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Is it reasonable to ask candidates to create a profile on Google Scholar?
I was in the evaluation committee for the adjunct lecturers this year, and it was a complete nightmare. There were over thirty candidates and many of them didn't have an account on Google Scholar, which made tracking their impact really hard, due to name collisions etc.
My question is would it be a reasonable requirement to force the candidates to create a Google Scholar account, so that we can easily track their publication/citation record and impact?
My hesitation is that it would require them to give away private information to a third-party company, and some people wouldn't like to be forced to do it, or even raise legal issues.

Well, I wouldn't do it. I would be happy to supply a list of publications, and expect you to use real tools such as Web of Science to check citations and whatnot. If you want to evaluate professionals, use professional tools.

@JonCuster: Unfortunately we don't have a subscription for that. We do have for scopus though.

Comments are not for extended discussion; the rest of this conversation has been moved to chat.

@Roland: I wouldn't like to add the specific country, let's just say it is in the EU.

As much as I like Google Scholar, requiring candidates to create a Google Scholar profile specifically seems inappropriate. You are effectively saying you won't hire people that don't use Google.
What you could do is make it an optional part of the application or you could ask candidates to submit something more vague like a "citation report" and suggest that a printout of their Google Scholar profile is sufficient for this.

I am completely fine with an optional box for a Google scholar account, but I would be very put off by a request for a "citation report."  But this may be a field-dependent thing.  (I am in pure math, along with I believe a disproportionately large number of users of this site.)

@Kimball I agree that not much weight should be placed on citations, but that seems to be the information OP is looking for.

@Kimball I think the solution for people like you, is to require a citation report, and say "or you can just give us your Google Scholar page if you don't feel like typing it!" Of course you still have the issue of normalizing the non-Scholar citation reports to Scholar and each other, but then if a candidate feels one option undersells them they are always free to just use the other option.

you could ask candidates to submit something more vague like a "citation report" — Such a request would only convince me that the search committee is too lazy to look up the data they want themselves.

Suggesting is one thing; requiring is inappropriate.  Some people have a philosophical objection to supporting NSA’s biggest competitor.  Right or wrong, this attitude is irrelevant to their academic qualifications.  Same goes for less successful snoops or spammers like Facebook or Linked-In.  Yes, I am obviously biased against these (censored) but again, that is irrelevant to my academic potential.

@WGroleau Publications are, by definition, public. So Google Scholar is just collating public information. To each their own, but I don't understand this attitude that Google Scholar is somehow a privacy concern. (I understand more the concern that citation counts are overemphasized.)

@JeffE Having all the information summarized in a Google Scholar report is convenient, even if it is, in theory, possible to collect it yourself. I wouldn't interpret it as laziness -- the search committee has limited time and many applications to review. Perhaps they shouldn't look at citation counts at all, but that's another discussion.

Have you considered ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifier)?
I have the same concerns about intellectual property protection issues around Google unfortunately. GoogleScholar is also quite discipline specific (as others have said here) and is banned in some countries (China, etc). So to endorse a product that exposes a scholar to legal ramifications in their country plus the risk of commercialization of their data is highly problematic.
ORCID on the other hand is "an international, interdisciplinary, open, non-proprietary, and not-for-profit organization". ORCID aims to include every discipline and many publishers and their journals are now mandating ORCID sign-in for their journal logins. Most people do not know about ORCID so you can offer them information. Also, make sure they know to make their ORCID profile public.
Unfortunately, if your applicants refuse to use ORCID, your choice would be limited. I am not sure whether you have a friendly and supportive librarian can confirm their publication record and piece together their impact factor before progressing them through the selection process?

This answer is pretty good but I think you should use ORCID profiles, not ORCIDs.  It is possible to have an ORCID but no public profile.

Hi Poidah, it was not intended to be a put down.  My comment was intended to be helpful to the asker, not to you.  My criticism of ORCID would be that their website is very slow to use.  That's not a criticism of you for suggesting it.

ORCID does not track citations, so it only satisfies a subset of the requirements that Google Scholar fulfills (publication and citation tracking).

Poidah, I did not say anything about plurals.  If you don't want to be critiqued (in a respectful tone) Stack Exchange is not for you.

Poidah You are making a very big deal about a very minor issue, especially since @AnonymousPhysicist  used the word criticism at ORCID's website, not you.

Yeah @lighthousekeeper I think the OP was keen to have a way to easily confirm the legitimacy of someone's publication. Rather than having to go through each publication individually on a search engine. Imagine if each person has 5 to 30 and there are 5 to 15 applicants. It would easily take an afternoon or a couple of days to do a proper due diligence. But yes, citations are not collected on ORCID which is the other point that the OP was keen to measure and easily double check. ORCID does interact with some databases, so it may be easier to find the impact stats through their ORCID.

I do not think it is reasonable to ask candidates to create a profile on any third-party platform. Particularly on a google service, taking in account that some proportion of web users have concerns about this company (as well as other large corporate data processing companies), and do not want to get on their radar if possible.
Typically, it is sufficient to make it clear to the candidates what are the selection criteria for the post and let them find their preferred way of demonstrating that they meet those criteria. For example, if your criteria is number of citations, you can suggest Google Scholar as an acceptable evidence, along with WoS and others, ultimately allowing your candidates to choose the service they prefer. If you want to check impact, you need to explain what you mean by this (the definitions vary widely across different fields and countries). Note that impact typically is not measured by the academic citations, but rather by adoption of research in non-academic environment, such as industry, government policies, patents, etc.
In the UK, the impact is a key performance indicator in the Research Excellence Framework. It takes Universities a few months to prepare and evidence strong  impact cases. I am sometimes puzzled when I see an entry-level faculty post requiring candidates to provide a fully justified impact statement. Maybe it is possible in some disciplines, but in my area (numerical mathematics) I find it difficult to trace, demonstrate and fully evidence the non-academic impact.

"I do not think it is reasonable to ask candidates to create a profile on any third-party platform."  Most academic job applications are submitted using a third-party platform.  Most require creating an account and entering your information.

@AnonymousPhysicist Most applications I submitted were through the university website, i.e. the platform is hosted by the university. University is the first/second party, not the third one. In the US, many guys use mathjobs.org, but this is not universal across the globe.

@AnonymousPhysicist: There's a huge difference in an isolated outsourced job application submission service and a platform that's tied into all sorts of other things.

It is common, and reasonable, for employers to require job candidates and employees coming up for review to provide the employer with any information it needs to evaluate the candidates/employees. So certainly you can ask them to prepare readable, well-formatted publication lists, citation information, and anything else that lets you evaluate their impact and productivity. I don’t see how the lecturers could reasonably complain if asked to provide such information in a format of your choice.
However, your concern about Google Scholar is justified. Requiring people to open Google accounts as a condition of employment is, at the very least, coercive and unprofessional, and will reflect badly on you. It seems not unlike asking employees to use Gmail email addresses for work because you are too cheap or lazy to figure out a better solution. Similarly, if the evaluation process was a “nightmare”, to me it suggests that the evaluation committee did not give sufficient forethought to asking the lecturers to provide the relevant information. The problem is not with the lecturers not using the tool you wish they used, but with your department not designing the evaluation process thoughtfully enough.

Assuming your university has a subscription, Scopus is pretty good at giving you relatively comprehensive and up to date author publication and citation profiles.
It's generally good at dealing with name conflicts.
A few scenarios where it might fail:
Academics who have changed names (e.g., by marriage).
Academics with particularly common names who have changed institutional affiliation. Of course, academics can notify Scopus of these changes and merge profile data, but it can't be counted on.
And as @Flyto, Scopus has fairly good journal coverage, but it may miss other important output (e.g., conference publications, some books and book chapters), which can be particularly important in some fields.
I guess it all depends on how much you want to rely on it versus using it as an additional source of information.

I thought it cost money for authors to use, but apparently I was wrong and author profiles lookup is free?

I just tried updating my profile, and wow this is worse than Google Scholar.

Field-dependant. For me, Scopus includes my journal articles but does not include a number of peer-reviewed conference papers, and hence does not give a fair impression of my output.

@AnonymousPhysicist I guess it depends on what you mean by update your profile. I don't believe that it's designed for adding publications. My understanding was that the main things you can do is (a) get publications in the database linked to your name if for some reason they didn't get automatically linked; (b) explain that two names in the system are both you; (c) remove publications from your profile that are not you. But yes, I agree. It's a bit clunky.

My question is would it be a reasonable requirement to force the candidates to create a Google Scholar account

You should recommend that candidates provide a Google Scholar Profile (not account).  In practice, hiring committees are going to go look for a profile.  You might as well let candidates know that is going to happen.
You cannot force job applicants to do anything.  They can always just decide not to apply.

so that we can easily track their publication/citation record and impact?

