lap Lambert publication online from Amazon without checking on the publisher first. It was on a topic that was relevant to my thesis and I felt I should check this book out. It's called "Aspects of Neuroses in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy" by a Mona Radwan from Cairo university. I paid a lot of money, a total of $154 for quick postage, because I was anxious to read it, thinking it might cover material in my own work, necessitating changes to my own thesis. I also thought that if it was an astute and well researched piece of work it might be very useful and take my own arguments in new and fruitful directions. But when I read the book I was appalled. You can see my one star review of it on Amazon if you care to read it, at http://www.amazon.com/Aspects-neuroses-barkers-regeneration-trilogy/dp/3848406403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454636030&sr=1-1&keywords=mona+radwan
I could not believe a publisher would allow its name to be associated with such a shoddy product. Even the blurbs on the back cover are very badly worded and punctuated. The contents of the book are poorly formatted. There are terrible problems with the thesis itself, in punctuation, structure, citation, referencing, style and level of research, indicating either that Radwan submitted it before her thesis was examined or before receiving comments from supervisors, because so much is wrong with this as a doctoral thesis. I am making this comment to warn everyone away from anything that comes out of this dreadful shambles of a publishing house. Avoid it like the plague. I have been burned. Save yourself.

I don't see your one star review when I follow the Amazon link, just a five star non review.

Publish them online for maximum impact or try a genuine academic publisher for prestige. Lambert will basically offer to print out individual copies of your thesis for a very high price (thus making a lot of money). Plus they use fake accounts in social media among other shady practices:
http://journalology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/lambert-academic-publishing-or-how-not.html

Some may see it as a benefit. :)


text:
MSc vs. BSc admission GPA for an application to a PhD program
I am currently attending a BSc in CS from a research university. I should end up with a MSc in Software Verification.
I wish to apply to a research university in EU, UK, or Switzerland, for a PhD, later on, (really interested in Oxford, since they have a research group that could turn on as a natural progression to my master's course, in alternative, I am interested in EPFL or in ETH's Computer Systems group) since I am interested in doing research and applied research in the future (I am already reading some papers from these Universities to have my ideas straight).
The research areas I'm interested in are: Computer Systems (OS, Distributed Systems), Software Verification, Compilers.
However, probably my master's grades will be actually much better than my BSc grades. That said, my BSc grades won't be low, but they won't be top 0,1% either. My question is: From your experience, is the MSc GPA valued more or less than the BSc GPA for a PhD admission?

Typically, grades in undergraduate work are weighted more heavily than grades in graduate work. This is because your graduate work in general is focused on the research you do and the papers you publish as opposed to merely classwork. However, this is not to say that the answer to your question is clearly black or white. Indeed, any reasonable school will look at all aspects of the applicants (grades in both undergrad and beyond, summer projects, research experience, letters of recommendation, etc) when deciding if they are a good fit for their program. There are no doubt countless examples of students whose grades differed from the other applicants, but were accepted anyway.
That being said, it's usually seen as a positive if your grades trend upwards near the end of undergraduate work and the beginning of graduate work. The idea is that if an applicant shows recent signs of improving, they (hopefully) are more likely to continue improving after joining the new program.
Finally, it's worth noting that different schools (and even different departments within a single school) handle their admissions process differently. As always with these types of specific questions, it's a good idea to ask the school's department directly about the matter. In particular, I'm sure that there's a contact in the CS department in Oxford you could email who could be able to answer this question directly.

+1 for the last sentence. Ask someone at Oxford, they'll be happy to help.


text:
Is there any guide or organisation solution for increasing utilization of laboratory and lab equipment?
We obtained a report for the last academic year. A shocking revelation was that the capacity utilization* of lab equipment, laboratories, instruments and machines is only 37%. Everyone seems to be happy with this result, most of the comments are that science can't be lucrative and researchers cannot be forced to work with already existing equipment. If they want to expand research and buy a new machine (even if we have 3 already) that should be allowed. "Your grant your rules".
Is there any organization method to overcome this "abeyance" of overall facilities at faculty?
*Utilization was calculated by time and resources being used, versus number of publications and number of employees (students, professors, researchers).

I don't understand this question at all. Your complaint is that some equipment is not utilized as much as you think it should be, and nobody but you thinks this is a problem? Why do you think it's a problem?

no, @ff524 I asked if there is any organisational design to improve utilisation of faculty research resources. This recourses are equipment, lab materials and instruments, machines and area in whole. I think it is a problem, if you have something that you don't use frequently, costs of repair and maintenance are higher than sending sample outside of institution, (example, sequencer, running cost more than sending sample to specialized company )

If you have data showing that the costs of keeping the equipment in-house (at its current level of utilization) are higher than sending samples out, I assume you must have showed that data to those who find the status quo acceptable. What was their response? You should [edit] all this information (including the last sentence of your comment) into your question, as it's likely to be highly relevant to any answer you might get.

