text:
What is an effective way to copyright my teaching material?
I am an adjunct instructor at a technical college in the US. I was tasked with creating a new class which I would teach in the spring. I have finished all of my course materials (.pdfs, lab sheets, power points, etc etc). When I was first hired and told to create the new course, I was informed by some of my colleagues (former adjuncts at the same institution) that I would be paid for my course content. However, in speaking with my directory I was informed that I would not be paid for my course content as it is part of running the class.
Now whether or not that is right or wrong, I'm not too horribly concerned. However alot of my own personal time goes into creating these materials and I would like to protect my time investment.
Would it be wise or prudent to try and protect my course materials through some sort of copyrighting process of some sort, or something to that effect?
If so, what is a sufficient way of documenting my materials and ensuring that any party who obtains them sees them as "copyrighted" or possessing whatever protection that is applied to them?
My interest is in ensuring that my course materials are not gobbled up by someone else in the program, then taught by someone else without having been properly reimbursed for my development work in my personal time. Everyone else I have spoken to has said it sounds "not very kosher" that I am not being reimbursed for developing the course work.
I would simply like to protect my personal investment into these materials.
Thoughts? Insights? Experiences? Thank you!
I went through my contract, and there are two subdivisions that outline IP and copyright goodies, etc etc. The first paragraphs in essence state "The faculty member is entitled to the results of their research, IP, etc, EXCEPT when we pay for the research to be done, OR give you a break in your work load but still pay you to do the research, OR" - now this is the line I'm not sure about, "C. Under an assigned duty and/or work-for-hire arrangement with an external sponsor.
" I was very informally asked "Hey, would you be willing to put together and teach a class on subject X?" Me - "Sure.". (That's fairly literally, the extent of the request and my response). Would that fall under either of the definitions of C?

I was under the impression if you create something as part of the job, you forfeit the copyright to your employer. E.g. The guy who designed London tube map. I may be wrong, so do not take my word for it

What Lost1 said. Go read your contract and find out who holds the rights to the content you create. Not being paid extra to create it doesn't necessarily mean it's all yours.

What country? Copyright laws vary from country to country. In the US, the instant you put the materials down in a fixed form (including computer slides and images), they are automatically covered under copyright in your name unless you are working under a contract that says differently. To sue someone who uses your materials, in the US you effectively need to have registered your copyright. Whether or not you intend to sue someone, once you've determined whether you or your employer has the copyright, you should mark all of your materials with the date, appropriate copyright owner, ans symbol.

I believe copyright applies autoamtically to all creative works, not just in the US, but in every country that signed the Berne Convention.  (If I'm not mistaken, it applies in the US because of the Berne Convention.)

Thanks for the insights everyone! I updated my original post quickly with a tid-bit of information. To be clear, I am developing the materials while not teaching any courses or being paid by the school in any manner. It is currently the summer semester and I am not being paid to teach, develop course work or anything. I will have to try and find my contract. Unfortunately the director seems to run a fast and loose operation. I want to be sure I am looking out for my best interests in the case someone tries take my content and run with it without proper dues being paid for my time investment.

Sorry for the double comment everyone, EDIT 2 contains some information from the contract, everything looks pretty good for me except for the line I included, which i'm not quite sure how to interpret. Thoughts?

Isn't the purpose of teaching to... you know, teach the students well so they learn the material? Isn't it a good thing if your course materials are so awesome that the other teachers want to use them too? Wouldn't that mean that more students learn better, giving you more satisfaction from how well you're doing your job, as well as explicitly furthering your goals as a teacher? Think about why it is that you want your students to see your materials, but not any student who isn't taught by you. Does that really make sense?

I would simply like to protect my personal investment into these materials. — You'd make a better return on your investment by attaching your name to your course materials and then letting anyone use them.

This may depend on the copyright act in the US. In the Czech Republic, the copyright act provides colleges with rights to the work of their employees and handles rights to the work of their students. But still, you may release the metainformation, about these documents and get some identifier - in this case, maybe Ark would be most suitable. But there are hundreds of identifiers and databases of metainformation, so I would do research on it.

Regarding your question

What is a sufficient way of documenting my materials and ensuring that any party who obtains them sees them as "copyrighted" or possessing whatever protection that is applied to them?

In the United States (I have zero knowledge of copyright law in other places) the following applies if you actually hold the rights to your materials:

You can only get copyright protection for materials that you have fixed in a "tangible medium."  For example, you can copyright your presentation slides or a video recording of your lecture; you cannot copyright your unwritten, unrecorded lectures.
You can only copyright something you "created"; if you compile existing public domain material in a way that requires no creativity, it is not eligible for copyright protection.
You can explicitly notify others that you reserve all rights (the rights of the copyright holder) to the materials with a written statement to that effect. For example, you can put "Copyright 2014 0xhughes, all rights reserved" on the footer of each page. (Note that you don't have to do this to get copyright interest in the materials, but it's a standard way of warning off potential infringers.)

Here is a reference for this answer.
Regarding the first part of your question

Would it be wise or prudent to try and protect my course materials through some sort of copyrighting process of some sort, or something to that effect?

this has already been addressed by another answer.
Regarding your specific contract, you will have to seek further clarification from the university as to who holds the rights to the materials.

Thank you for your concise answer with relevant information ff524. I have a good idea of how to handle my investments of personal time in regards to the multiple requests of program research and creation.

I am late arriving, but let me see whether I can understand... a) you are pretty sure you aren't going to get rich off your work, but b) it would chap your buns if the college took your material, handed it over to a TA and had the TA teach subsequent sessions of the course.  Is that right?
If that's right then the question (in the United States) boils down to whether what you've produced is a "work made for hire."  If it is, it belongs to the institution; if not, it belongs to you.
Getting a standard contract modified, particularly if this is a state institution, may be nearly impossible.  I think I'd write a letter to whoever signs the contract saying something like, "My understanding of our contract of _____ is that all rights to the course material which I may develop to deliver this course vest in me, and that the University of _____ claims no right to any intellectual property developed in the preparation or conduct of this course.  Please confirm that my understanding is correct."  Then get a letter signed by whoever signed the contract that essentially repeats your question as a statement.  It will probably be easier to get this going with a personal meeting than with an exchange of mail.
Then put copyright notices on everything.  You might also want to record your lectures: http://bbrown.spsu.edu/papers/podcasting/podcasting_protects_ip.html
(I am not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.  If you think the materials are worth tens of thousands of dollars, you need an IP lawyer.)
Edited to add: Take note of MarkJ's answer here and consider putting all your stuff on a personal web page with copyright notices attached.  I've used the Creative Commons licenses for my own stuff.  Publishing it that way won't keep others from using it, but will preserve your claim to authorship.

+1 The work for hire point is the crux of the matter. As a data point, my own university does not consider materials from face-to-face classes to be work for hire, but they do consider materials from online classes to be work for hire. There is no way to tell what a particular school without asking.

Your first paragraph hits the nail on the head. I do not expect to make oodles of money from this in any form. Faculty higher up the chain have a habit of re-branding the work of others as their own work. I would like to avoid spending time developing the new courses only to be kicked to the side and someone else sticking their name on my work. I've already done two projects which were used for a senor faculty's master's project and outside job project (which were originally framed as projects for the school). I'm tired of being used for doing research/projects outside of the school.

Simply write "Copyright: Your Name.  Do not copy."  Putting your name on it leaves them a way in in case they want to contact you for possible re-use or collaboration.  The "do not copy" (or similar desired "term of use") puts your explicit intentions on the document, in this case reserving all rights to yourself.  I personally put the latter part in a different font so that it stands out as a "meta-item" of the document.
Otherwise, if you think the "cat's out of the bag" on your material already, the best way to protect it is to publish it to the web, where the Internet can form a historical record for your creation and the community can now help you with fair credit assignment.

Ah, thanks, I've deleted my answer.  As for copyright and fair use, I think, like many, your understanding of copyright is wrong and has gotten confused after all the wars with software and has gotten conflated with the idea of a "right to copy", but no.  Copyright protects authorship, so that no one can say take credit (authorship credit, not money) for something that another wrote.  It's an unfortunate misnomer, that has confused everyone it seems.