Google Scholar is good for tracking publications.  Beware that some people allow Google to add publications to their profile, and these are of often incorrectly added.  Do not use it to judge impact, and beware that no citation counting system will be totally reliable.

You cannot force job applicants to do anything. They can always just decide not to apply. You can also spin that the other way: "You can force job applicants to do anything, as long as you accept that those that do not want to comply, will just walk away."

"You cannot force job applicants to do anything. They can always just decide not to apply." Well, duh, sorry. It's clear that "force applicants to do X" means "refuse to consider applicants who don't do X." I'm quite sure that nobody believes it means to actually physically compel applicants to do something.

Yes, it is completely within reason to ask candidates to have a profile somewhere. What it's not appropriate is to demand they use Google specifically.
Besides Scholar there are other alternatives like Scopus, ORCID (mentioned in other answers) or even creating profiles in sites like scholarly, researchgate, or academia.edu.  You should leave it to them to choose whichever they like but perhaps suggest Google Scholar as that is what you'd be using to asses them. Don't force them to use an specific 3th party as that could even be illegal in some countries for considering such as 'coercion'.
A little story. During my MBA one teacher made us use facebook to create a group to drop the homework there and such, so I had to create a profile there for that since I had avoided getting one, and after that class I have only used it a couple times for subscriptions. Still, I know some of my data is there. had the professor given us option, we would have use Google environment for the class and it would have worked. So yeah, a professor did asked us directly to use a third party.
On another note, since you mention that it's for hiring, then yes, it is still appropriate to ask for profiles because many companies want to see  social media profile before hiring.

"many companies want to see social media profile before hiring": too bad, they usually can't, at least not for the generalist kind of social media. And frankly, even where it is allowed, it's likely going to piss off many of the good applicants. But this is tangential to the question, since we are talking about ORCID and likes, which cannot really be considered personal profiles (I wouldn't even call them social media).

Many universities operate as companies in a broad sense and nothing stops them from searching your name in media (Thank you for that site, it's quite interesting even if it only applies to USA, I'll check if there are repositories on international  rulings).  As fort Orchid, it says in it's main page "...your ORCID record with your professional information and link to your other identifiers (such as Scopus or ResearcherID or LinkedIn)", so yeah, its a public profile linked to social media. I dont see it working alone as it wouldn't be such an useful tool [https://orcid.org/].

ORCID alone actually can be a useful tool if your name is common or has many spellings (and these cases cover lots of researchers). Not to mention that it is a step towards the semantic web, which is always a good thing :)

That is true, although in integration it works even better for the researcher as she/he can link all the profiles. The common name thing however is a big problem, more so because researches around the world are forced to cut their names to only the first name and the first family name to conform to anglosaxon simplicity, like when APA deems to add just 1 initial and first family name ¬¬ . But yeah, moving to better dta and metadata integration is a good thing. I completely agree on that.

To some extent this depends on the field and where in the process you are (although I have to find it funny that 30 applications is considered severe; in math there are positions which get literally 300 or 400 applications). Here are some relevant considerations:
Are you in a field which usually uses Google Scholar? Math for example doesn't almost at all(Edit: See comments by Dmitry here- I may be seriously wrong about how much it is used in math), but it seems to be common in some other fields. If one is one of the fields where it is common, that may make more sense.
Is this is a position where research is going to matter? If you are hiring someone as an adjunct as you suggest, this doesn't seem like a research focused position, so why should it matter?
What stage in one's selection process is one in? If for example one first selects out some of the candidates, and asks the remaining pool to do so, that looks a lot more reasonable. You can probably eliminate a fair number of candidates simply by not having strong CVs (and frankly it is likely if you are looking for a research position in a field that often uses Google Scholar that those people will often be the ones without Google Scholar profiles).
Legal issues are complicated, and we can't really give legal advice here, but there are some potential issues that can be highlighted. The most obvious one is accessibility: is Google Scholar easily accessible for people with disabilities? If it isn't, this would be a potential problem. Are you at a state school or a private school? If a state school there are a lot more rules about hiring generally that need to be followed, and asking for something like this after the job has already been advertised with instructions on what to do will be a problem in some states. Note that in some respects for some of these issues this may also be the sort of thing where it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission: if you ask a university legal counsel if you can do anything that seems remotely questionable, they'll frequently just say "no." If you are in Europe some of the legal issues may also be more severe as they may interact with European data privacy issues, and that's a serious enough issue right now that if one is concerned about it, getting competent legal counsel may make sense, but you may have someone even in IT who can walk you through any relevant issues at an informal level.
Now for my personal opinion: For what it is worth, if I were applying for a position and they asked me to make a Google Scholar profile, since we don't generally use them in math, I'd consider that to be a serious red flag about what the committee knew or how much the school was micromanaging hiring decisions. Unless it was a high profile school, at a highly desirable position, I'd almost certainly say no. And if I were to see it while applying for a position that was a primarily teaching position, my reaction would be extremely negative. I have seen positions that ask one to highlight which of one's research papers one is most proud of, and it might be a substantially more useful than trying to use some potentially gameable metric like this.

I am in Maths and I use Google Scholar.

@DmitrySavostyanov I'm not claiming that none of us use it, but that it isn't used much. Do you think that impression is incorrect?

All my close collaborators (in Maths) use Google Scholar, apart from maybe one or two very senior professors.

@DmitrySavostyanov Hmm, interesting. I'll include an edit then that I may be wrong. Could you explain what you are using it for? I'm not sure what I'd use it for that MathSciNet doesn't do better, with the exception of if one is in a highly applied field that it might help to be able to see citations from journals not indexed by MathSciNet.

I can't say I did a rigorous statistical testing, but when I last checked, GS was picking almost all my papers and almost all citations in a few weeks from the publication date, while WoS and MathSciNet took months and sometimes years to update the records.

Mathscinet is only for published papers (it updates quickly when it’s published) while google scholar includes arxiv preprints.

The problem with Google Scholar is not that it doesn't pick up publications; it's that it picks up too many of them (false positives / inflated citation counts).

Is it reasonable to ask candidates to create a profile on Google Scholar?

Absolutely not. Google is an atrocious entity involved in mass commercial and governmental surveillance, political censorship etc. You really must not require people to use Google's services, legitimizing these practices.
Now, to be practical - I'm not saying that you should demand the opposite. I mean, I use Google Scholar from time to time (though I wish I could avoid it completely). But you should definitely make an effort to stay away from the Google "octopus" of services and definitely not feed it more victims. I suggest you not even ask people to have a Google profile (Google Scholar or whatever other account).


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Submitting paper when leaving academia?
Is it a good idea to submit a paper when you are about to leave academia, say in the next year?
In my field (Mathematics), the review progress is typically very long (At the moment I'm waiting for the first review for almost a year). I do not want to receive a review while I'm in the middle of a new job (probably without access to other academic people, articles, books, etc.). On the other hand, I've done something which is worth to published somewhere.
Should I submit it? How can I improve the length of the review (e.g., by chosing the journal?)?
Edit: Some details: I'm about to finish my PhD and I have no co-authors for the latest paper who could handle big parts of revisions.

I think you answered your own question by saying you've got something worth publishing :)

I would say, yes.
If the results are worth publishing, then the world should know about them.
That said, even if the paper is accepted, it is likely that you'll need to make minor or major revisions. If you do not expect that you will have the time to do this, then ultimately the paper will be rejected (or simply just vanish). So you need to consider whether you will, in 1, 2 or 3 years (or whatever the journal turn around time is) be in a position, mentally and otherwise, to address the review comments.
The other option is to archive the paper on arxiv.org and hope that interested people find the work – for the good of science.

Another alternative is to ask a trusted colleague to be the corresponding author in your absence. (It used to be relatively common, especially in various Society publications, for results by X to be communicated by Y.)

If you think it's worth publishing, you should at least put it on ArXiv.
I'd also recommend submitting it to a journal. If the paper is well-written and correct, it shouldn't need a great deal of revision, so it should be possible to do that in your spare time. You could also mention when you submit the paper that you'll be leaving academia so you might need more time than usual to make revisions.
Another possibility is to bring your advisor on board as a co-author to deal with these things.

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How to communicate achievements on the StackExchange network in an academic CV or job interview?
I think contributions to StackExchange constitute a valuable thing for an academic to do. In many cases such contributions are directly related to the aims of an academic department: community engagement, building new knowledge, etc.
This is particularly clear for sites that directly align with a particular academic discipline (e.g.,  mathematics, statistics, psychology).
However, many people in academia have not heard of StackExchange. They often won't have heard about the reputation system. They may not be aware of the high quality content that often appears.
Thus, as an academic, how should you share your achievements on the StackExchange network in contexts where how your performance is evaluated has material consequences? (e.g., a CV, job interview, grant application context, promotion context)

This is not an answer, but apparently for computer programming jobs, participation in StackOverflow (the original SE) is viewed as a plus.