I think it would be outside of scope of my question? I was referring to known management and organisational methods for scientific or/and educational institutions. I think 37 is not satisfactory, do you think that I am creating a problem by raising this question?

Your question is fine. I'm also interested in strategies to increase lab efficiency.

I agree with @ff524 that this question would be much easier and better to answer if you gave more evidence about why you think 37% "utilization" is too low. 37% is just a number - it can be great, terrible, or just usual utilization. Equipment usage depends on many things including (a) whether the machines you have are sufficient for the planned research, (b) how allocation policies etc. currently work, (c) whether the equipment is general-purpose or extremely specific, (d) to what extend your institution is even allowed to use hardware bought with a specific grant in other contexts, etc.

I think my reasons are not factual, @xLeitix rather feeling that faculty is poorly managed and capacities are not used enough. I acknowledge that everyone have their own right to plan and design research as they want, although I think it is strange to design in a way that dont correspond with available methods, (b) allocation policies are pretty simple, except if some machines are in personal ownership of professors, they will usually ask for co-authorship (c) both (d) good question, I dont know,

A work week is somewhere around 40 hours, a full week (24/7) is $7 \cdot 24 =  168$ hours. This would make 23%. I'd say 37% is stellar...

I thought I understood what the 37% represented, until I read the part about "versus number of publications and number of employees (students, professors, researchers)." Perhaps you could better clarify how "number of publications and number of employees" was used in this calculation?

so percent of utilisation decreases if you have low number of publication and high number of employees. @DanielR.Collins if surface area ( prescribed by accreditation institution is 8 square m per student and employee) and utilization of this area is not utilised in timely and proper organisation timeframe, percent increase, this is also utilised for other categories-utilisation of machines, materials, equipment, dishes. and average of each individual value is made..and you get finale score.cumulative average of each individual features important for productivity of institution

It's extremely hard to understand what you're saying. There seems to be some calculation where if the equipment is used constantly around-the-clock, but no papers are being published, then this would count as 0% "utilization"?

@SSimon Could you please add a link to A shocking revelation... 37%?

Are you using the term "capacity utilization" in the sense that's defined on Wikipedia?

@DanielR.Collins yes!" if there wasn't any educational activities, and if no paper is published than in that scenario it would be 0%, why is that strange?

yes @chipbuster

It's strange because it can be "used" 100% but "utilized" 0% at the same time; but those words mean the same thing in everyday English usage. Perhaps it would be helpful if you put an exact formula for this calculation, or link to same, in your question.

you never heard about capacity utilization @DanielR.Collins ? It can be positive ( yield with success ) and negative, where no results are obtained

Unfortunately, the 37% capacity utilization number is essentially meaningless on its own, because it does not directly relate to the actual metric that one might wish to optimize.
When attempting to improve efficiency, it's important to have a precise understanding of what the ultimate metric is that it being maximized.  In a university research setting, the metric being maximized is not utilization of equipment, but rather something regarding research being accomplished and effective use of grant money.  To maximize such metrics, it's actually important that some equipment be idle some fraction of the time.
The problem is, research projects typically have highly uneven and unpredictable resource utilization profiles.  For example, my collaborators will often have 1-2 day bursts of flow cytometer use, in which they use a $200K machine for an hour or so every few hours, followed by a weeks-long gap while they prepare the next experiment.  It's very difficult to interleave usage during such bursts without distorting somebody's experimental plans, and an experiment may need to be started several days before the flow cytometer is first run.  Counterintuitively, this means that overall experimental efficiency demands that flow cytometers stand idle most of the time.
An even more extreme example is common tools like pipettes or screwdrivers: if anyone ever needs to spend more than a few seconds looking for such a tool, then operations are clearly inefficient.  As a professor of mine once told me: "If you can't just reach out and pick up the screwdriver you need, you don't have enough screwdrivers."  This means that such common tools must have exceedingly low capacity utilization in order to used efficiently as part of the larger workflow.
That same professor, on the other hand, now runs an operation in which an automated high-throughput mass spectrometer is carefully scheduled to run 24 hours a day, since it is the key high-value bottleneck of an entire pipeline.  In that case, efficiency means 100% utilization (but also that when they have grown enough, they will probably add another mass spectrometer).
Bottom line: if you want to improve efficiency, knowing the utilization of equipment is a useful starting point, but it can only be properly interpreted in terms of the larger workflow in which that equipment is used.

but what if your lab start to aloud others departments and faculties(unies) to use your flow cytometer? That would increase utilisation ?

research plus educational setting

@SSimon What you describe is essentially flow cytometry as part of core facilities.  My collaborators have bought their own flow cytometers because sharing the equipment meant their research was significantly inhibited by the wait times and competition for equipment.  Yes, there is still sharing (i.e., they will let other labs they trust use it when nobody in their lab wants it), but 100% utilization is highly suboptimal with this particular type of equipment, as it is for most.