After OP edits, have re-instated answer with new data.

As a pedant who took a one-morning short course in copyright, let me say that (C) was said not to carry legal weight.  The exact C-in-circle symbol is needed, or the word, "Copyright" as in "Copyright 2014 by Bob Brown."

@BobBrown: Ah right.  Edited answer.  In truth, even the term copyright is vague as an informative stamp.  Communicating intentions to the widest audience is an art in itself.

I think we are missing the main point here: are talking about intellectual property.
I do not agree with the idea that pedagogical design is different from research based on the fact that the former was created to serve an audience (e.g.; students). Under the same premise, the copyrights  of a composer's opera commissioned by an Opera House would belong to the opera house. Under the same premise, the copyrights of all commercially published handbooks should belong to the universities if the author happens to work, even part-time, to a university.
There is no question that customizing materials for a class, preparing a lesson, or doing specific handouts, powerpoints comes with the job of being an instructor. However, if a teacher prepares a whole course in his/her free time (e.g. summers) that is not bound to the school where s/he works, and furthermore, with the intent to publish it. Then, I think these materials belong to the teacher.
I find problematic all this idea that it is OK to defend intellectual property only when it is research. I think it is a reflection on the view of teaching as a second class citizen in some academic circles.

You are being paid to teach a course, which means you're getting paid to create things like power point presentations, OR simply write on the black board... Since you're choosing to create a more concrete item, this is your choice, and that is still the property of your faculty. Whatever you create is being governed & paid by the faculty.
What investment are you talking about?? Please don't be delusional. You're not writing a research paper which is being published under your name. You're relaying information to your students. This information is out there because you were paid to create it. There is no investment here.
You're trying to get paid say $50,000 to create things for your course, teach it, and then get paid again for the same material!
That makes absolutely no sense! Find another field of work if you want to get royalties.

Downvoted because of the unnecessarily rude tone. Also see the Be nice policy.


text:
How to react to a reviewer’s comment when he is completely right, but you do not like the consequences?
One of the reviewers of my conference paper (computer science), which got a revise & resubmit, criticized that my conclusions are not well founded in my experiment and that they don’t show my hypothesis. (In detail, there was no control variable, which he correctly remarked.)
The point is, I wanted to use this experiment to give an idea for the direction of the work following my results and to generalize my previous findings.
My question is, how could I respond to this comment, as deleting my discussion would cut out a huge part of my work?

Can you be more specific about the “work following my results” and the “previous findings” and tell us whether and where they were published? Anyway, if you have some good reasons why you want this content in your discussion, why don’t you give this reasons in the paper or at least to the reviewer?

The work I am doing now but cannot put in this paper yet. The previous findings build the foundation of this paper, which was published at another conference in the same research area. The reviewer didn't give any suggestions on how to improve the from him criticized part, could you then give me a phrase how to respond to this in an elegant way?

I suggest sitting down with your advisor and sorting the feedback you received into good (as in constructive) and bad (as in worthless) piles. The good stuff you can start cranking away on. You should then prepare an "author's response to reviewer's feedback" document in which you explain in respectful but unwavering terms why you did/did not choose to incorporate the various action items stemming from the referee report. Submit this document along with your resubmission.

That's a valid risk of the 'future work' section - if the described experiments as such seem to the reviewer as insufficient, a likely reaction is "the direction is fine, but come back when you've done the next step and added it to this paper".

First of all, I love the title of your question.  What an open, honest way of phrasing things, which makes for a question which just about every academic I know can identify with.
Whenever you get a "revise and resubmit" referee report, the two key questions are:

How many of the revisions do you want to make?  How many can you make in a reasonable amount of time?
Almost certainly you will resubmit, yes, but: to the same journal or to a different journal?

I take it that by "completely correct" you mean that you agree that all of the suggested revisions would improve the paper.  That still does not imply that you want to make all of them: if the revisions ask for significant further work, then it may well be that, yes, you are in the midst of this work / planning to do it in the future but nevertheless you are seeking to publish what you have done so far.
Of course if you agree with all of the suggested revisions and you feel that you can do them in a reasonable amount of time -- e.g., in time to meet the deadline for a conference -- then it seems pretty clear that's the way to go.
I take it though that in your case it is not practical to complete all the suggested revisions in the given amount of time.  Your remaining choices are then: (i) complete only some of the revisions, explain very carefully in your reply why you considered the other proposed revisions but did not make them, and hope for the best;  (ii) indeed resubmit, but elsewhere; and (iii) withdraw the paper until you can complete the suggested work.  Then resubmit (possibly to the same place, if applicable, but starting over again in the formal submission process).
These are tough choices, and obviously they cannot be made globally.  All I'll say is that the more (!!) "completely correct" you feel the reviewer's suggested changes are, the more likely it is that if you do not satisfactorily incorporate these changes then the paper will not be accepted.  This still does not mean that revising and resubmitting is a poor choice: you have to do an expected value computation (e.g. if you can respond to 2/3 of the suggested revisions within a few days, maybe give resubmission to the same conference a whirl: why not?) to decide what is your best option.  This decision also includes how important it is to you that the paper be published sooner rather than later and how important that it be published in this specific venue.  Ideally speaking, you should take the necessary time to publish a "complete" version of your work rather than an unsatisfactorily partial preliminary version...but in reality, many academics do not have the luxury of fully indulging this ideal.

'I take it that by "completely correct" you mean that you agree that all of the suggested revisions would improve the paper.' - based on the question, I had expected exactly that not to be the case (but as the OP accepted this answer, apparently they meant it like interpreted here).

If one does resubmit without implementing such a correction, it is important to include an explanation of this both in the direct response to the referee and in the paper itself. Reviewers are test readers, so if they caught this then some fraction of the intended readership will also go "why isn't there a control variable?", and it's important that the paper itself make it clear that that is either not possible/technically hard, or work in progress, or so on.

Let me first recapture your situation as I understood it and based my answer on:

You have essentially three Papers, let’s call them Paper A, B and C. Paper A has already been published, Paper B is the one you are currently working on and Paper C is a planned future publication.
You drew conclusions in Paper B, which are not based on the research of Paper B alone but also require results from Papers A and C.
The reviewer correctly remarked that your conclusions were not supported by your research in Paper B.

First of all, as your conclusions are not supported by published research yet, you cannot make these conclusions and there is no (ethical) way to leave them as conclusions. Rather from the situation at the end of Paper B, they are an outlook or speculations and thus should be marked as such.
E.g., you could write something along the lines of the following in your conclusions:

Our results confirm the findings of [Paper A], which suggests [general hypothesis]. This could be confirmed by [ansatz for research of Paper C].

To the reviewer’s comment you could reply along the lines of the following:

The reviewer is indeed correct that [general hypothesis] is not supported by our current findings. Rather, [general hypothesis] is something suggested by our results from our findings and [Paper A] and should be investigated in future research. We have insufficiently described this point and amended our manuscript such that this aspect is now made clear.

There's a long tradition in some fields of basing work on a conjecture which is only later proven.

@djechlin: At least in my scenario, and that’s exactly what I am suggesting to resolve.

I think the solution for the problem in the title is to revise the paper so that the undesirable consequences are no longer consequences. As I understand it, the reviewer correctly pointed out that your conclusion is not adequately supported by your experiment; the undesirable consequence is that this conclusion should be removed; it's undesirable because that would mean removing a big part of the paper.  Fortunately, the undesirable consequence would no longer be a consequence at all if the conclusion were relabeled to match what you wrote in the second paragraph of your question --- for example along the lines of Wrzlprmft's suggestion. More generally, instead of saying (incorrectly) that something is a conclusion from your experiment, say what it really is, as accurately as you can.

My question is, how could I respond to this comment, as deleting my discussion would cut out a huge part of my work?