E.g. I included in my CV "a moderator of Theoretical Physics - Stack Exchange (Nov 2011 - May 2012)" under projects/activities, with a proper link.

I routinely mention my participation in cstheory as a moderator on grant applications (under Broader Impact). I also mention it as part of 'synergistic activities' in my NSF 2-page bio.
For departmental review, I'd view this as external service.

what if you are not a mod of any academic site?

The StackExchange point system is not a metric for anything other than "how much we trust you to use the site correctly". The idea exists to balance the needs of a public/open/crowdsourced/self-moderating Q&A system, with protection from internet trolls and defacement. The authors of SE even said themselves that "reputation was useless," and not a proxy for the value someone brings to the site.
For example, some people like Brian Tompsett rack up huge amounts of points by editing posts with minor spelling corrections. This is NOT to say Brian's work is meaningless though - it absolutely is not - but you can't just look at a score and directly convert it into value to the community since there are so many different ways to gain rep.
I am myself a pretty good example of this. Recently I made a question regarding my poor working conditions which gained the most number of views for a question on the site to date. Probably because many people felt sympathetic to my circumstances, it gained a large number of upvotes too. I am under no illusion however, that my question and thus my account has anything like the value to the community that my rep score indicates. The large number of upvotes however, gave me the psychological support i needed to tell my boss that my working conditions are unfair, despite what he claims, and now everything on my end is much much better - so ironically, it was the upvotes themselves that had value, not the question.
There are also numerous answers that contain "hard truths" that get heavily down-voted not because they are inaccurate, but because people just don't like what they are reading - despite it having considerable value. People who play devil's advocate get hit by this the hardest.
So you see there is only a weak correlation between between rep and value to the site - and that is by design. Anyone who would know what to do with your rep score if seen on a CV would likely know this too, so if you do go on to put your academia.SE details on your CV, make sure to highlight why you like helping people, whether you like to ask good/insightful questions or answer technical/demanding questions with research, etc etc. Don't make any reference to rep, because the person reading the review won't be impressed - particularly if their rep score is lower or much higher than yours ;)

You get no points for editing posts after 1k BTW.... I'm just a pedant

There are also numerous answers that contain "hard truths" that get heavily down-voted not because they are inaccurate, but because people just don't like what they are reading - I haven't noticed that so much on this site, have you?  Maybe there are a few downvotes (which only effect rep a little anyway) but I think that good timely answers usually get many more up than down votes.

Yes I have experienced that, mostly on other people's answers but also occasionally my own. I guess your exposure to it all depends on the questions you read, and whether you look at a controversial answer and think its "bad" or "necessary". I think the last time it happened to me was 3 months ago: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/64567/ where my lone attempt at answering the question was given -3, not because it's factually incorrect, but because lying to pull copyright is ethically indefensible (which I wrote in the answer). Anyway, this is getting a bit meta...

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How to automatically import APA references into reference manager?
Related to this question on cross-checking APA citations and references, I often have an existing list of APA formatted references. This might come from a document from a collaborator or it might just be a published article.
I often want to take this list of APA references (e.g., one reference per line) and import them into my bibliographic software in such a way that the reference manager is able to discern what aspects of the reference correspond to author, year, title, journal, issue, pages, etc.
I'm often working with Endnote to do this, but I imagine that once you get the data into any reference manager (e.g., Mendeley, Zotero, etc.), it would be relatively easy to export and import into a preferred reference manager.
I'd also be happy with a system that was pretty good but not perfect. In psychology at least, most references are journal articles, book chapters, and books. So a system that imported these and flagged the rest would still be useful.
Question
How can an existing list of APA references be automatically imported into a reference manager?

There is a list of tools that attempt to convert formatted bibliographies to bibliography software formats here. I haven't used any of them for a while so I can not recommend any of the tools in particular.

The reference management program Citavi does this quite successfully in the case of journal articles, but not so successfully in the case of books (I know this because I work for Swiss Academic Software, the developers of Citavi).
It will not specifically import APA lists, but any kind of formatted bibliography.
This is how to do it:

Add the PDF document containing the list of references as a reference to Citavi.
Show the PDF in the preview column.
Select the text with the references you want to import.
In the menu above the PDF click More > Search bibliography.

Windows only, unfortunately.

That is correct, but an operating system agnostic web version is being developped at the moment.


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Which summer internship to take?
I asked a similar question last year, but the stakes have changed slightly.
So, I have an offer from a top 5 program in Chemical engineering (my major). There are a couple of extremely accomplished professors in fluid mechanics here, which is what I want to study in grad school. However, I am not so interested in attending this school for graduate school because it does not send many people to academia post-graduation, despite being a top 5 program, mostly because it isn't a very big name school. Or at least I assume this is the reason.
The deadline to reply to this school is March 5th.
To complicate things, I am waiting on a reply from a much more prestigious university for a summer internship. While the school has a much better name, its ranking is slightly less (number 6 for chemical engineering). I think I have a very good chance of getting this internship (my PI went to grad school here and wrote a very strong letter, plus I have a good resume otherwise). However, I learned today that they will NOT be able to get a response back to me before March 5th.
I am much more interested in attending School 2 (slightly lower rank, better name), because they very frequently send people to academia, which is my long term goal.
School 1 (higher rank, worse name) was pretty firm in the March 5th date, so I don't think I can ask for an extension.
Financially, School 1 offered me a slightly better deal, I'd be netting about 2k more over 10 weeks. However, that isn't as important to me, since the experience is worth far more than the money.
I apologize for the long question, but any advice or guidance would be appreciated. Am I putting too much emphasis on the name and rank? I don't want to be greedy and put all of my eggs in School 2's basket, and be left with nothing if I end up not getting it after all.

Are both of these REUs at different universities, or is 1 primarily an industry based internship?

Both of these are at different universities in the US.

Two things: 1) An internship isn't going to lock you into a school. The goal is ultimately to do good work; this may net you an excellent recommendation letter regardless of school. 2) Just because school 1 is ranked lower, doesn't mean it'd be the worse choice. For grad school never underestimate the importance of a good relationship with a supervisor.

Since these are both REUs, I do not think attending school 1's summer program will affect your chances of attending grad school and continuing in academia.  Most REUs are designed to give students an opportunity to see if they can conduct scientific research and / or enjoy it.  Depending on the university and the discipline, they may be considered 'recruiting' camps for people to attend that university's grad school program in your discipline.
Since you have a fairly strong inclination to working in academia, you do not need the experience other than to confirm your suspicions and to make you a better candidate when you apply to graduate schools.
As for what I would suggest --- ask when you think the earliest day / time you would be able to get a response from School 2 on acceptance or rejection, and then from there, try to see if you can eke out some more time on School 1's deadline so that you don't end up shooting yourself in the foot.
You may also be able to talk with your current PI and see if he can hear anything through some back channels as to whether or not you have a decent chance.
At the end of the day, it's up to you.  Consider all your options wisely.

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately School 1's deadline is firm, and School 2 will not be getting me a decision before March 5th. I'm going to talk to my PI but I think I'll be headed to School 1 this summer, hopefully I can work with a professor who is in my desired field.

Good luck!  Maybe this will broaden your research interests beyond what you currently want to do (something that is quintessential in academia).


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Finishing a PhD while working at a community college
I'm a PhD student that just finished my first year in graduate school. The University I am at will only fund me if I work as a TA.
There is a community college in the area which I have a long working relationship with. The full time instructors are paid more than I am. They also get 6 credit hours per semester of paid graduate tuition at the university.
I am considering going back to work at the college after I get my masters degree to have some more control over my life while continuing to work on my PhD.
My question is whether anyone on this site knows someone who has done this or has done this themselves? If so what were the worst and best aspects of the situation?

A major consideration you didn't mention is whether you can count on each possibility (TA / community college instructor) being available to you.

@MarkMeckes, for the purpose of this discussion they are both a pretty sure thing.