Excellent answer. I'd like to add that in the labs where I work, we also rather typically have spatial constraints as well. We operate three instruments in one small lab, of which two need to have the room dark for the actual measurement. Also, if you have many people operating systems in a way where the experiments mean that actual beamlines are configured differently, essentially everyone needs to go through a full configuration, alignment and calibration procedure for their experiments. Thus, it is more efficient to reserve blocks of time in case the experiments don't go as smooth as hoped.

I think it is important to realize that the costs of not being able to work well is often much more expensive than the instruments. Plus, many instruments wear out rather by abuse and working hours than by standing around unused.

yes @cbeleites can you back up with some sources your claims?

@SSimon: Example 1: One of our students just redid 4 days of experiments because he hadn't realized that one of the shared pipettes he used was not working correctly. A PhD student here in Germany has marginal costs of around 100 - 150 EUR per working day. 4 days equal 2 - 3 new pipettes. Agreed, the student should have checked the pipette before using it. But for shared pipettes, the respective student would need to check it pretty much before every experiment, for your "own" pipettes you know when you need to service them (regularly or because something bad happened). Commercial pipette ...

... check comes at around 50 EUR. The student can do it, but needs to go another lab for the balance. I don't know exactly, but I'd guess that you don't do it properly below 2 - 3 h for the set of pipettes (all preparations included). Say, over the year 40 h, i.e. one work week can be saved by having "own" set of pipettes for a student who works quantitatively. That is roughly a set of 3 pipettes per year. And this does not include figure in the annoyance it causes if you always need to spend major amounts of time before you can start the "real" experiment.

Take my advice - invest in human hamster wheels to generate lab electricity, rather than buying it off the grid. So long as you make sure the wheels aren't too efficient, it should be possible to get most if not all of your researchers utilizing the equipment, 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. You may see a slight dip in the utilization of other lab equipment, but the high usage in both number and duration of use of hamster wheels should pull up the whole departmental average.

I am, of course, being facetious. A lab is not a factory that turns some arbitrary raw material into widgets en masse. Time and motion principles of labour management simply do not apply. If anything you want scientists using equipment less for the same amount of science published. In all seriousness, the only real machine whos utilization is worth tracking would be the coffee machine.
Lab efficiency however is a different ball game. Labs can be more or less efficient, however thats a different question for a different post :)

why you think lab is not a factory? It is factory of research articles. How many papers are published and in what journal are published tells directly about lab performance and without good utilisation you cannot have optimal number of publications

Unfortunately we have a difference of opinion about this, so i'm not going to be much help going forward. Perhaps one thing we could agree on is that old, unused hardware isn't doing anyone any favours.
One idea would be to donate it to Seeding Labs: http://seedinglabs.org/
Dumping your underutilized stock will improve ratings, plus you can pop some blurb into the website about how U. of Z is doing its bit. Most importantly, I think you are one of the few people who would be indifferent enough to the scientist's pro-hoarding protests that you might actually be able to get the job done :)

I understand you @J.J unfortunately, I think your vision of research and institutions in modern world, are not in touch with reality and current historical modern of developing research. " Researchers are not talented, rather gifted for organisation and planning"

Well if you're looking into increasing your resource utilization you might want to check out Clustermarket - they offer sharing your equipment externally and gaining an additional income which is always an added bonus. They also have a white paper about resource utilisation that could be useful.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a system of user facilities.  Access to these facilities requires an application and scheduling.  Access is typically free.  At least some of these facilities reach 100% utilization.  Each tool in each facility may have its own rules.  These are often listed on websites.  Facilities are incentivized to reach their utilization targets with funding.
Example:  http://www.anl.gov/cnm/user-information/user-access-program

To complement earlier responses, two types of cost come into play:

context-switching (when you have to go to a different department to use the tool) or re-calibrate whatever tool you use every time you take it from the joint pool;
unpredictability due to use fluctuation. It is known from queuing theory that with queue use approaching full (theoretical) capacity the fluctuations grow significantly. Sometimes not being able to estimate whether a tool will be free to use can hamper your productivity more than the cost of the tool. There is a reason why a rigid scheduling regime is implemented only for really expensive devices.

So, 37% may represent a perfectly good balance for these costs and as measure of utilisation it is not sufficiently informative in isolation.

yes, @Captain waist majority of stuff at my inst share your point of view.

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


text:
Article citation tracking
I am trying to find the origin of an idea based on journal articles.
To elaborate more:
Let's say object A affects object B in a certain manner and this was originally discovered by Researcher A a long time ago, say in the 1960s.
Subsequently, until now, there are many variations of studies around the idea that object A affects object B. Many journal articles revolving around this central idea have been published.
My dilemma is:
I do not know who (i.e. Researcher A) or which was the original paper published regarding this idea.  Is there any facility/journal resources that allow me to track the origin of this particular idea? Does Scopus have such a citation tracking ability?