Trust me. I have been there.
Remove the questionable part, and even the whole paper if necessary. (Well, unless the reviewer is a well-known idiot :-) )
In the future, you will regret anything you published that is not perfectly fine and relevant.
PS.
Also, in the future, you may be involved in some competition or conflictual circumstance where a "competitor" or opponent may use a "scientific weakness" against you. And in this case you may "pay" a high price.

I absolutely agree. We give them what they want, there is nothing we can do against them anyway. Whether, you like or not like the consequence is not relevant.

@randomA Who is "them"? The reviewers? That's also "us".

@Raphael Depending on how they see things. In most cases, they are very much different from 'us'.

Firstly, I'm not totally clear about the exact situation. Here's how I understand it:

some experiments have been done and analysed
some conclustion can be drawn
some control experiment that would allow far more general conclusions is planned but has not yet been done.
This is what the reviewer is worried about.

Author point of view:
I'd say that the decision what to do depends on whether the conclusions that can be drawn are important enough to write a paper about them. Alternatively, the other way round: whether a paper written about both the already performed and the control experiments would be too long for a good paper.
In these situations, I'd

agree with the reviewer (in the answer to the reviewers)
but point out that after careful consideration you decided that the control experiments are out of the scope of the present (preliminary? feasibility? case?) study.
In addition, I'd spell out the limitations of the present study very clearly
while outlining the follow-up experiment as a solution. This needs some care in order to convince readers (and reviewer) that the follow-up experiment is really taking place: the literature is full of ongoing experiments that never went on.
In the answer to the reviewers, state explicitly that you took care to clearly outline the limitatins of the present study due to the lack of control experiments.

Obviously, this approach can only work if the lack of control experiments has some sensible reason and doesn't appear to be lazyness. Spell out the reasons  (careful with non-scientific reasons like feasibility [vs. laziness]).

Reviewer point of view
When reviewing a paper, I find it quite OK if experiments have limitations* if the authors are clearly aware of these limitations. I tend to be worried if the conclusion that the world is rescued is based on 3 dead mice.
* Experiments will always have limitations. It is IMHO perfectly right to look at science as an iterative process of refining knowledge. It doesn't make sense to get thousands of patients for a preliminary study. But the preliminary study should spell out the limitations. And in practice, the preliminary study is (and should be) needed in order to get the thousands of patients, and/or better meta information, or other other labs joining the efforts etc. for follow-up studies. But also this will work only if the preliminary study is honest about limitations. Otherwise the topic will be perceived as "solved".

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

authors: Сергей Ислямов

sort: votes


text:
How to develop experiment to justify construction of a prototype system?
I have worked hard for my master thesis project to build a system that uses an already existing algorithm, just in a mobile setting, which hasn't been done before. Because the algorithm is complex, it required a client-server infrastructure. Now, as I said most, of my efforts until now went into building the system of already existing components rather than contributing to knowledge.
Now my question is, how can I use my system and efforts to go more in the direction of a scientific contribution? The problem is if I, for example, simulate data loss over the network, I could have done that without even building the system. So I somehow want to include my real system in the experiment rather than doing a simulation. What would be a good approach that justifies also the construction of my real system?

You might think of it in terms of the research question(s), which might look something like this:

Is it possible/feasible to use algorithm X in a mobile setting? (Presumably the answer is yes, because you've already built it.)
What challenges are there in applying algorithm X in a mobile setting? How can those challenges be met?
How does the efficiency/accuracy/data loss compare between the "regular" implementation of algorithm X and the implementation in a mobile setting?

Edited to add:

What are the advantages & disadvantages of using your implementation over a simulation? I'm guessing that your implementation gives more realistic results than a simulation would.

Obviously I don't know your field, or how novel a contribution your implementation is. But in principle, I think that answering the kinds of questions I've listed above could lead to publishable papers, and could justify your having built this system.

What would be a good approach that justifies also the construction of my real system?

I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't say anything other than: in some fields, in addition to showing that your approach works well in a simulated environment, it is a really good idea to also show that your approach works well in practice.
If your peers value such "real world" results, then you don't need to justify it any further than that.

And in some situations, the real-world results disagree with the simulations, which makes everything so much more interesting :)

@ff524 Yes, indeed!

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
How to make sure journal is indexed in Scopus or not
I have submitted a paper to a Q2 journal last year (2021). But now when I checked the Scopus record it says Scopus coverage years:from 2018 to 2021. Does this mean its not indexed now? For some other journal it says from 20xx to present at Scopus.
What should I do now? I have also paid the APC fee.
EDIT:
I checked scopus discontinued list and i cant found it in there. Can you please check this ISSN: 2089-4872. It is available in Scopus Sources October 2021. It is not available in Discontinued titles Jan. 2022. What does this mean. It is quite confusing for me

Search Scopus for the journal. If you don't find it, it's not indexed.
Edit: the journal in question is indexed by Scopus, but it doesn't have any 2022 articles. I'm guessing that's why the Scopus coverage years are only 2018-2021. 2022 articles will be indexed eventually, just not yet.

I checked scopus discontinued list and i cant found it in there.  Can you please check this ISSN: 2089-4872. It is available in Scopus Sources October 2021. It is not available in Discontinued titles Jan. 2022. What does this mean. It is quite confusing for me

@TalhaAnwar what is the name of the journal?

@TalhaAnwar also, it sounds like the journal is still indexed in Scopus.

title name: IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence.

@TalhaAnwar I just checked Scopus. This journal is indexed, and by the Cite Score, is not in danger of being delisted either. Looks like this answer is incorrect; I am going to amend it.

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


text:
When can a DPhil student or EU PhD refer to themselves as DPhil/PhD Candidate?
I understand that in US PhD programs, students are often labelled as a "PhD Student" until they pass their qualification exams and begin working on their dissertations, at which point they can be called "PhD Candidate".
What is the convention for Oxford DPhils and other European PhDs, given that there is no coursework? At Oxford, students are admitted as a Probationer Research Student and must pass 2 milestones, the Transfer of Status and Confirmation of Status. At which point, or after which exam that is passed, can one refer to themselves as a DPhil Candidate?
I'd like to know to avoid misrepresentation of my background as there are certain opportunities and/or visa and residential statuses reserved for those who have completed all requirements but their dissertation (ie. PhD Candidates).

What makes you think the distinction is important?

@BryanKrause Well there are opportunities specifically available to PhD Candidates (ie. those who have completed everything but their dissertation). Since DPhils only have their dissertations, I don't imagine they'll automatically qualify for these in the first instance. So then, at which point would they qualify, given they remain as a DPhil Student for the entire duration?

That changes the question a lot, though, so if that's the question that's what you should ask. Likely it depends entirely on whoever is offering those "opportunities". See also https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/401068 - you should always ask your actual question.

I suppose that is only one part of my question - overall, I just wanted to know when and if DPhil students are allowed to refer to themselves as DPhil Candidates. Whether it is to qualify for certain opportunities, for certain visa/residential statuses, or to simply avoid unethical missrepresentation of one's background. I assumed there would a more definite answer given that most non CDT EU doctorates only include dissertations. Regardless, I edited my question a bit, thank you.

I did some more research and came across a post on Reddit with a similar question but for Australian PhDs.
It states that "the first-year milestone in Australia is called 'confirmation of candidacy', and basically proves you have a strong enough concept to carry out the rest of the degree. People in the program before this milestone call themselves 'students', while after passing confirmation you are then a 'PhD candidate'. You retain this status up until you submit your thesis for examination."
Another comment for the UK states that "you're on probation for the first year, then you sit an examination (a report + defense). Then they back-date your enrolment and you're officially a candidate."
This leads me to believe that the Oxford Transfer of Status serves as your qualification exam, and once you pass this examination, you would be able to label yourself as a "DPhil Candidate". Time-wise, this about matches up with US programs (after 1st year in a 3-4 year UK PhD program vs after 1st/2nd year in a 4-5 US PhD program).