Teaching at a community college while in grad school is certainly an option and I know people who have done it.
My major concern would be workload.  I'd expect a community college job to be drastically more work, greater responsibility and stress, and less likely to accommodate your coursework and research time.  It can be very difficult in grad school to balance your time and energy among your responsibilities, and it's easy for  the short-term demands of teaching to push the longer-term demands of research to the back burner, ultimately sabotaging your chances of finishing your degree.    I certainly wouldn't suggest a full-time community college appointment; even part-time seems like it would be hard to manage.  But it sounds like you've actually taught at this college before, and have also TA'ed, so you'll be in the best position to make that judgment.
At the university, you'll probably get to TA a variety of courses, including more advanced courses in your discipline.  This can be a great learning experience for you, and fill in gaps in your education that you didn't know you had.  It can also be an asset on the job market.  At the community college, I presume you'd teach introductory or remedial courses exclusively; that's a learning experience too, but not in the same way.
At the university, you're more likely to find fellow students and faculty mentors with whom you can discuss aspects of teaching, and being a TA can be a great social / bonding / networking experience.  If you stay in academia, you'll be able to get letters from well-known professors attesting to your teaching ability.  At the community college, you'll probably be more on your own, and a letter from the department head there may not carry so much weight.
Overall, it might be better to plan on teaching community college during occasional summers (when TA'ing may not be available), or perhaps near the end of your PhD (and especially if your departmental funding runs out).  It seems overly ambitious to plan to do it throughout.

I made the decision to go work at the college part time.
The balance between PhD research and teaching part time has been manageable under the following two conditions. 1) I am not teaching a new course which is unfamiliar to me. 2) I am not taking advanced graduate course. When one of these conditions is not met then the amount of outside work is simply too much to balance with research.
Regarding condition (1). Teaching new classes takes me roughly an hour or two per lecture to prepare. This ends up taking all the free time which was presumed available for research. If at all possible it is preferable to co-teach with a colleague who has taught the course before.
Regarding condition (2). As a physics student I dearly wanted to take Quantum Field Theory even though it wasn't strictly necessary for my research. I found that I had no time to finish the homework assignments. In one week I fell behind on grading exams (which were all free response) and I fell badly behind in the course.
There are some advantages to teaching courses of my own design. As the course instructor I decide what gets graded and how it gets graded. If I give my students exams which can be automatically graded by a computer with a few free response components then I can finish grading exams within 30 minutes to an hour. The danger is to get too ambitious and forget how much grading free response exams takes.
I have found that I have to take advantage of every free moment. When I am proctoring it is advantageous to have something on my laptop which needs to be done for my PhD. This generally should be something that needs supervision, but not my exclusive attention (for instance compiling an application or linking libraries). Also, if I am co-teaching with a colleague I should have something to do which is productive on my laptop.
In short the balance is manageable, but the teaching must be strictly controlled so that it does not overflow past your paid working hours. An inexperienced instructor can easily give themselves too much work to do for a single person within the allotted hours.


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How to cite a new journal in abbreviation form which is not found in existing abbreviation list?
Recently, I want to submitted a paper to IEEE, I encounter a problem when I want to cite a paper from a new journal, for example, Systems Science & Control Engineering . According to IEEE standard, all papers submitted should have the abbreviation form of journal name in reference, however, I can not find the abbreviation form for the journal I want to cite. How to solve this problem?
I tried this abbreviation database JabRef/reference-abbreviations and not found.

You could write the journal and ask them. They should know and it's in their interest to have a well-defined abbreviation.

@fileunderwater I had twittered their office twitter, hopefully, we will find answer soon. Besides, my best guess would be Syst. Sci. Control Eng. based on the abbreviation pattern appeared on JabRef/reference-abbreviations.

There is a list of journal abbreviations issued by ISI (now Clarivate) where official abbreviations are found. There are many places where the list is found but the best updated will likely be the one at Web of Science. Your journal is not listed here as far as I can see but abbreviations follow certain guidelines so it would not be difficult to "guess" what abbreviation should be suitable. My guess will be Syst. Sci. Contr. Eng. based on other existing abbreviations including the words that make up the title.
Note, however, that this is still not the formal abbreviation and I would add a note to the fact to the editor when submitting the manuscript so the journal can decide what to print based on what you have provided. It is possible that the copy-editing will catch this as well but declaring your actions will always help editors in their work and will be appreciated.

Thank you very much, hopefully, we can find the official one. Science I can't the official one, if it's okay to cite it in full name instead of abbreviation?

Besides, I found the abbreviation list in Web of Science(WOS)  is not compatible with the abbreviation list in IEEE, for example the journal IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, in WOS it has IEEE T AUTOMAT CONTR, while IEEE gives IEEE Trans AUTOMAT CONTR

I found a pattern, if a journal is IEEE's, the control is the title should be abbreviated as contr, otherwise, control is not abbreviated. Hence, my best guess would be Syst. Sci. Control Eng. :)


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How to reply to reviewer's positive comment more naturally?
I want to reply to the reviewer's comment (see below) on my paper,

My concerns have been addressed satisfactorily and the paper is acceptable.

My own reply would be like:

Your recognition of our work is much appreciated.

or

Your encouraging comment is greatly appreciated.

However, it seems unnatural to read, How to give an more appropriate reply?

There are a few points that have to be considered here.
First, a reviewer will usually not see an authors response to their review except if the reviewer has accepted to review also the (major) revision and the manuscript is not accepted after the revisions. This means such a response has no audience and editors will not typically convey such messages between author and reviewer.
Second, All reviews and rebuttals pass an editor, with the explicit exception of an open review (visible online), which occurs in a few journals. So for the most part the response you provide should be directed to the editor. It is perfectly fine to tell the editor you really appreciate the reviewers comments but that will most likely not reach the reviewers as pointed out above.
Third, most authors provide an acknowledgement in their published papers and it is in most, or at least many, circles considered polite to thank reviewers in the acknowledgement. A common phrase could be that "the manuscript was improved by the [insightful] reviews by X and y [or: the anonymous reviewers]" or something along those lines. The square parentheses indicate places where alternatives are necessary depending on ones view of the reviews. There is no need to involve very complicated thanks here as has also been pointed out in other replies. Simple and straight forward is better.
As a final point, the quote you provide stating that "My concerns have been addressed satisfactorily and the paper is acceptable." is not what I would consider an overwhelmingly positive response and your thanks should be written with this in consideration. If someone says the manuscript is just ok but publishable, a response glorifying the review and the effect of the review will certainly seem odd from all perspectives. So make sure there is a match between the "verdict" and your "thanks". Keeping it simple and non-convoluted is always a good reciepe.

For this sort of reply, I personally like to keep it short and sweet:

Thank you!

What about this one: thank you for your kind recommendation.

@WangyanLi That works too: anything simple, really.

How about 'Thanks bro fistbump!'?

This. There's very little served in anything other than "Thank you."

First, "your recognition of our work", although not intended as such, sounds slightly egotistical. Second, "your encouraging comment" seems to read too much into what is being stated: simply that your paper has met the necessary standard. While that may be encouraging to you (it would be to me), encouragement is not the purpose of the statement.
If you wish to thank your reviewer, you shouldn't directly address your thanks to that specific comment itself, but rather address your appreciation directly to the whole of the effort and time that the reviewer provided to help you to improve your work. Here's one possible way of starting such a statement:

We wish to express our appreciation for your in-depth comments, suggestions, and corrections, which have greatly improved the manuscript.

Ideally you should be specific in stating how you believe that the reviewer's comments have improved the paper: e.g. added clarity; technical accuracy; correction of specific errors; language; suggested analyses or experiments; etc...
Giving such feedback tells a reviewer that their anonymous review is valued and that their time was well spent. Remember: the anonymous peer reviewer is doing this as a community service for which they receive no payment and little recognition, if any.

Thank you for your kind suggestion, I would like to use We wish to express our appreciation for your in-depth comments, suggestions, and corrections, which have greatly improved the manuscript as opening words in my response. It seems more official.

That is First of all, we wish to express our appreciation to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for your in-depth comments, suggestions, and corrections, which have greatly improved the manuscript.. My original words are First of all, the authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, which I found it's not as good as yours.

It may be advisable to avoid condensing your expressions of thanks to the editor and the reviewer into a single sentence.

It's an opening words, I would like to thank them again when I reply their detailed comments.

I would suggest the following response to the reviewers:

That's great to hear! Thank you for trusting us. Have an awesome day!

Sorry dude, but this doesn't answer the question. It deserves to be a comment at most, but I understand you don't have enough rep points to comment. So, I'm flagging this for the moderators to convert to a comment. :)

What does trust have to do with it?

@TheDarkSide: This is not even a comment. The intended ways for expressing thanks are upvotes and bounties.