There are no such online databases that could track down origins of ideas. To understand why a citation is used you have to read the paper. To get to the bottom of an idea you might have to follow several pathes of citations.

You might not be able to track the origin of an idea (unless it is patented). In order to do so you would have to traverse along towards the root of the citation graph. Which might not be practical since not all such references along this path may be freely available. You may go trough the trouble if the core of your research depends on this method's origin. But if you wish to design a system that is to be better than the ones in literature, then you ought to look for the recently published best practices and state of the art. In such a case the notion of who invented the method would be irrelevant.
Note that if you are still concerned about the originator of the concept there are a few tips you can follow. If this concept is revolutionary in its time then you might see many articles citing the same historic paper.  If such a concept is of common understanding then you might not see such a paper in common cited with the ones you studied. In such a case searching for the originator would be futile. This applies provided that you did enough survey to attain an extensive number of papers under this concept.


text:
It is plagiarism if my work is very similiar to something previously published?
I am a PhD student in economics and making a mathematical model of some stuff in a subject of my interest.
While I was searching papers on Google Scholar, I found a PhD thesis written 5-6 years ago in my university, in which one of the chapters is somewhat very close to my stuff.
Just for an important detail, my idea is totally different and I think it is an interesting idea but the model is just slightly different from author's thesis and the solution method is very close.
In particular, the model framework that author used is a very commonly used framework in the literature but accidentally my solution method is very close to the author's method.
For sure without doubt, I will give the exact reference with the chapter and state where my idea is different from author's idea.
My question is: is this a plagiarism? How can I avoid any plagiarism problems? Should I contact the author in order to invite him to be my co-author in this case?

As a rule of thumb, if you didn't plagiarize, it's not plagiarism.

Your situation is not in any way plagiarism, but rather a common and ordinary case of independent reinvention.
There is no need to have the other person as a co-author or anything like that: just cite their model as related prior work, explain how yours is similar and different, and learn from it so that you can do the best you can with your own work.

Thanks for your answer but if someone tells me that my work is to closely to X's PhD thesis ? Even I have not done this intentionnaly, people or even my advisor could think in this way...

@optimalcontrol From what you wrote, it sounds like this particular method is only one small part of your thesis work.  If this is the case, then don't worry about it: you can simply acknowledge that yes, this particular part did turn out to be very similar to that bit of previous work.  As long as you've made a significant contribution overall, it's just fine if some parts turn out to be less interesting than anticipated.


text:
What to do when manuscript is in latex but journal requires submission in MS Word
I wrote an article containing quite a lot of maths using latex. I want to submit this paper to a given journal. However,  submission guideline explicitly states that
all submissions must be done in word format. I am a bit confused about such a specification and really feel unconfortable to reedit everything in word. Some companies seem to offer convertor or online conversion. Maybe some of you have already experienced some of them and can give me some feedback and advices.

submission guideline explicitly states that all submissions must be done in word format. — Submit elsewhere.

In physics as in mathematics all the "real" journals accept LaTeX submissions--indeed most of them prefer LaTeX--and this would be a bad sign concerning the quality of the journal.

See here for a list of converters: How can I convert math-less latex documents into Microsoft Word?

What is this "math-less latex" of which you speak?

And then I was complaining a journal wouldn't let me use the glossaries package...

@DavidZ At least the America Journal of Physics does. I didn't find a global policy statement for all AIP journals. Hmmm...but now I notice that this is a AAPT journal. Here is one: RevTeX (good) or Word (why?).

I've used pandoc for this problem previously and it worked pretty well. Problems I have encountered are;

Multi-line equations (e.g. align or matrix environments) are not converted correctly to word. (I don't think there is an equivalent of align in word).
Converted all citations to the ones within parentheses (much more minor a fix).

Last publication I did this because I got so frustrated with the journal (it would accept and compile my Latex file, but gave no instructions about what packages I could use nor any instructions on how to get the bibliography to compile - and emailing for three weeks with the staff did not help). But it only took me a few hours to convert the paper (that publication had minimal math though).

If as Peter mentions the article wants the math in images, pandoc can do that (and does it better I think) than converting the formula to the MathML that Word uses. Also good to keep in mind if the journal allows just the PDF to be submitted.

I can sympathize with your situation but unfortunately there is not much you can do if the journal explicitly asks for Word files except to provide them. As was stated in a comment you can (and should) contact the journal to ask about the use of LaTeX. Most large publishers handle LaTeX but the individual journals (editors) may not be aware of this and may not use LaTeX themselves so as to see the benefits. I doubt anyone would change their local policy based on one manuscript but if they are not aware that people wish to submit LaTeX files, nothing will ever change.
If you ask editors about LaTeX, remember to also ask them about formats for supplying equations. In some cases, journals accept the built in so-called equation editor in Word and in some cases they may request equations as graphics. They should however, have some standard way of handling such, since I assume your manuscript cannot be the only one they ever published that includes equations.