The General Regulations for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy make the official position very clear. Students are admitted as Probationer Research Students. In due course, they then make an application to the relevant faculty board to become 'Students for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy'. If this application is successful (or, colloquially, if they 'pass transfer of status') then they can call themselves DPhil students.
Confirmation of status is - as the name suggests - just a check that things are as they should be. As long as this is successful, the student continues to be a DPhil student. If the confirmation process is unsuccessful, "the board may approve his or her transfer to the status of Student for the Degree of Master of Science by Research or of Master of Letters, as appropriate."

Thank you for your answer. The reason for my original question is that there are certain opporunities reserved for those who completed all requirements but dissertations, or PhD Candidates. When would DPhil students then be qualified for these opportunities? Would it also be inaccurate or even unethical if I were to refer to myself as a DPhil Candidate, at any stage of a DPhil degree?

@IcyLemons In general conversation, probably not. However, if you are thinking of applying to some opportunity where "PhD Candidate" is used as a term of art, it would probably be best to contact whoever is advertising the opportunity and ask whether your situation meets their requirements.

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


text:
How to add ResearchGate preprints manually to google scholar?
Is there any way of adding my ResearchGate preprints manually on Google Scholar? If no, will Google Scholar automatically add it to my scholar profile? Can other authors cite my ResearchGate preprints?
For the manual addition of my paper, I have performed the following steps.
For the manual addition of my paper at first I tried with Add articles option but I did not find it on scholar. Then I tried with Add articles manually but I did not find any preprint option there.
,

Google Scholar may well index your preprint on ResearchGate automatically after a few days, although it's rarely possible to be sure what Google Scholar will do, since it appears to run largely unattended.
You can manually add articles to your Google Scholar profile by going to your profile page and clicking on the plus icon just above the list of your publications:

Other people can cite anything you post to ResearchGate, although the citation format will depend on the citation standard (Harvard, APA, MLA etc) that they are using. ResearchGate says it issues DOIs for preprints, which make it easier to cite them.

There is no special preprint option. You are supposed to use "Add articles manually" for your preprints and fill-in the fields accordingly.


text:
Is it Self-Plagiarism to paraphrase my own published work in my thesis without citation?
I recently completed my PhD in Computer Science in Australia and am now a postdoc at a U.S. university, where I am assisting a PhD student with his thesis. In our field, it is common to publish several papers before completing the thesis, which often becomes a compilation of these publications. In my thesis, I began each technical chapter with a note saying, 'This chapter is based on my publication [A],' but I combined all Related Work sections from these publications into a single literature review and introduction, paraphrasing the content without specific citations or acknowledgments. The student I'm helping questioned whether this approach might be considered self-plagiarism. I can't advise on that, but it suddenly makes me realize this might not be appropriate from a point of view.
Then, I scanned my thesis with an online plagiarism checker, which showed that some parts of my thesis involved plagiarism. However, what is odd is that I've observed similar structures in many other theses, including those from U.S. universities. Some PhDs even directly copy and paste the Related Work sections without any paraphrase and citations in the Introduction section, although they explicitly mentioned reusing their own publications in the technical chapters. I guess this might be acceptable, as many people have done the same thing, but I can't find explicit guidelines on any university website about this practice. They all only state that recycling your own text without attribution is considered self-plagiarism.
My question is: Does integrating and paraphrasing content from one's own published works into different thesis sections without specific citations or acknowledgments constitute self-plagiarism? Why did so many PhDs not follow the rule if recycling your own text without attribution is considered self-plagiarism? I'm concerned about potential repercussions, similar to what happened to the Harvard President, even years after graduation. Maybe I am just overthinking. Should I apply to revise my thesis at the university where I graduated? I guess this might be extremely difficult.

Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion or containing answers may be removed.

As @GeorgeSavva said in the comments, self-plagiarism is the practice of presenting your old work in a way that misleads people into thinking that it's new work. The main contexts in which the distinction between old work and new work matters is important is when you have something to gain by misleading other people into thinking that the work you are presenting is entirely new. Some examples of situations when people tend to commit self-plagiarism are:

A student submits work for course A, and then resubmits the same work (or a repurposed version of the original work that's substantially similar) for an assignment in course B without disclosing that this work was done for another course.

A researcher publishes a paper containing substantially similar work to a previous paper they published without citing the earlier work.

In the first example above, the student's deception undermines the learning process, since the instructors for both credit are assuming that the student will learn something from doing their assignment, but this is not true for the second duplicate assignment. The student will unfairly get double the academic credit for the same assignment, and that's not how college is designed to work.
In the second example, the researcher misleads the journal into thinking the work is novel when it isn't (thereby gaining the benefit of publishing another paper), and misleads their employer into thinking the researcher is scientifically productive and continuing to publish novel work when they aren't.
Now, the type of situation you're describing, where a PhD student reuses material from publications in their PhD thesis, is not a situation where the student tries to mislead anyone or to unfairly get double the credit for a given work. Rather, they are trying to get two different (and roughly orthogonal) types of credit: first, they publish the work in a journal, and second, they include it in their PhD thesis. This is completely acceptable and appropriate: publishing research is the standard way to disseminate it in the literature, and including it in the thesis is the standard way to get a PhD degree, which is the academic recognition of your ability to do research.
Indeed, in my field it is common for PhD theses to contain entire chapters that are either identical to, or are mildly paraphrased versions of, papers the PhD student published during their PhD. As I said, this is entirely acceptable and appropriate.
Since it is acceptable and appropriate, there is also nothing for a student to gain by hiding the fact that they are reusing material. As you say, it is standard for the thesis to include citations of the relevant papers where the work originally appeared, along with a brief explanatory statement of the sort you referred to ("This chapter is based on my publication [A]"). This can be done in the introduction, or at the head of each chapter, or at some other appropriate place.
Is it self-plagiarism if you don't include citations? Well, it's poor scholarship, but mainly it's just a strange way for anyone to behave. You won't gain anything by it, and you would undermine yourself, since if you're lucky enough to have someone reading through your PhD thesis, you should want them to know about the papers you've published instead of wanting to hide those papers' existence. So to the extent anyone would consider this to be a kind of misconduct, it's a stupid form of misconduct that doesn't provide any benefits. For this reason it seems misleading to me to describe such behavior as self-plagiarism. This is like asking if it's misconduct to write with bad grammar or punctuation, or to be a sloppy writer or researcher. No, it's not misconduct, it's just something that has only disadvantages and no advantages.

Why creating work suitable for two courses to be a problem? Student was adept enough to create something that suited both needs. Learned whatever it was to be learned in both subjects. I see no issue with that. Sounds like blaming an engineer to reuse previous invention into a new invention.

@akostadinov The problem lies in the fact that the student did not spend the time to explore the subject. Regardless of their current knowledge, they are supposed to learn (even) more. The quality of what they newly learned is graded via their homework. For this reason, they cannot re-use their homework. ---- That said, if there is some final exam, then I do not agree with this reasoning. In this case, their progress is measured anyway so them not doing the homework will be reflected there.

@akostadinov see this discussion.

@akostadinov Is absolutely correct. The 1st example is clearly a failure on the institution that is then blaming the student. If the classes, or instructors, fail to differentiate themselves from other classes, then it is their fault if homework for one class is passable for another. If the point was for the student to explore more, or learn more, then the onus is on the instructor to provide an assignment that would fulfill that goal. If the classes are so similar, then it is an institutional failure for poorly designing a program with too much overlap. But its easier to blame the student.

@DavidS While I agree with the sentiment that the student is not at fault, if it's just one assignment with overlap I don't think it's an "institutional failure". Ensuring that all classes in a subject have disjoint syllabi, especially when there are basic and advanced versions of the classes, seems hard. So an early assignment in a class might duplicate something in the more advanced version of the prerequisite.

@DavidS a student who behaves dishonestly cannot blame other people for their dishonesty. The right thing for a student in that situation to do would be to go to their professor, explain that they have already studied the topic of the assignment in another class, and ask whether it is permitted to reuse the work from the other class. The professor is then free to allow it if they agree with your logic, or they can give an alternative assignment, thereby addressing your criticism about duplication of material and avoiding the “institutional failure”.