This was not a "thank you" comment; it seems to be an actual answer to the question, as seen in context.

this answer looks more like an attempt of trolling, like I had not seen yet on any Stackexchange forums.

authors: ישו אוהב אותך


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How to write a paper about marketing for publishing in ISI Journals?
I have read many ISI papers, and now I want to publish my own paper, but the subject I want to write is about marketing and brand development, which lots of people are writing in this topic. Is it possible if I don't do any mathematical or analytic researches and just write my paper based on other papers and my own knowledge and by mentioning the sources and books that I wrote my paper?
My main question is, can I just write descriptive words and mention some issue in just words, and I don't do any math or numeral calculations?
And what ISI Journal do you suggest me to send it, which will easily accept it, and has a good Impact Factor, and doesn't cost me too much?

which will easily accept it, and has a good Impact Factor I think you are asking too much.

yes i ask too much, and you could answer short, which you have already done

I would really appreciate your kind attention to my questions, please give me a comprehensive reply

As far as I know, it's not easy to let good IF journals accept papers. That's why I said that.

aha, lol, i misunderstood. Ok just advise an easy journal with lower IF, like 1 to 2.

So your question is really: How can I publish in a highly-regarded journal without doing the hard work of research like everyone else has to do?

It seems like you're going about this completely backwards.  First you do the work (you know: research), then you write about it, and then you publish it where it fits.

For those of us in other fields, what is ISI?

Writing for an IF journal should follow standard good practises. First you need to have a well defined question/hypothesis for the work. You need to provide a solid and up to date background for the work (Introduction providing an overview of all relevant literature, i.e. earlier work). You need to successfully show significant (new) results and conclusions. Then you need to write the paper well, which means no spelling and hopefully no grammatical errors, clear and concise language, good structure. Finally you should adhere to any instructions for authors regarding how the journal requests papers to adhere.
So this is actually not so difficult in theory. To what extent this will be easy for you depends on your experience. Based on your question, it sounds as if you are thinking more about a literature review with some own thinking on the topic, avoiding new data and data analysis. This does not sound like the easiest way to gain acceptance. Likewise, knowing your field also involves understanding what journals accept what sort of papers. You seem to be at an disadvantage also here. The best advice is therefore to try to connect to someone who knows the field better and ask for assistance in, for example discussing the problem, and possibly helping with the strategic decisions regarding format of the paper and where to send it. One has to know the details of your work to provide such advice and that is clearly beyond the scope of this site.
Finally, as already stated by scaaahu, "easy accept" is not a concept known to the majority of us when it comes to scientific publishing.

What is an "IF journal"?


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Is it advisable to have a master or PhD thesis topic in mind before entering graduate school?
This is a question that fascinates a lot of people prior to attending graduate school. The question whether one should already have chosen a thesis topic so that all efforts will be put on creating that thesis and more time can be used to explore that given topic.
Or a more basic question, is it feasible or even possible for someone to know exactly what their thesis topic would be before going into graduate school?

Interesting question! "Poll" questions are not considered a good fit for the Q&A nature of SE sites (see the [help/dont-ask]). I'm therefore going to [edit] your post to remove the poll (the part beginning "how many of you...") However, please go ahead and edit the edit if you can restate that part of the question in a way that meets the community guidelines.

Scoping out the topic of a thesis is most likely a process of negotiation and adjustment where the process starts with your selection of the adviser. Your adviser's area of interest and yours will overlap but up to a point. You will have to negotiate and adjust where the overlap is lacking. I'd be surprised if you, as an entering graduate student, are in a position to know exactly what you want to do and you meet an adviser who is willing to let you do what you want without suggesting anything based on their experience. My caveat to you is to be careful what you want, because you might get it.

Your question "is it feasible, or even possible?" My counter question is "is it desirable, and is it the best thing for you, and is it something you want once you are more fully informed?" Note that your ability to negotiate will be constrained by the adviser coming back at you with "I love what you want to look into but it's outside of the scope of the grant I received" Yeah, the Golden Rule "He who has the gold makes the rules" applies in research as in almost anything else.

Yes! It is advisable!

"Is it feasible or even possible?" Yes, it is, but it is seldom the case and is not really expected unless you just continue to work with the same adviser on a project that is already well under way. What you should really know is where you stand in terms of your education and what areas are close to your heart. The first will save you from over/under-confidence when choosing the curriculum (yes, this is a major problem) and the second will prevent you from ending up doing work you just hate doing. In all other respects, just have open mind and decent work habits and you'll be fine :-)

"I love what you want to look into but it's outside of the scope of the grant I received" — So what? That only means the student can't be paid from the grant to pursue their research agenda, not that they can't pursue it.  It's the student's PhD, not the advisor's, and certanly not the grant agency's.

@JeffE It is the student's PhD, but they don't have an automatic right to funding, and a supervisor is at liberty to limit how many students they take on (within uni politics). I've not yet come across a case of a supervisor not accepting a student they consider good enough who also has their own funding.

It all heavily depends on the area. In pure math. "the scope of the grant I received" means just "whatever I like doing or discussing with you at this moment". In other areas this phrase may mean anything up to "Either you'll be crunching these data on this machine, or I'll be getting someone else" (though I have to admit that I haven't seen such an extreme with my own eyes, just heard of it). This distinction by area seems to be even more pronounced with postdocs.

There may be advisers, departments, universities, countries (academic cultures) or fields where you need to come up with your own idea. I would not think this is the norm, however. In many cases Phd positions are financed by project funding so that the project is largely defined. This does not mean that the entire PhD is staked out in advance but the direction is. When you start a PhD you need an adviser which would imply that the field and direction of research of that adviser will determine the direction of your research. In many academic systems you directly apply to a PhD project which is pre-defined. I could probably come up with more cases that point away from come up with your own thesis topic.
That said, however, it is not inconceivable that someone could enter a system with an own idea but since coming up with great ideas commonly involves having a deep understanding of a field, and that in itself being one of the goals of a PhD, it would be a very rare case.
So depending where you are or where you are heading in the academic world, you do not need to know the thesis topic in advance. You will be looking for topics that may interest you and once finding positions announced decide if they fit your interests. It is rare that you find exactly what you dream of so many go for positions that are "close enough". Another point here is that you would probably not select a topic only, you would also consider the academic milieu and if you think it would be good for you and your endeavour into research.

I think this depends a bit on the country, or rather, who specifically provides the funding. There is a very good point about the knowledge of the field; I have seen quite a bunch of PhD vacancies that do not adhere to it.

This is strongly dependent on the field and department.  In some places the grant-driven approach is very unusual.

This is a very local issue, depending (as Peter Jansson says) on the country, university, field etc. For instance, at least in the arts and humanities, it is usual in the UK to apply to PhD programmes with a thesis proposal that explains pretty much what your thesis will be on. Of course, there's nothing to stop you changing what you work on once you're accepted into the programme, have discussed it with your supervisor etc.
As to whether or not it's advisable, again that depends on local conditions. If your PhD has coursework then you have plenty of time to think about good thesis topics while you do that. On the other hand, for a purely research-based PhD like those in the UK, it's good to know the topic going in because you're supposed to get on with research straight away.
I've seen mixed results with this approach, to be honest. I ended up sticking with exactly what I proposed, but I suspect that's less common: research often doesn't turn out how one expects, some topics seem like a good idea at the start but as one learns more one's focus shifts and what appeared to be an interesting and tractable question turns out to be tedious or impossible to make progress on. Many of my fellow PhD students changed topic partway through, although often this was more a change of emphasis than a complete change of topic—that's less common, and correspondingly more difficult since ars longa, vita brevis (in particular, PhD students in the UK are expected to complete within four years).

This will very greatly by the discipline. My PhD was in mathematics, and I do not know of any of my colleagues that entered grad school with an idea of the problem that they would solve for their dissertation. In fact, most entered with no more than a notion of the area of mathematics that interested them (algebra, analysis, topology, applied math, logic) and at least half ended up in a different area from their notion on entry.
In mathematics it seems not feasible to me to know the area upon entry. The frontiers of mathematics are just too far away ...

The answer is heavily dependent on the field, school, and department you will be applying to, and also the individual faculty you will be working with.  As the other answers suggest, in some programs it is common for students to be immediately attached to an ongoing project, and the general boundaries of their possible dissertation projects will be set by that.  In other programs that is almost unheard of, and each student must develop his or her own project.
That said, my impression is that you should have at least some idea (or ideas, plural!) of questions you would like to answer, even if you don't know exactly what the thesis topic per se will be.  One big reason to have such ideas is that you aren't likely to be accepted into grad programs if you have no plans for what to write about.  The difference between programs seems to be that some of them expect you to apply knowing that you will work on a particular project and write about that, some expect you to have a topic in mind and stick to it, and some expect you to have ideas but won't care if you change your mind during the program.
The individual variation in attitudes towards this question was, for me, beautifully summed up in a personal experience.  When I was applying to PhD programs, I visited a certain school along with several other prospective students.  As part of this process, each student had a short meeting with each faculty member.  One professor, during our meeting, mentioned that she felt "students who come in with a dissertation topic already in mind sometimes miss the point" --- that is, that they should be open to exploring new things they hadn't thought of before.  I then went across the hall to meet with another professor, whose first question was "Do you have any ideas for your dissertation topic?"  And this was in the same department!