For quite some time, Word has allowed equations to be entered in LaTex.  It shouldn't be a big deal to handle all your equations in one session, and get your paper out the door.  A good text editor like notepad++ would be a big help.
You might also look to see if there is any tool in the OpenOffice or LibreOffice suites that might help.

This question is from Dec 6, 2013. Perhaps you could list when Word added in it's LaTeX equation editor.

Word's equations feature that is similar to Latex appeared in 2006, in the version called Word 2007. The syntax is similar to Latex but it is not identical. Equation Editor was different - it was the old plugin for Word that was superseded by this native feature in 2006. See https://superuser.com/a/1201596.

It was quite a lot worse than LaTeX the last time I used it.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/linear-format-equations-using-unicodemath-and-latex-in-word-2e00618d-b1fd-49d8-8cb4-8d17f25754f8#:~:text=To%20insert%20an%20equation%20using,of%20math%20regions%20check%20box.

Try Adobe's pdf-to-word converter. Apart from some issues with equations, works extremely well.


text:
What author affiliation to put when you work for one university and study at another?
I am an author on a poster, but I am unsure of what to put for my affiliation. I am a graduate  student, but the poster and corresponding project is in no way connected with my university. I work for another university and the project relates to materials from that university, however they are not sponsoring the project. Any suggestions?

Both.  In alphabetical order.

Traditionally, affiliation address must be where the research has been conducted therein (this is the statement given by some scholarly journals in Guide for Authors).
Professors normally use their official affiliation for any publication/presentation even if their university has not supported that research. Probably, because their secured salaries let them to work on an external project. This is different for graduate students, but still can be applied.
In any case, nothing stops you for using both affiliations in your poster. Normally, a graduate student is gaining credit from his/her affiliation. Then, two affiliations can be indicative of your research potential, as you have not stuck to your academic project.


text:
How to review similar academic papers for a literature review?
In writing a literature review, assume you have the paper X and the paper Y. The two are similar in the study and the results. How can I write a review in this case?

Were they published simultaneously by two independent groups? Or earlier paper was cited in the second one?

One of them is back to 2004 and the other 2007. None of them cited the other.

It looks that it is an example of two independent studies that obtained similar results so you might comment that this reinforces the claim that the reported results are correct. However, most probably the studies weren't exact replications so it might be good to mention the differences between the studies.
It is also a good idea to investigate the journals they were published in - maybe the earlier paper was published in some obscure journal and the second one appeared in a high impact factor one? Have you looked at 'cited by' numbers (in Google Scholar)? Which paper got more citations? Maybe there are some publications that mention both papers? This might give you a clue how the community finds both papers and which one made more impact. It is also plausible that one paper got bigger publicity simply because of more known authors/research group.

I would just say "We have the following result in the following setting", tell the scientific part of the story, and finish with "see [] and [] for details". No matter what you do, my advice is not to try to claim that someone "did it" and the other one "repeated it" or "did it later" or that the results were "obtained independently". With a three year difference in publication time (some papers take longer to prepare and to review and it certainly takes more for an average paper to get "widely known"), you never know what exactly happened and it is neither your duty, nor your right to make any "educated guesses" on that account unless you have some tangible evidence at your disposal.
This is basically the same as Peter said (only in stronger language). You may launch a small "private investigation" along the lines Rabbit indicated to satisfy your own curiosity, of course, but it is definitely way beyond your reviewer duties and nobody really expects that.

Without knowing all the details it is not possible to provide equal amounts of detail in an answer. Since we (you) do not know the background of these papers it is also problematic to try to say anything to separate them. It is, for example, possible that they were mde independently bt one wtook much longer through review. we simply do not know. We cannot therefore cast judgement. I think it is ffair to simply list them both in a citation without saying anything about who was first, the publication date will definitely put one before the other.


text:
Can an emotional letter of motivation be harmful in a PhD application?
Today some of my friends were discussing a motivation letter. One friend's application was rejected. One reason his friends find out is that the letter of motivation is very emotional. So I was thinking: is there no place of emotion in academia? People used to study a lot as a strong feeling works in them, inspiring them to do more and more work. This is the emotion. Can it play harmfully in a letter of motivation?
Edit: I have collected his small letter. It is included. We thought it is very emotional.

College XY has best undergraduate mathematics department of the university of XY.
  IITX is built upon the basement of the first engineering college of Asia. I completed my B.Sc. from XY and M.Sc. from IITX. Both the times I got first class after each evaluation. I had a dream to continue my PhD studies in a good western university. I tried. My degrees are equivalent to degrees from European universities. I came to the understanding that my knowledge is not much sufficient for their requirements. Currently I am working in a project focussing on a very particular problem. I am out of touch from many interesting topics of mathematics.
  Many advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me which shall be very useful in my work. So I am thing for a better opportunity to revise my
  mathematical concepts in a better way and to collect new knowledge. I wish to build myself in a way that I can continue my PhD work in a good university and I can be a successful researcher. If I get the opportunity to continue the diploma hope I reach my dreams.