@Barmar If the institution expects unique work, even 1 instance of duplicate assignments is a failure on the institution's part. If the instructor expects unique work, its on them to ensure their assignments are unique. Something being hard does not absolve accountability. If the institution has a policy against self-plagiarism, every instance they encourage it or are negligent to avoid it is a failure on their part. I will state, the institution being wrong doesn't make the student right and there are exceptions, intentional repetition to name one.

@DavidS Who said the institution expects this all to be unique? I can easily imagine assigning something at the beginning of Calc II that's similar to the end of Calc I, to make sure the students really got it. If the student did it correctly in Calc I and resubmits that, it serves the purpose.

@DanRomik In the general sense of this discussion, the student is not automatically dishonest here. There are certain conditions that are not universal that would have to be present for the student to be dishonest here. If those conditions are not met, then it is an undue burden to put the onus on the student to bring it up to the instructor. That's just blaming the student because the instructor or institution's failure to recognize or address the duplication. Now, if the conditions are met where the student is being dishonest, then you have two problems.

@DavidS the student is not "automatically" dishonest - they are dishonest if they have been explicitly instructed that reusing earlier graded work without acknowledgement the reuse is not allowed (and most universities' academic honesty policy do indeed include such explicit instructions). Effectively any assignment comes with an implicit statement by the instructor along the lines of "In grading this assignment I assume that any work you submit was done specifically for this assignment. If this assumption is not correct, you must let me know."

@DavidS p.s. you sound like a sensible person, but your comments give the impression that you have never grappled with the practical issues that come with teaching a university class, let alone running an entire university. "even 1 instance of duplicate assignments is a failure on the institution's part"? This is laughably utopian; if you think this is a failure, wait until you see the real places where universities fall short of your ideals.

@DanRomik It isn't utopian to point out problems or faults where they are present. Also, students can still err here. Students must be mindful not to cross any boundaries that have been clearly established by the instruction given, syllabus, student handbook, etc. Both of the examples in this answer can be largely mitigated by higher standards on the institution side. Shifting the accountability to the student only allows the institution to degrade, it doesn't make better students. Of course, Buffy's answer of breaking the chain of ideas remains a valid problem.

Another type of self-plagiarism is when you write something for someone, and that person/institution has a IP interest in the work. For instance, if you design logos for a living, and you create two logos for two different clients that are close to being the same, that's self-plagiarism.

@DanRomik, if assignment requirements are filled with the old homework, then how would redoing something similar just with apples instead of oranges, make student learn something more? Your line of thinking is one of the things that I dislike in education in general. At least an engineer needs to learn to be efficient, not follow some made up ethics rules. Ethics is important but this is made up.

@akostadinov respectfully, I don't think your understanding of what "my line of thinking" bears much relation to anything I wrote, so it seems to me we're largely talking past each other. To be clear, I was mainly addressing OP's specific question here and was not attempting to give a comprehensive account of my views about self-plagiarism, which are much more nuanced than "self-plagiarism is bad". Anyway, this is a digression from OP's question which should be the main focus. If there's anything I wrote related to OP's situation that you want to comment about, I'm happy to keep discussing it.

Paraphrasing is not a guard against plagiarism. Reusing work without citation is plagiarism. If it is the work of others then it is classical plagiarism. If it is your own work then it is self plagiarism.
The issues are slightly different, however. In classic plagiarism the infraction is one of attributing the work of others to yourself. In self plagiarism, however, the infraction is breaking the chain of development of ideas, so that the entire context of the idea can't be properly followed to the source. The other/earlier papers provide important context, including the citations made there as well as associated ideas. Self plagiarism breaks that chain.
You can "self plagiarize" in things that won't be published, as you are the only consumer. But for publications, and likely theses, the assumption is that they will be made public (the literal definition) and so things should be cited. Likewise, you can self plagiarize things of your own that haven't been (and won't be) published. That isn't actually any form of plagiarism, actually, but I think you get the meaning. Your unpublished ideas are still just your own ideas, perhaps awaiting publication.
A "stapled thesis" that includes the earlier work can take some liberties in the summative material as the link to the earlier work is unneeded when the earlier work is literally included.
Your literature review should have pointed explicitly to the literature. Otherwise it is difficult to evaluate and even more difficult for a future researcher to make use of what you did to go forward.
The fact that you find "transgressions" isn't surprising. At the moment, for political reasons, the rules seem to be getting stricter. This is a good thing, IMO, though it might make some writing more pedantic. But in academic writing, links to past ideas are critical to the forward movement of the art. Avoid "islands" of thought, which appear when there is insufficient citation.

Note, importantly, that you can plagiarize a work using, literally, none of the key words of the original. It is still plagiarism. Plagiarism is about the underlying ideas, not the specific words used to express those ideas.

Yes, the literature review pointed to the source literature. Here is the common approach I used: in the publication, I mentioned that the works are classified into categories A, B, and C, each followed by respective citations. Then, in the thesis, I expanded this to 'The works are classified into A, B, and C. A is defined as (detailed description of A), with (citations). B is (description of B), with (citations), and C is (description of C), with (citations). Most of these are described in descriptive language without any creative content. The categorization way might be somewhat novel.

I'm worried about "without any creative content". If you mean "new" creative content, but describe old creative content without citation, then it is probably some form of plagiarism. My advice is to say more. Popular literature emphasizes readability. Scientific/academic literature emphasizes precision. Make it clear.

And you description of "sections" isn't very clear. If you are clearly pointing to the earlier work and that is obvious to a reader then you are fine. Otherwise, not so fine.

Yeah, I meant "I clearly pointed to the earlier work with citations". It is just that the way I organize the earlier works is from my publication. That is without any pointing to the original source of my previous publication. Like the example I mentioned in the comment.

Plagiarism is about both: words AND ideas.

Why did so many PhDs not follow the rule if recycling your own text
without attribution is considered self-plagiarism?

An honest answer is that in some subjects, people don't care so much about "self-plagiarism", to the point that some will argue that it is an incoherent concept. You can see a sample of opinions here.
In the coursework context, we never know whether the student has actually done any of the work, we can only judge by what they submitted. Hence, the tendency to inflate the penalty if caught and act whenever there's a clear proof. If a student lifted a sentence verbatim from a source without citation, we punish them so harshly not because it is such a heinous crime, but for deterrence purposes, and because it puts the independence of the whole work in question.
None of this applies to the thesis situation; you are judged on substantial contribution and people have little appetite to examine how far from the paraphrased text you have quoted the source.

I'm concerned about potential repercussions, similar to what happened to the Harvard President, even years after graduation.

There are three thing here to calibrate: 1) this was as high profile political case as it gets, normally nobody would care; 2) what Claudine Gay was accused of is far more serious than what you describe; 3) once we get to a public scandal, there's an important formal aspect of it: using someone else's text without citation or quotes is undeniable, and clear to non-experts.

If you're bringing in non-experts, or laymen in to the picture, the average layman will look at you like you're the crazy one if you try to compare any form of "self-plagiarism" to actual plagiarism.

I have the same problem with my doctoral dissertation: three chapters are based on three articles I wrote previously, and they include some of the text and images that also constitute the articles. I did not cite the articles in the doctoral thesis or write the sentence "this chapter is based on the article ..." and later I became concerned about this. I did not do it because after having asked to my supervisor, I did not get any clear explanation about how do it properly (I was basecally the first PhD student who had published articles before writing the PhD thesis).
I did some research and found that the editor allows articles to be reproduced in a doctoral dissertation. However, the editor asks you to quote the article in the doctoral thesis, not as a citation, but to write the sentence "this chapter is based on the article ...". At the same time, if you publish the doctoral thesis first and then the article, you must write that the article is based on the doctoral thesis. I came to this conclusion: the problem is not plagiarism, self-plagiarism or copyright. The editor can just claim that I did not mention it correctly, that's all.