Just to touch a point that nobody else did, there is also the issue of timeliness.
Some fields of research advance pretty fast, and what was a great topic before starting graduate school, may be outdated or not relevant anymore when you are about to start your Ph.D.
For these fields it is usually better to define the topic close to the moment when you will actually start your research. I did my Ph.D. in Computer Sciences, and I have seen people Ph.D. topics get outdated while they were developing it!.

Any thoughts on how to better future-proof a topic?


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Review asks me to demonstrate "what is the new thing done"; what should I write?
The referee has asked to demonstrate ' what is the new thing done" so that the paper will be accepted. I feel, though the fundamental theory is same for the work, the experiment at various machine is carried out and result is being published. So what should i write to the journal for convincing the matter.

Are you sure that the referee is not asking you to demonstrate what is new in your work with respect to the existing literature?

According to the description, I would suggest that you can say your contribution is conducting several new experiments. This is seemingly just the new thing.

I have a really hard time parsing this question ("the experiment at various machine is carried out and result is being published.").

If you feel the need to ask this question of strangers on the internet, you should probably withdraw your paper.

First, it is important to clearly arrive at a conclusion that shows how the manuscript contributes to our unerstanding of the matter at hand. The referee apparently thinks your paper is lacking in this respect.
Second, in most journals it is not up to the referee to decide if a papepr is published or not, the editor(s) decide based upon recommendations from the referees (usually more than one). So is there a second referee? and if so what did that person say?
You should revise your manuscript and think about the conclusions. Make them clearer as suggested if you think you can. Such comments froma referee usually mean that the manuscript is not as clear as you may think and it is necessary to critically view your work and see if you can improve it. If you cannot, you should provide a note to the editor to meet the criticism of the referee which should entail why the improvements cannot be made. That would make a decision on the faith of the manuscript easier and more clear to the editor (which I suspect is involved).


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Professor requiring volunteer work
I am in a US graduate program and our professor has made a requirement that we have to participate in a program called VITA. It is a volunteer tax aid program for low-income individuals. As a volunteer you usually only review W2 and Social Security information. Not enough undergraduate students volunteered so they decided that the graduate students should be required to help. We (the graduate students) volunteered as undergraduate students and it does not benefit our learning.
Because of this requirement, I will now have to make up 8 hours a week AT my real job, which also does taxes, to not have my pay cut. I am a Staff Accountant.
How can I convince my professor to not require this volunteer work?

You need to discuss this with the Dean or other responsible at the institution.

Welcome to AC.SE. Please take a look at our [help]. Right now I am not sure what your question is and it seems more like a rant with some unneeded info (W2's and Social Security). Also the title seems to be missing something, but I am not sure what.

This VITA? https://www.irs.gov/individuals/free-tax-return-preparation-for-you-by-volunteers

Welcome to Academia, Darin. I rewrote the body to try to make your problem clearer. I don't know if you can see it until it's approved and if people vote to reopen the question.

So if I understand correctly, your question is this: you are being required to participate in a volunteer program to help people with their taxes.  You feel that this does not benefit your learning, takes an excessive amount of time (8 hours per week), and is experience that you already get in your job (in fact your job is more advanced).  You're looking for suggestions on how to get out of this requirement.  Does that sum it up?  You could edit your question to make it more clear.

Yes nate. and Yes Daniel that is that VITA.

Discuss with your professor or higher as to the facts that 1) you have already done this, 2) your work is above that level at your day job.  I had a similar issue with a 4 week "workshop experience course" at Uni - (welding, turning etc but basic) and I wanted to go home and work contracting doing the same and more for money.  Saw the professor in charge, provided proof and was given the credits, my fellow students were very jealous... :)

what would happen if you just refused?

To add to @guest’s question, can you clarify how it was communicated to you that you are “required” to participate? Were there any threats, explicit or implied, about what would happen if you refuse? And what is your relationship with this “our professor”? Are they your adviser, or teaching a class you’re in, etc? What sort of power do they hold over you?

If you are self funded through your regular job and need that income, then it is certainly burdensome. It seems that doing what everyone else in the program does doesn't give you any benefit at all. The university has made a commitment to help people, which is a good thing, but have no right to force that commitment on others.
But, perhaps there is an opportunity in this. The volunteers will need supervision and probably need tax advice themselves. You are probably in a good position to do either or both of these, and to do it effectively in less than eight hours per week. You could, for example, use email to field questions from volunteers as they arise, making the others more efficient and effective.
If this hasn't been resolved properly otherwise, you might suggest that as an option. Supervision might give you some experience that would be valuable later, depending on your regular job requirements.

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


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Can I conduct independent research and publish a paper on a H4 visa?
I am in the USA on H-4 visa (family member of a H-1B visa holder which is an employee visa), waiting for my Employment Authorization Document (EAD). Can I conduct independent research and publish a paper?

Welcome to Academia SE. Please mention which country you are talking about and explain what the abbreviations H4 and EAD mean. That would help you get meaningful answers.

If by independent research, you mean that you are not being paid by anyone and are doing it on your time, then in principle it should be allowed regardless of your visa type. Whatever "hobby" you do in your personal free time is your own prerogative.


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What does a successful NecTAR application look like
This is quite specific question, though, it specificness is largely related to the fact it can only be answered by someone with experience with computational research in Australia.
NeCTAR grants Cloud computing resources, in the form of VM's to Australian researchers.
To apply for resources there are several fields.
The allocation documentation is quite sparse on recommendations for what they are to contain.
The most significant of which is the "Research use case" which has the description:

Research use case [Form Box Here] Note: A short write up on how you intend to use your cloud instances will help us in our decision making.

It's not much to go on.
The box is quite small though it is expandable.
I'm not sure how much to write. It doesn't support rich text or any kind of markup. I am wondering if I should reference my statements (seems awkward without rich text).
Or if I should be describing other avenues of getting compute power attempted etc.
The documentation does note:

If there are any issues with your request, we will get in touch with you.
  You may be asked to provide more detail about your research or to clarify your technical requirements.

So perhaps what I write the first time does not even matter,
since they will just ask for clarification until I have appropriate amounts of information?
I am really looking for an example of an application that someone has done successfully in the past. Just to get an idea of what it would be like.

My application was successful. I might actually check to see if there is any issue with me just uploading the whole thing as an answer.

I don't have any personal experience with NeCTAR; maybe someone who does will chime in.
But if it's anything like the US and EU analogues I have worked with (e.g. PlanetLab, GENI, OneLab), this information is used mainly

to collect information about how the system is being used (e.g. to report back to funding source), and
to filter requests that are clearly ineligible (e.g. "I want to host my personal website on your cloud"),

not because they reject some serious, eligible requests based on application details.
If that's the case here, too, you really don't need to worry too much about what you write. Something of the form

My research is on X. I will use the system in order to do Y.

should suffice. (If you happen to have a project website, adding a link to it is also nice.)


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proper grading fairness when certain questions dropped on exam
I had a 135 question final exam. The Professor decided 11 questions were problematic. For those 11 specific questions, he gave points to all students if they missed those questions. If a student got them correct no extra credit was given. Some students got more extra questions than others if they missed more of the 11. Is it unfair to not award the entire class same amount of wrong questions?

Frankly, I don't know what you're asking. Please clarify (1) Did you mean the professor added 11 more question to the make-up exam? (2) What do you mean by "Some students got more extra questions than others if they missed more of the 11"? Did those students take the exam the third time? Lastly, what do you mean by "same amount of wrong questions"? What are those wrong questions?  Vote to close as "unclear what you're asking".

@mkennedy The original post says "Professor added back 11 specific questions to all students test if they missed them". The OP did not say those 11 questions were problematic. Did the OP actually come back and explain this? Or you just guessed it so? Also, what does it mean by "Some students got more extra questions than others if they missed more of the 11"? That does not sound like those 11 questions were problematic or wrong in the first place. Did the OP actually explain this?

He credited points on 11 questions if a student missed them. That implies to me that the prof thought something was wrong with them.

@scaaahu For your later query, I think that statement goes along with the OP's statement that students who did get them right were not given any extra points. OP is seeing them as "free points" to the students that missed them.

This is a common complaint.  Anytime a professor relaxes a requirement, the students who achieved it are unhappy (turn in time for a paper, whatever).
As far as those questions, it is not clear if professor decided they were wrong, ambiguous or just too hard.  In any case, what he did had the impact of removing them from any relative ranking (which is why the screams from those who got it right).
I wouldn't get outraged over it.  Sometimes there is no perfect answer. (Consider also the possible damage from leaving the questions in if they were flawed in some way.)  Just get over it, work hard, keep doing well.