No academic department has told it. It is his friend's thought about his application.

So what did his friends "find out"?

As a general approximate rule, youngish students' speculations based on essentially no information should not be reasons for concern. The motivation to guess is clear, but that doesn't mean that guesses will be accurate.

Hope current edit shall make it clearer.

The extract you are showing is a translation right? If this is the text that was submitted I don't think 'emotions' are the primary concern.

The letter is not emotional. However, it won't convince anyone to give your friend an interview, let alone a position: it tells us nothing useful about what your friend wants to study, and why the particular program is a good fit for him!

I am wondering if we should change the title of this question. Currently, this question would not really help anybody who is actually wondering whether (s)he should keep emotion out of a motivation letter. The title should be more "Can a very generic motivation letter be harmful?" (to which the obvious answer is "yes", of course).

@xLeitix but that would invalidate several existing answers. (Also, this question would help anybody who is actually wondering whether (s)he should keep emotion out of a motivation letter, because it has answers that do address the titular question.)

Personal experience: While I was looking for a PhD I sent a lot of applications. In addition to my skills, knowledge and marks, I was quite emotional while doing interviews and sending applications. I actually found out that 2/3 of the people that decided to accept me as a student did it because I was emotional about it (of course, I had some skills also). I even got some positive responses from topics where my knowledge was close to none, just because they though I was motivated enough. So be emotional. But don't forget your skills!

Somewhat related: Why shouldn't I quote famous scientists in my SOP?

In brief, even after imagining that text's language cleaned up, the problem is not about "emotion" but about lack of verifiable substance. As in @aesmail's good answer, insubstantiated claims, or, worse, claims which appear to be counter to any documentable reality, are at best unpersuasive. For example, unsupported claims about the quality of one's university or department are at best pointless, and suggest that one does not know how things work. Proposing to "collect new knowledge" gives a very strange impression, as though the writer believed that learning new things was somehow unusual... while being remarkably inspecific.
That is, if I were to receive such a letter, I'd consider it basically content-free, for all practical purposes. "Emotion" is not the issue. The problem is that such letters should not be content-free, but should include tangibles, past accomplishments and connections with the future, etc. A content-free letter competes very badly with content-ful letters.

This reminds me of the understandable efforts made by applicants-to-grad-schools to find some formulaic approach to "good personal statements"... The essential impossibility of a formulaic approach is what makes reading of personal statements important to me as admissions committee member. Such statements are harder to usefully fake (given their dependence for sense on the writer's circumstances) than many other things.

There is a wonderful quotation by Bertrand Russell that perfectly sums up the nature of emotions in academia:

Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire. [1]

You should definitely show a sense of inquisitiveness, drive, enthusiasm, and eagerness; the "catch" is that we want to see that in your work. Dazzle us with your papers and presentations. Wow students in your lecture. But what we don't want is for you to tell us that you're enthusiastic and passionate. Leave that for others, such as the people writing your letters of recommendation, to tell us that.
[1]: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., p. 536 (1961).

I think this is a really good answer.  In many (if not all) parts of academia, your passion for your work will be taken into account (even quite significantly, in some cases).  What will not be taken much into account -- and, if taken into account at all, more likely negatively -- is your own verbal description of your passion for your work.

Yeah. A lot of things make a lot of sense as long as you're not saying them about yourself.

As others have said, the main problem of that letter is not its emotionality, but the lack of content and the presence of unnecessary details. Let me analyse a few example sentences:

College XY has best undergraduate mathematics department of the university of XY.

According to whom or according to which criteria?

IITX is built upon the basement of the first engineering college of Asia.

This is unnecessary: it does not actually strengthen the previous claim, nor it gives useful information to understand the background of the applicant. It's just a historical curiosity. Probably briefly listing the main research topics of the department would have been more useful.

I completed my B.Sc. from XY and M.Sc. from IITX. Both the times I got first class after each evaluation.

What was he evaluated on? Typically students have to write a dissertation at the end of their degrees, it would have been better to add information about these: objectives achieved, feelings about continuing on the same topics or moving to other topics.

Currently I am working in a project focussing on a very particular problem.

Which problem? Is it a toy problem or a research problem that can be suitable for a publication?

Many advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me which shall be very useful in my work.

Indeed, many advanced parts of mathematics are also unknown to mathematicians. So which are these parts that are needed for his work?
Therefore, on the basis of the above, I would have rejected his application too. You can write an emotional letter, but the emotions should be just an addition to the information needed by the application board to correctly assess the level of the applicant.