I largely agree with this answer, which cuts right to the heart of the ethics of it all, but I have one caveat important enough to include in my own answer:
Sometimes you can get into copyright issues with the first publishers of your papers.  I've seen this fall under the umbrella of self-plagiarism, too.  A great many (most?  probably varies by field) of those venues have carve-outs allowing for republication in a dissertation, but not all of them.
My US-based institution had a formal process for squaring away that issue, along with a bunch of other plagiarism issues.  I thought it was very tedious at the time, but in the wake of certain scandals, I find it retroactively comforting.

Yeah. At that moment, our university asked us to sign a declaration to ensure that we tried every way to secure the copyright. But actually, I signed the declaration without knowing what that declaration meant. So, this time, I went back to check the copyright of the publications. Luckily, they all allow redistribution... otherwise, it would have been another story.


text:
I'm required to apply to multiple projects but I'm interested in only one
I'm interested in applying to a Ph.D. position and the guidelines indicate that a given number of different projects (of a range of open positions) should be indicated. I'm interested in one in specific and the other options fall completely outside of my interest or even my specialty. This is required because a potential interview will include members of all the chosen projects, what approach is recommended for completing the list?

Before continuing this process, I'd recommend you browse around Academia.SE for the people who have had problems with an advisor, difficulty completing a project, had a change of heart about their planned project, etc. Starting a PhD with only one "out" seems somewhat perilous. Being so narrow in your thoughts and interests might be a mistake (you haven't even started the project yet). If I were on the admissions committee I would never want to accept a student who had an interest in one project and one project only.

I’ll second Bryan’s comment. Over my career, any number of things have been quite interesting. And nobody really has a career on one narrow topic. Lots of fun things to work on in every direction...

Follow the directions.  If they ask for 4, give them 4.  Not 1.  Not 3.  Not 5.  4.  I don't want to hear about why you don't like the other ones.  Pick the lesser of evils.  The reason is that selection committees have a mass of paperwork to do and then get on to their "real job".  Do not give them a simple reason for filtering you out.  Not following directions shows a stubbornness or stup...err...ignorance or tactlessness or something.  NOTE:  I'm actually a big rogue who believes in not following rules.  BUT. Not when you are submitting an application, writing a grant report, doing references for a journal publication, or submitting an EIS to EPA.  You need to be gnat's ass perfect on the format and the direction following in that case.
Once you HAVE the acceptance.  AND acceptances at other schools.  Then (perhaps) you can negotiate, discuss, etc.  But don't screw up and not get the offer first.
You need to have options.  Advisors can be SOBs.  Can die.  Can leave and go to another school.  Don't go to a school where there is only one option.  There are a few cases where a big fish is at a lesser program (often money related).  But you don't want to be in that pickle.  Don't go to Ag State U with perfesser Fancy and nobody else when you could go to Ivy with several fancies.  In fact your whole approach in the question here shows too much focus on one school.  Apply to several.  And this one with only one acceptable program needs to be towards the bottom of the barrel.

You will always have to work with more than one faculty member as a PhD student. Certainly during your class work, you must be prepared to interact with other faculty. During your research, you will figuratively (and perhaps literally) have to "go down the hall" and talk with another faculty on a topic that impacts your research because your advisor is not the expert on that part of the work. Finally, your dissertation committee will contain more than one faculty member.
The reason you are asked to select more than one faculty at this point is to give you the opportunity to prepare for the above situations well enough in advance. We have another reason too. Suppose that I am a faculty member who is to interview a potential PhD student for my research group. I would be far more impressed to hear the student tell me that he/she already knows about my colleagues that have potentially useful contributions to make than I will be to hear the student say "No, I had no idea that person was here".
Take the time now to get to know the place where you plan to start your life-long career. Learn to network by learning how to get to know who to contact to start your networks.
This exercise in discovery carries over ten times or more when you are later going to interview for a faculty position at a university. Do you believe the department where you will apply will be impressed when you know only about that one person in the department who has the research equipment that you need for your studies?


text:
who should I contact for the Faculty interview follow up: Department head or Search committee?
One month ago, I have done a campus interview for a possible academic job. Now I am thinking to send a followup e-mail. I would appreciate to let me know whom should I include in the follow up e-mail.
When they invite me for the interview, there was a search committee chair and 5 other search committee members. However, during my campus visit, I met more than 20 faculty members including the department head and school dean.
What I am thinking to do is to send an e-mail for the department head and cced to all the search committee members including the chair. Is this the correct approach?
Or should I send a follow up e-mail to the search committee chair and cced to the committee members.
Thanks

In the U.S., I think the usual practice would be just to send to the search committee chair, with no cc's. But I have a limited sample size on this...

Either the department chair or search committee chair would be appropriate to send the follow up email to. Good luck!

It would depend on what you want to say. What is your goal here?

If your goal is simply to thank them for hosting you and meeting with you, I think it's really up to you to choose who to include.
However, I'm guessing that your main goal is to get a reply with some kind of update about your application status.  In that case, I would send a message with only one recipient.  The reason is simple: if there are multiple recipients, it's unclear who should respond and since they are busy people they may each hope that one of the other recipients will respond.
As for who that single recipient should be, I would write to the same person that invited you for the interview.  That message may have officially come from the department or committee, but there is a single person who sent it; that person is certain to know the status of the search and is the person most likely to reply promptly to you.
In case all the invitation correspondence was with an administrator and not a professor, then the search committee chair is a good choice.

I second writing to the person who invited you. Also, if this is in N. America, be prepared to never hear back from them.


text:
Can I ask for authorship/acknowledgement for writing small data analysis program for a large study?
Earlier this year I entered into a high-profile molecular biology lab and started doing wet lab work (I am an undergraduate). Knowing that I have a computational background, my PI asked that I also help with a project that had been conducted over the last two years and was nearing its completion. I was told that if I made enough of a contribution that I could be listed as a coauthor. I wrote a program for the post-doc that is leading this project and used it to analyze the validity of part of his data. The most current (nearly final) version of the project's manuscript that is being passed around the lab unfortunately don't have my name anywhere on it, even though my code is listed in the supplementary information section.
I have always heard that you should get an authorship on a paper if your work resulted in a figure or sizable part of the discussion. My contribution to this project only slightly altered one figure, ensured the figure's validity, and got about 2 sentences in the discussion. My relationship with my lab and my PI especially is very important to me (I would love to continue my work here for at least another 2 years), so is it worth asking for a co-authorship, or at least an acknowledgement? Would doing so be inappropriate given my relative contribution (a month vs. 2 years) and status as an undergraduate in the lab?

Asking whether a contribution merits acknowledgement or co-authorship is always appropriate, as long as it is done in a professional and non-confrontational way.
The answer may be "no," but it's certainly worthwhile to ask. (And if the answer is "no," at least you have learned something about standards for authorship and acknowledgement in your lab/field.)

And maybe it is not everything lost. You can ask what could you do to gain authorship, if that is possible.

How do you ask for co-authorship without sounding confrontational?!

To be acknowledged seem appropriate. When it comes to authorship, having your name on the paper implicitly means you should also fulfil several criteria such as outlined by the Vancouver Protocol (look at this post for details or search for posts with the tag authorship). It seems unlikely that you would be eligible for co-authorship.

Must be noted that the Vancouver Protocol is not applicable to some large studies, or interdisciplinary research, when no one can really work on everything. (As a bioinformatician, I know nothing about wet lab, and I don't expect the biologists to know advanced calculus).

At the very least, an acknowledgment would be appropriate. However, it very much depends on the standards in your field—and within your present lab—whether or not you'll be recognized for a small analysis tool.
Also, I would not expect that the tool would lead to multiple authorship credits—you created the tool once, and should receive "credit" for it once. (Otherwise, I'd need to cite the authors of the software I use in every paper out of my lab group!)

Thanks for your comment. To clarify, I don't expect (nor want) for the tool to lead to any further authorships or publications, I really only care about the impact it has had on the lab's current publication at hand.

I find it a strange statement, that using an essential tool for your research doesn't even merit a citation apart from the very first use. It depends on the software package of course, but if it's a unique algorithm / implementation that has a citable publication associated with it, then a citation seems pretty reasonable. If it's something essential created in-house (by someone who isn't an author), then an acknowledgement in each paper that it's used also seems reasonable.