The "get over it" advice is good for now. But after you receive your final marks, if your grade is within 1% from a grade cut off, it is worth contacting the professor saying something like "I'd just like to draw some attention to the way my grade was calculated. My answers on the 11 questions dropped from exam X showed a mastery of the material because __. It is clear I would have received grade Y if those questions were kept. While I know you dropped those questions would it be possible to discuss my grade in light of this unusual circumstance."


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What is an extended abstract?
Some conferences ask for an extended abstract. What are the differences among "abstracts," "extended abstracts," and "full papers?"

An abstract is a preliminary submission that summarizes the contribution of a paper. There are usually strict limits on the length of an abstract, either in terms of words or of total characters (rarely do they exceed 1000 words or 5000 characters; they are often substantially shorter than this.
An extended abstract and a full paper are nearly the same; the primary difference is that an extended abstract tends to be somewhat shorter than a full paper; I've seen extended abstracts from 2 pages up to 6 pages, while conference papers run from 4 up to about 12 or 15, depending on the space allotted.
One other important difference—outside of computer science, extended abstracts almost never go through a formal peer-review process before being published, while a conference paper will typically have at least one reviewer. (I think this is the case for almost all such papers, but there may be exceptions.)

According to Jukka they go similar peer review but you say extended abstract almost never go through formal peer review.

Computer science is different.

@JeffE: CS seems to be an exception in many ways. This is probably tied in some way to the fact that conference papers carry much more weight than journal publications in CS, but the reverse is true in almost every other scientific area I'm aware of. But I've edited the answer to take advantage of this.

@aeismail conference papers carry more weight than journals? So I shall consider submitting to conferences than journals.

In computer science conferences, the terms "full paper" and "extended abstract" are often used interchangeably.
For example, STOC calls it an "extended abstract" while SODA calls it a "full paper". In this case there is no difference that you can infer from the choice of the terminology: they are of the same length (approx. 10 pages + appendix) and they go through a similar peer review process.

I think the reason for the "extended abstract" terminology is historical.  In the early days of CS conferences, it was thought that calling the conference papers "papers" might conflict with later journal publication, while calling them "extended abstracts" preserved the idea that they were merely summaries of longer journal papers to come.  (This was especially true in more mathematical areas, since math has far fewer conferences that publish papers.)  By now, the idea that conference papers can later be expanded to journal papers is well established and you can call them whatever you want.

Actually, there is a very important difference between STOC and SODA: STOC papers are limited to 10 pages, while SODA allows up to 20 pages.  A typical STOC paper has to omit details to fit in the page limit; a typical SODA paper does not.

@JeffE: True, not a perfect example. Incidentally, ESA lets the authors pick whichever term they prefer: "Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or full paper of at most 12 pages and an optional appendix".

Evidence to the contrary is e.g. William Pugh's guidelines for authors of extended abstracts http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fischer/pldi96/pugh.html -- it appears to have been developed for the SIGPLAN 1991 conference, a computer science for programming language research.  Apparently, the conference committee wanted to be able to cover a lot of submissions, hence went for extended abstracts instead of full papers.

Reading the other answers, it is definitely not the case that all disciplines understand the same when speaking about extended abstracts (while they can agree on abstracts and full papers).
In Economics, an extended abstract is something between an abstract and an introduction - being more close to the introduction. That is, it includes the What, the Why and a little bit of the the How, along with references and results. Results are, however, only preliminary, which is why there is only an extended abstract. There are usually no tables nor graphs in it. There are also no chapters.
I believe the Why is the most important part, as it distinguishes your work from the literature and shows what you are going to add.

Even a short (normal length) abstract should summarize real results.  Preliminary results are what you find in a proposal.

I agree with the first sentence, but not with the same. In a proposal in Economics you don't even have preliminary results - you just propose that it's worth getting to them.

Just answer from the perspective of whether it will be included in the proceedings, some conferences will be included in the proceedings like regular research, but some won't, you need to confirm it by email.

Please clarify: do you mean "some conferences include the extended abstracts in the proceedings like regular research"?

My view is that in economics an extended abstract is a short version of the paper. Conferences that accept extended abstracts usually expect them to include results, methodology and a short discussion, to be able to gauge the plausibility of findings and appropriateness of the methodology.
In terms of lengths, I'd say 2-6 pages, while a full paper is anything from 15 to 100 pages. So, while very different in terms of length, the main contributions in the paper should be found in the extended abstract.


text:
Do workshop publications hold the same value as conference publications in CS?
I had missed deadline for a reputable conference (Computer Science). Now I see that a workshop is being organized with the conference which exactly aligns with my area of research. The workshop proceedings will be published with the conference proceedings. (It is the first workshop in this series)
Does a workshop publication holds same value as a conference publication for PhD work, future employment opportunities etc. ? (I am a PhD Candidate as of now)
Edit

My field is Computer Vision
The conference is ECCV

No, workshops are generally (at least in my area of CS) of much lower value than full conference proceedings. (Especially when held before a more major conference.) Even though workshop proceedings are published, they are not always considered archival, and usually are stepping stones to full publications later on. A workshop is a good place to get feedback on ideas that can then be upgraded to a "full" publication in the future.
But, I'd strongly advise you to attend the workshop in order to meet and interact with people in the area! You can get great feedback for taking a weak conference submission and making it a strong accept.

The answer of that question depends on the quality of your work, how it aligns with the workshop (very well it sounds like) and the conference alternative you are comparing it to.
Not all workshops and conferences are equal but generally conferences are much more important. Workshops are often informal and less academically significant. Ask someone in your field which would be more prestigious in your situation.
You are asking a hypothetical question without the specifics needed to provide you a quality answer.


text:
How active should professors be in writing papers with their students?
In recent months, I have found myself getting involved in varying degrees with the papers being written with members of my group. Some of the papers—by the more senior and experienced members of the group (primarily the postdoc) have needed little real effort on my part, except suggestions for improvements.
On the other hand, some of the more junior members of the group have been struggling significantly in writing papers that I believe can pass muster in getting into good peer-reviewed journals. My question is: how involved should I be in the writing process?
While I am ultimately equally responsible for the contents of the paper, it is not clear how strong a role I should play. Is it better for me to keep hounding the student through draft after draft until things are fixed to a satisfactory level, or do I need to step in at some point? Does the decision calculus change when an important deadline is on the horizon?

Could you clarify whether you are a coauthor on these papers in question (and, if appropriate, what kind of coauthor)?   In my mind, this makes a difference.

I'm the "sponsoring" or "last" author on all of these papers.

Thanks for replying.  This is really outside of my expertise -- in mathematics, we almost always list authors in alphabetical order, and it is far from unheard of for a faculty member to play a large role in a student's work but not put her name on the paper.  For whatever it's worth, I feel a lot of ownership and responsibility for any document that I put my name on.  For most (but not all) people I have cowritten papers with, I take a lead role in the writing because I am decently good at it, can do it relatively rapidly, and because good writing is important to me.

@PeteL.Clark: I am in engineering, which is decidedly different from mathematics in the way we operate. It is very rare for advisors not to be on papers written by their students, because of the funding issue (that is, the PI got a grant which was carried out by the student).

.AT.aeismail: Thanks again.  I suspected things would be different in your field.  (That's a large part of why I'm here, by the way: I'm interested to hear how things are in other corners of academia.)  Maybe in your field it's well understood that you are in some sense "not really an author" of the type of student papers you describe.  For me though, I feel like I am "really an author" of any piece of writing which I either write myself or has my name on it.  This may not be the most pragmatic point of view, and I am not necessarily recommending it...

Personally, I would have greatly preferred more actual input on my writing from my PI. I primarily got "this needs work" with no further explanation and virtually no contribution of content.

Writing "good" papers is an integral part of being a good academic, and therefore it is, in my opinion, something that supervisors should teach their students.
This means you should be active in teaching them how to write, and less active in the actual writing itself.
Struggling is part of any learning process, provided they are struggling with writing, and not with your reviews. The best you can do is to provide the student with clear goals of how the paper should look, how it should be structured and what it should contain. Looking back at my own first papers, I usually started writing before knowing exactly what the bottom line, e.g. the take-home message, should be. Discussing a plan of the paper, both with regards to content and the writing process, with the student before letting him/her write it is probably a good idea.
When reviewing the manuscript, I think it's important to provide clear, consistent and constructive criticism. Specifically:

Clear: If you don't like a sentence, paragraph, figure or table (don't forget these latter two!), make sure you tell the student exactly what you don't like about it. This may require putting intuition aside and thinking through why you're not happy with it.
Consistent: Avoid editing ping-pong that lead to the same paragraph being re-written 20 times back and forth. It's probably a good idea to keep copies of previous iterations with your own comments. This also helps the students if you can tell them they've done a good job fixing things from the previous iteration.
Constructive: This is kind of obvious, but I can't be reminded of it often enough.