There is most certainly a place for emotion in academia.
That place is amongst your most trusted friends and closest colleagues.
Science works by identifying truths that hold regardless of whether we care about them or not, regardless of whether we desperately want them to be true or fear that they might be.
Science is funded by agencies who don't care how much your work means to you, but rather how its outcomes might support the agency's mission.
Professors are hired by other faculty who don't care whether working there will fulfill your dreams, but rather how your skills and abilities will fit the needs and goals of their department.
So by all means, have emotions, share your emotions with people who genuinely care about you as a person, and allow your emotions to direct your passion in research and teaching.  But know that you will be judged not by your passion, but by the fruits of your labor, and make sure that those are at the forefront of how your present yourself to strangers.

" But know that you will be judged not by your passion..." That seems too strong to me.  Many academic recommendation letters mention how passionate / committed / intense a candidate is.  For me, when someone is unusually keen I make sure to mention it as a positive trait.  Note also that academia \neq science.

@PeteL.Clark academia \neq science? I thought that academia is the place for science happens

Emotion in academia is a double-edged sword. On one hand, emotion (e.g. curiosity, drive) is usually what drives us to conduct research in the first place. But as research should always be targeted at getting closer to a objective truth, emotions must not interfere with your struggle for the truth. Yet there are many emotions (e.g. fear, faith, trust) that can cloud your judgement and lead your research down a wrong path.
In short, emotions can be a good reason to conduct research, but must not affect its results. If your friend's motivational letter was suggesting that he might be affected by emotions in the latter way, this may justly be held against him.

This is tangential to the question, but still have good information

The problem is not about emotions. Other answers have pointed out a lack of substance, but I'll make a different point. It's that your friend draws a very bad image of him/her-self. Your question title should really be "Can a letter of motivation that highlights weak points be harmful in a PhD application?"
Just isolate these four parts of the motivation letter:

I tried.

And then?

my knowledge is not much sufficient for their requirements

So no surprise you're not admitted.

I am out of touch from many interesting topics of mathematics.

Not good if you're to pursue cutting edge research for a PhD.

advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me

ditto
This is an application. It needs to draw a good image of the applicant, not show the weak points.

The original poster is asking totally the wrong question.  The problem isn't his friend's level of "emotion"; it is his friend's utter lack of social intelligence at how he will be perceived in writing such a thing.  The answer is not for his friend to become a smoother wordsmith; the answer is for his friend to get out into the world more, and actually develop a functional level of social intelligence.
The intended reader of this letter is a HUMAN, probably a group of them.  Each of them can be expected to be a very, very smart human, who will analyze the letter on many different levels, but nevertheless, a human, with emotions, from which the writer would like a particular (favorable) response.  My immediate emotional response, as a human, after reading this, is disbelief, annoyance, and disgust.  Disbelief at how clueless the writer is, annoyance at how little useful information he provides me, disgust at how little he must have thought about me and what I might want to see in such a letter, and then a bit more annoyance at what a waste of time it was to even read it.  This letter is so poor on such a fundamental level, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea it was written by someone seeking entry into a PhD program.
The primary emotions being expressed in the letter are anger at the injustice and victimhood of being denied, and bewilderment at not understanding the reasons why, and then more anger at finding out his prior education, is, apparently "worthless" in the eyes of these institutions.
So, the reader of the letter should admit into their PhD program, an angry victim of rejection, a victim who seems to believe the fault was with the evaluators, not himself, yet does not show any understanding of WHY others rejected him?  A candidate with this lack of awareness does not inspire confidence, doesn't seem like a good bet.
And instead of telling us even what area the "very particular (mathematics) problem" is in, we are left to guess?  Why doesn't he just say it's a "problem in the area of (some mathnobabble area, I'll say "online reputation management") involving (slightly more particular considerations, I'll say "mathematical models for detecting falsified reviews").  What is he hiding from us by being vague? Maybe he's hiding... that he actually knows NOTHING! Yet, perhaps he knows a great deal. The reader cannot tell anything useful about what he does and does not know in the relevant area.
A socially intelligent writer would have gone to great lengths to find out why his qualifications were perceived to be unsuitable by other institutions, and then calmly but briefly explain it. How could he appear to not know WHY those other institutions rejected him? Was he so lacking in motivation, he did not bother to find out the specific, detailed reasons for his rejection?  I submit that much academic work is about figuring out what the problem is that needs to be solved, and then applying thinking and action to solve it.  How is it possible to have confidence in a candidate who accepts rejection without clearly figuring out the reasons, what the PROBLEM was?  How can this man be trusted to take effective action to identify problems, and then solve them, as part of a a PhD program?  To address this issue, he must be able to briefly and calmly explain what the problem was, and preferably why it will not be an issue at the desired institution.  For analogous examples from Finance and Economics, "European institutions require an EU-accredited course in Financial Derivative Models, which was neither required nor available at my prior institutions." Or, "European institutions prefer graduates of the Austrian school, while my coursework was centered around the Chicago school". Explaining why the problems other institutions cited won't be an issue at his desired institution is an exercise I will leave to him.
And overall, there is little to no mention of anything substantive he has done, nothing that can be verified; the primary mentions are of the injustice he feels has been done to him by having his degrees ignored and disrespected by other schools he has applied to, schools who are obviously arbitrary, mean-spirited, and just out to get poor little him.
I hope I reach my dreams?  What ARE his dreams, maybe a little statement of them would help?  His dreams are so vague he can't even briefly state them?  And he HOPES he reaches, not he "is determined to do the work to reach", his dreams?  But don't just try to be more smooth; invest time, attention, and emotion to figure out what his dreams actually are, so that he can clearly and compellingly express them in a sentence or two. "My dream is to..." (I'll say, "help the online world become a more honest place") "...and being admitted into this program would bring me closer by..." ("being around brilliant mentors who can help me devise and improve mathematical models for detecting patterns of deception and fraud").
Such a letter should be written to show an awareness of, and caring for, the point of view of others.  As it stands, it loudly conveys a lack of awareness in those areas.  The readers would be likely to conclude the writer is unaware, a bad thing in itself, or, even worse, uncaring.
The writer of the letter would be better advised to take up some hobby or activity, take a year off from school if necessary, to work on and improve his social intelligence.  Maybe go to a university and work as a mathematics tutor for students in the areas he has learned, while taking classes or doing other work that involves interacting with people a lot.  It should be an area that requires a level of social intelligence skills to be successful, provides opportunity after opportunity to develop them, and provides immediate and direct personal feedback on how well he is doing.  A quick list of ideas could include doing commission sales work, working as a bartender, and volunteering to canvass and advocate for political candidates and their campaigns.