@DylanRichardMuir: It absolutely merits citation—but not authorship credit—in the future publications.

A month's worth of work and a small analysis tool sounds like an acknowledgement, rather than an authorship. Depending on your relationship with the rest of the lab, I wouldn't press the point too hard -- a middle-author paper is worth something (but not much), and an acknowledgement is only worth the brief glow of seeing your name on a printed page.


text:
How to transition from MBA in Finance to PhD in Financial Economics?
I want to pursue a PhD in Financial Economics in USA/Canada. I am a software engineer and going to Canada to pursue an MBA in Finance in September from an average public university.
I have studied a lot of high level math courses in Engineering (Undergrad).  I will study many Finance and Econ courses in the MBA program.
I am interested in a PhD from a US university (average public university, not targeting top level).
I am really crazy about this subject. I know that I wasted a lots of time on other things but I still have time and I am very interested in teaching.
What opportunities can I take advantage of during the MBA to maximize my chances of PhD admission?

PhD programs exist to produce researchers, so an admissions committee would like to see that you will be able to produce original research. (In economics, that means journal articles.) So, what would help immensely would be to gain actual research experience. The best way to do that would be to work as a research assistant for someone who is actively publishing research.
It would be fantastic, of course, if you could co-author a paper and get it published in a top journal. But don't worry so much about that. What you're looking for is a chance to work with someone who can then write a letter of recommendation that says they are confident that you will go on to produce quality research of your own, and whose opinion will matter because they have a good track record of publishing their own work.
Add some statistics coursework to your programming experience and you'll be well-positioned to work as an RA. (Even without a stats background, being able to wield Perl or R or some other tool to collect and clean data is valuable.) Or find someone working with agent-based modelling who needs a code jockey. Then, of course, work hard and ask lots of questions.

Hi Szarka, This is great suggestion. I am thankful to you. I will take electives 9301, 9302, 9303 - Research Project in 2nd year of my study. I will also try to get good recommendation letter from faculty of Economics. I have studied a lot of math stats, calculus in Engineering, not sure If that would be counted.
My main worry is what should I keep in mind from the very first day about getting admission in good grad school in usa.

Keep in mind that you will be completing applications for graduate school in the fall semester next year. If possible, don't wait until your second year to do research. Start either during your first year or during the summer before second year.

I am doing something similar right now. It really depends on the sub-field of your interests. As mentioned by Szarka most of the finance/economics research statistics is often used, but not at a very high level. You could have a shot in many of the RA positions because you are fluent in R or Stata, but those data analyst positions will not likely to yield a coauthorship in top departments. On the other hand, there are a lot of subfields in Econ/Fin researches, for examples:

Contract theories, insurances: you need rigorous measure theories, probability theories, and sometimes non-linear functional analysis (convex optimization) in graduate level
Decision theories (behavioral fin-econ): you need measure theories, probability theories, functional analysis, optimization, and sometimes Lipschitz analysis in graduate level
DSGE, GE theories in Fin Econ, incomplete equilibriums (closely connected to 2), evolutionary dynamic game theories: You need measure theories in graduate level, stochastic differential equations, abstract algebra (advanced linear algebras in graduate level), stochastic optimizations on different types of manifolds, and sometimes methods of perturbations, Lipschitz analysis, and differential topologies.
Auction theories, multi-agent models: usually you need a very strong CS background, DNN, graph theories, discrete analysis, dynamic optimizations and controls, etc. Sometimes linked to dynamic game theories.
Corp-Fin, principle agent theories: This is very closely connected to contract theories and sometimes, decision theories
Derivative pricing theories and applications: measure theories, stochastic differential equations, and non-linear functional analysis are the minimum. Sometimes connected to contract theories and decision theories.

Each of the "subfields" that I classified has many subsubfields, and the subsubfields have their subsubsubfields. For example, despite of being mathematically intensive, some recent advances in decision sciences are closely linked to not only psychology, but also neuro sciences, physiology, and cell biology. MBA courses are usually focus on the practical uses. As a general advice, you could take more theoretical courses (like microeconomics theories in PhD level), and most importantly, find your field of interests and find the proper advisor.


text:
Should I do an MBBS before/after taking a doctoral program in neuroscience?
My goal is to become a professor in neuroscience. At the moment I have a master's degree in computer science. During my studies, I did research in neuroscience but from a computational aspect. I succeeded in publishing two papers during the program. I am mostly interested in clinical neuroscience. Therefore, there are two questions I would need an answer to:

Does the degree MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) allow me work as a doctor? Treat patients? And, most importantly, run clinical studies as the person in charge?
Should I get the medical degree before or after doing a science PhD?

It seems there are some PhD/MD programs (I don't understand the difference between MD and MBBS) but they would take +9 years in most places. Doing a PhD and medical degree separately seems to be a faster route (3 year PhD and 4 year MBBS, if this MBBS is sufficient).
I would really appreciate any help, there's a huge amount of variation in information I can find from the web.

I'm guessing this isn't the US, so is this maybe the UK?

I am located in Europe (Sweden).

The distinction between an MD and MBBS is the US versus the British system of medical training. Both allow you to practice medicine in countries that support each system. Confusingly, it appears the MD degree in the UK is also a post-MBBS research degree most similar to the US PhD, though you must have already obtained an MBBS to train for an MD (source: Wikipedia).
A quick google scholar search for MBBS reveals many published clinical trial studies where authors have MBBS degrees. For example,
Article 1 - Article 2 - Article 3 (in Lancet)
So the answer to your first question is yes. Perhaps the only thing to consider is where you ultimately want to practice. Ideally, you'll want to do your training in the same country. There are lots of crappy things about training in one country then moving to another--mainly, many places will make you retake the country-specific licensing boards.
I'm a little skeptical of your proposed number of years of training. In the UK (where MBBS originates), training is 5 to 6 years in length, generally two years pre-clinical followed by 3-4 practicing in the hospital. As for the PhD, Europe and the US have different expectations. I encourage you to check out this concise comparison from a different post. Essentially.. time to get a PhD is often fixed in Europe, while more open ended here in the US. But, as is emphasized above, training should be about learning the key skills necessary to succeed in academia, which is your stated objective.
In regard to which to obtain first.. I would argue for a PhD followed by medical training. Clinical skills are easily forgotten. I recommend once you've done medical training, it's best to start your clinical/research practice. This is especially important in any country with regular maintenance of licensure exams. This would be much harder if you primarily did your PhD rather than practice medicine in the intervening years.
The truly best order though is probably what is done in MD/PhD programs in the US. It is widely considered optimal to observe the following order (US medical system): 2 years didactic training (medical school), entire PhD (3-5 years), second two years of clinical training (medical school).
The reasoning behind this order is that the first two years of medical school are essentially pathology and basic science classes that will give you a broad introduction to how a body works at a gross and microscopic level. This will give you a biomedical background that no PhD student gets. You also won't use 99% of what you learn in the lab... but in principle, you might draw connections outside your own field that others would have no background to make.
PhD training is much more focused on a particular field, with the emphasis being depth rather than breadth. In your PhD years, you will master a remote niche of science, hopefully while learning how to be a good scientist, how to write, and how to obtain funding for your ideas.
Empowered by this, you then return to the clinic, where you realize most everything we do in medicine is empirical! Ideally going through the clinic you think about all the biomedical questions for which we have no answer. After graduating, you continue on in residency training. In the US, there are research-oriented residency programs that cut out a year or two of training in place of pseudo-postdoctoral research fellowships.
The length at most US MD/PhD programs is 8 to 9 years, which is definitely faster than obtaining an MD and PhD separately in the United States. The main reason is that the cross-training allows some MD courses to count towards the PhD, and because lab rotations are done in the summers before the first MD year, and between the first and second, when normal MD students are free to do what they like.


text:
Is the knowledge gained from a masters conversion course suitable for pursuing a PhD?
I am looking for advice on applying for a Phd in Software Engineering/ Human-Computer Interaction. I am currently working as a software developer and interested in pursuing an academic career in Computing at university level. I have recently completed a Masters degree in Computing with a Pass last year, however I have a 2:1 undergraduate degree in Graphic Design.
I feel that the subject knowledge I have only gained on my Masters may be less adequate compared to a 3 year undergraduate degree to pursue a Phd. Would my current knowledge and experience be suitable to apply for a Phd in Computing or would it be beneficial to undertake another/ specific course before applying?