Deadlines are a bummer, but they're as much part of the academic process as the writing itself, so the best you can do is to teach your students to prepare for them adequately, i.e. plan ahead.
Addendum
As for authorship, in my opinion, teaching a student to write a paper in no way qualifies as co-authorship. It's part of your job as an academic. Co-authorship is something that arises out of having contributed significantly to the contents of the paper.

different disciplines have very different conventions for ownership - it's not uncommon for a PI of a lab to by default be on papers emanating from that lab. But as Pete points out, in math (and parts of theoryCS) it's quite different.

@Suresh: Quite right, I've amended the addendum to point out that it's my personal opinion.

"Is it better for me to keep hounding the student through draft after draft until things are fixed to a satisfactory level, or do I need to step in at some point?" — Better for you?  Probably not.  Better for the student?  Absolutely!

It seems you already know the answer -- it depends on the paper (your level of interest), the co-authors (their ability to work alone) and your time. There are no rules. I saw both advisors that spend a lot of time in technical discussions and advisors that hardly spend time to read the paper. Both were good advisors INHO.
I would say the role of the advisor is like the role of the head-chef in a fancy restaurant: Quality Assurance. If the cooks make great food, all you need to do is to clean the crumbs off the plate before it goes out. If the cooks messed the food up, you need to return the plate back to them and tell them that the fish is still raw; the chicken is blend; and the correct way to do Flambé is by lighting up 95% alcohol rather than 5%-alc beer. Demonstrations are always appreciated.

That's a really nice analogy :)

One strategy for teaching students about the writing process is to get them involved in projects/papers being written by the professor or by more advanced researchers of the professor's group (post docs or 3rd or 4th year students in European system), and over time gradually increase the amount of responsibility that the student has. This works in groups where people are collaborating on the same thing. For a computer science example, you can imagine that people in the lab are developing the same software system.
Start by getting a first year PhD student working with a more advanced researcher. The research is not wholly done by the new student, but the student should be involved in all steps of the process. The new student can learn mostly by observation (watching the paper grow), contributing about 10% of the total effort.
Writing of the next paper could follow more or less the same pattern, except that the new student should take a more active role, say 25%.
For the third paper, give the new student the lead, and keep the more experienced researchers around helping and contributing, but make sure that they do not take over, and let the student work at his/her own pace. Whenever the student gets stuck, the more experience researcher could help move things forwards, to avoid the work stagnating. On this paper the student could do 60-70% of the work, and most of the writing.
Finally, let the student take the main responsibility on a paper and have the more experienced researchers contributing only comments and encouragement.

Doing things in this way requires a bit of bootstrapping, as you need to have multiple papers on the go, written by multiple people, but all around the same topic, but it could work with a single student-single professor set up.


text:
Switching field of study from computer science to GIS in the post graduate level
I have a B.Sc. in CS, but I want to further in the GIS (geographical information system) line. I am thinking I'd have to do some sort of post-graduate diploma in GIS, before I can go for a M.Sc., which is necessary to hit my mark, seemingly...
I need your guidance about this case.
Thank you very much

GIS = geographic information system? PGD = preimplementation genetic diagnosis?

yes, GIS=geographic information system and PGD=postgraduate diploma.

I can't comment with authority on your specific case, but some GIS masters courses may not assume much GIS-specific prior knowledge. You should probably have an interest in mapping, cartography or spatial data, and - since you are coming from a CS direction - in databases or spatial computing; but interest does not necessarily mean in-depth knowledge.
I think my advice would be "find a course that interests you, and discuss it with the person in charge of admissions".


text:
Pursuing a Masters, trying to figure out the potential effects of my undergraduate transcript on PhD admissions
Long story short, my transcript is quite the spectacle: I started off getting really good grades, but due to a lot of personal issues ended up graduating with a respectable, but lackluster GPA.  Unfortunately, I have a downward trend.  While my final GPA is slightly below 3.5, I have failed quite a few courses.  I'm getting a MSE in computer science, coming from an applied math background.  My undergraduate computer science GPA is really high, but my GPA in everything else is pretty low.  I'm confident that I will do exceptionally well in the CS MSE, but I have a few questions:

Are undergraduate courses unrelated to one's discipline factored into the PhD admissions decision making process?
Despite doing poorly in some math classes in my undergrad, will taking graduate level math courses and doing well in them essentially negate the fact that I did poorly in some classes as an undergraduate (did well in most of them)?

For reference:
I'm currently conducting research and should have good to outstanding recommendations.
I understand that for PhD programs, a common order of applicant evaluation is:

Recommendations
Research
Transcript

and that I have valid reasons for my poor performance, nonetheless, I'm scared that they're going to look at my undergraduate transcript and just get scared off.  Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the kind words.  They definitely help, at least a little.

I'm not sure "boast" is the right word, exactly. "Confess"?

You're right to be concerned. Some places will be scared off—or more accurately, won't even see your application—because of your undergraduate record. But some won't. Some will see your strong record in computer science, in graduate classes, and in research, at the expense of other classes as a sign of passion/focus/geekery (which is a strong advantage in research) combined with immaturity (which most people grow out of).
PhD admission is a random process, a numbers game.  You have a high-variance record, so to be reasonably confident of admission, you should apply to a wider spectrum of places than someone with a more consistent record with the same average.
I strongly recommend discussing your concerns directly with your letter writers.  They have to make the case that the admissions committee should ignore the black marks in your record and focus on your considerable strengths—good performance in graduate classes, excellence in your chosen field, strong research ability, and so on.  (You can't really make that case yourself.) Your references may also be willing to contact colleagues directly, to convince them to pull strings on your behalf.
Also: PUBLISH!
Best of luck!


text:
What are the flaws of working in a research center department led by young principal investigators?
In few months I will join a new research center department of an excellent university in Northern America. My field is computer science and bioinformatics.
This new department has mainly hired young principal investigators and scientists, all 35-40 years old.
I have visited the labs and clearly have seen the advantages of this new young environment: flow of new ideas, enthusiasm, friendly relationships, opening of mind.
But I am sure there are also some flaws of this situation.
So I am asking you all: what are the main flaws, defeats, disadvantages of being part of a department lead by young principal investigators?

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20926/what-are-the-advantages-disadvantages-of-a-phd-advisor-who-is-experienced-vs-on/20935#20935

You may see raw behaviors/decisions by your colleagues in such young environment. Young researchers may not have older/senior professor's experiences in both professional and daily life-style. This may have bad effect on the researchers there. But exceptions always exist and not all the young environments have similar advantages/disadvantages.

The question is likely going to collect anecdotes, predisposing you to be more sensitive to probably unnecessarily small problems. Just keep a positive attitude, focus on enjoying the positives; the specific negatives will soon reveal themselves, if any. Also personality is not just dictated by age; you can put many 35-40 year-old PIs in a team and each of them can have a different outcome. This question is thus overly-broad.

I don't agree that this question is more broad than many others we have answered before. Voting to leave open.

Some of the disadvantages of young professors vs. more senior staff may be:

Less established in their field. One advantage of a very senior professor for a PhD student is that the senior professor often knows all or at least most of the important players in the area. Hence, he can put the student in contact with interesting collaborators, and open up doors for internships or postdocs. A younger professor may not yet have a network that broad.
Less experienced. This one is obvious, but more senior professors are typically more experienced. They have advised many students before, and make less "beginner's mistakes" (e.g., expecting too much from a student, and then getting angry because the student did not live up to those expectations).
Less laid-back. Non-tenured professors need their students to perform, as their own career is very tightly coupled with their students (mis-)fortunes. Many a high-potential assistant professor will not take an unsuccessful research project lightly. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage - an ambitious student and a non-tenured professor may push each other to achieve great results, but the same
professor and a more average student may lead to some friction and bad feelings.
Less money. Younger professors tend to have less research grants (yet). This has implications for you even if you personally have a stipend from another source, as it means there is less money for travel, less money to fund research students, etc.
Less pull in the faculty. This may be more relevant in some places than in others, but I have certainly seen faculties where working with an assistant professor had the disadvantage that your group was at a disadvantage whenever any sort of global resources were distributed. The senior professors were often able to acquire resources (they did not actually need) basically by appealing to their seniority.
Higher chance that your advisor moves. Non-tenured professors are much more likely to change university (voluntarily or due to not getting tenure) than ones that are already tenured. Especially take this into account if the tenure review of your professor is planned for the next years.

These things just came from the top of my head, I will edit the answer if I can think of anything else.
Sidenote: yes, these are all stark simplifications. No, none of those points has to be true for any given young professor.