Welcome to A.SE! We try to provide constructive answers here -- your response is unnecessarily negative with ad hominem attacks, which is why it likely will not attract many upvotes. I'd suggest editing it to make it more constructive -- imagine that you are writing to the student applicant himself/herself.

RoboKaren tells me "your response is unnecessarily negative with ad hominem attacks".  I have been direct and descriptive in describing how I, as an evaluator, would process such a letter.  At the same time, I have tried to provide constructive suggestions and specific actions to improve the situation.  While I could certainly be more concise, I stand by what I wrote as an authentic expression that, I believe, is more likely to be helpful than a kinder, gentler wording. Relevant cliche: Tough love.  Is RoboKaren right, and I am too harsh? Or is my direct wording a better medicine here?

Yes, in my opinion, you're too harsh. At least, I don't understand why the letter is disgust.

I accept your opinion that I may be too harsh in some areas.  I simply can't immediately tell which ones. :)  In some cases, pain, emotional pain, is needed to trigger humans to action and change.  I hope what I write inspires the right kind of pain in the original writer to motivate him to take constructive action to address what I see as the real, underlying problem.  He needs to become better at reading, understanding, and anticipating the perceptions of humans, in order to put himself in a position where whatever mathematical skills he has will become relevant.

The problem isn't his friend's level of "emotion"; it is his friend's utter lack of social intelligence at how he will be perceived in writing such a thing - looks like you should take your own advice.

To the above points, this post has been flagged as "offensive" by users. Can you edit to make the tone less attacking and more descriptive of the solution? I appreciate that you're trying to provide "tough love", but that's not the approach we condone on this forum.

This answer is only "harsh" in that it doesn't sugar-coat the conclusions or explanations of reactions letter-readers would have. In fact, it is very informative about specifics.

I reduced harshness of a couple paragraphs that were not describing likely reader reactions.  My objective is to be direct, not unnecessarily harsh.  It's interesting that Davor attacks me without pointing out specifics of what he believes should be changed. Davor, can you do better than that?

Your objective is not unnecessarily harsh. I specificly pointed out the word disgust. You are still using it. What's the point for Davor to do better than that? I would agree with Davor.

scaahu, Are you asking why I used the WORD disgust?  Your question is worded strangely... The word "disgust" describes my own emotional reaction upon reading the letter, from the viewpoint of someone being asked to consider an applicant.  Should I be less honest about my own reaction? It appears the applicant has given little meaningful thought to the intended audience and what would be helpful to their decision process.  And yes, if Davor is going to attack me, he should have the consideration and clarity to be specific; not simply level an unsupported ad hominem attack. Give me specifics.

OK, I see I had overused the word disgust in describing my reaction. Edited accordingly.

Edited a bit more.  My intention is a constructive response, if somewhat direct.  I understand that people may perceive certain extra-direct ways of expressing things as inflammatory rather than constructive.  I think I can still get my points across the same with a little less that some would perceive as overly harsh.

Minus the remaining "disgust" which I just don't understand, I think it's a well-written and useful answer - although harsher than I'd be likely to write. I'm leaving the comment only for what comes now; if you want to reply to a specific user and have the user notified of it, you need to put '@' in front of the username, or at least in front of enough letters to identify the user uniquely, as in @Developer6 (you tried twice and might have wondered why the others didn't reply).