I am in Psychology and not CS, but what we find is that students with a three year BSc are rarely competitive for a funded PhD and most must do a MSc course first in order to be competitive. We ran a MSc conversion course last year for the first time. These students faired better than undergrads, but not as well as the students on our straight MSc course. A number have continued on to the regular MSc course with the hopes of getting a funded PhD the next year. I think you would probably need a distinction on a conversion course in order to be really competitive for a PhD. That said, you can always apply and see what happens. Some places might offer you a 1+3 type program.

Hi, thanks for the reply. If I was to apply for Phd funding, would my proposal be taken into consideration over the grades I've gained?

@ThisName it is never that simple. Very few applicants are perfect across the board, so yes, a great proposal can offset average grades.


text:
How to deal with non-reproducible research?
For context, I am a PhD student in bioinformatics, working partly in development of new statistical models and partly in applying models to data.
I recently came across a paper which describes an interesting approach to clustering data. This method would have direct use for data I was working with at the time. The model itself was also interesting, and I am interested in using ideas from their paper to solve similar problems in my field.
I tried to use their published modelling software to analyse my data. It crashed my R session. For context, errors in R code rarely cause the session itself to crash; usually they result in an error message, which one may easily find the source of.
Unsure of whether this was my mistake (due to a coding error or data misspecification), I retrieved the data from their publication and attempted to run the code which they state produces the outputs in their paper. This lead to the same issue. I flagged this issue on the software repository, and another user mentioned having the same issue. I have replicated the issue in multiple independent environments using different software versions. I have also informed them that I have narrowed the error down to one or more lines of code, though I cannot exactly explain why it occurs (it would be too time-consuming to debug as I am not familiar with their code).
The authors initially did not respond to the issues raised on the repository, and only did so after I emailed the corresponding authors several weeks later. They have only stated that the software works on their system and suggested that I try different software versions, which I have now done with no change in outcome.
My initial goal was to ensure the issue was reproducible, and to raise it to the authors' attention. If the issue remains unresolved, and the authors largely absent if not uncooperative, how should one deal with this? I do not feel that this amounts to research misconduct, however I also feel unable to trust the results in their paper, given that the code which should replicate their results does not function in any respect.

Is the code a major part of their paper, or is it just a nice extra and the paper without published code (i.e. the ideas and results) on its own is already good? Depending on the answer to that question, I would let it slide or consider further steps.

Their paper describes the model in mathematical terms, discusses its implementation, and applies it to simulations and to real data. Based on the results of the application, they describe the model's utility, strengths/weaknesses, etc. The code is both their implementation of the model, and their application of it to simulated/real data. Thus I would say it is a very substantial part of the paper, and it would not be easily publishable without it.

Is their code a package on CRAN and does their help page have examples? If so, it means that CRAN at least has tested their examples. Do they work on your system?

How old is the paper (submission date in case that's much earlier than the publication)?

Their code is a package on Github, it's not submitted on CRAN, and they have no unit tests or continuous integration. The only example code I tried to run is the one which I described in my question. As I said I've tried in multiple environments (uni cluster, my desktop, Travis CI) with different software versions.

Received August 2018,
Accepted March 2019,
Published April 2019.
Last substantive commit (other than updating README) was December 2018.

It is possible that the libraries used have undiscovered platform dependent differences that result in such behavior (crashing) when run on a different platform. Such errors have just recently been discovered in Python libraries, for example.

They mentioned using Ubuntu and MacOS; I have tried using multiple Linux distros and my colleague tried using MacOS. I've not checked on Windows.

As an R package author myself I can only say that you did the best you could. I'm grateful if users flag issues like this to me, and I do my best to correct errors in my code (which do happen) responding to such requests.
I'm not sure how insistent you were with the authors; they may have said "try a different version" to fob you off, but may still react if you tell them "this-and-that doesn't work either". It is easy to get lost in changing versions of dependent packages etc., so occasionally an analysis initially gives a certain result and then something like an update of a required external package happens that breaks it. However I'd normally expect the authors to collaborate getting at the bottom of the issue.
Assuming that the authors remain uncollaborative you are right to not trust their results and not use their method. To what extent you want to call them out is up to you really. Maybe their results were fine originally and they just can't find the time to investigate the present error. Who knows? But surely if others discuss the package feel free to share your experience. There's too much stuff out there that doesn't work! I'm sure this is an everyday story, unfortunately.

Thanks. Re authors, I've repeatedly pinged them to say that their suggestions don't work. My last interaction was to supply them with a Singularity container to reproduce the error and I've not heard anything since. I know that changing software versions can cause errors (don't we all!) but as their package has very few dependencies, and most of them are fairly stable, I am very sceptical.

R crashing

errors in R code rarely cause the session itself to crash; usually they result in an error message, which one may easily find the source of

yes. There are a few situations where session crashes are more probable:

with compiled code and
libraries installed on the system (as opposed to R packages) which are incompatible across versions/OS boundaries
particularly libraries that are "close" to the OS (I've had trouble in the past with interactive graphics across OS boundaries Linux vs. MacOS vs. Windows)

Thus, if the lines in question can (easily) be replaced by equivalent (though maybe slower or more memory conuming) R code, the crash may be avoided and the scientific merits of the model may be evaluated.
We may have an example here of the famous "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Amount of cooperation to be expected?
As author and maintainer of scientific/academic software packages I certainly appreciate bug reports etc. I even more appreciate bug fixes, btw.
However, I also have only limited resources available to maintain such software, and the longer back the publication was, typically the less resources (e.g. new employer is not willing for their staff to maintain projects at former universities) are standing agaist increased maintenance requirements. (Probably less of a problem here as the paper is quite recent compared to some code that was developed years and years back)
Please also have a look at Why do many talented scientists write horrible software?
The authors may be seeing the publication of the code as them being extremely nice in giving the public not only the abstract description of the model but even an example of an implementation.
In fact, they may even have had an uphill fight to get permission to publish their code under an open license (I've been in the situation of not being permitted to do this by an academic research institution.)
Of course it would be much nicer if they had written more rugged code in the first place or would now help you debug. But you don't have any kind of hard right to their time.
I'm chemist and we sometimes have lab procedures that are difficult to describe in such detail that another lab with somewhat different conditions is [easily] able to reproduce them. Thus, people visit other labs to learn their techniques - this means a whole lot of effort for both sides and IMHO that needs to be appreciated. Similarly, I appreciate if a package maintainer does put in the time to deal with my bug report. And in consequence, I try to make it as easy as possible for them.
There may be a mismatch in software development ability/possibilities here: guessing from the crashes that their code isn't at the highest level of robustness and that you didn't find them using continuous integration etc. vs. you providing them with a Singularity container: they may not know how to use that or may not have the possibility to use it or may not be willing to put in the time to get that particular virtual machine up and running.
I may add that in many places (including universities and research institutes) there is in addition daunting burocracy to get the IT department to install further software on their machines (and they are the only ones with installation rights). I teach for the carpentries and it is not unusual to find course participants do not have the necessary software for this reason - even if they are officially sent to the course.
You may get further if you ask them whether they do have the ressources to resolve the issue with your help and how you can help resolving the issue.

Misconduct?

I do not feel that this amounts to research misconduct

No, it isn't misconduct - it's just that the situation could be nicer.
It would be academic misconduct if the code at the time of writing and submitting their publication on the authors' machines had not produced the results described (incl. crashing and not producing any results).
In contrast,

writing code that is not portable or
fragile in the sense that it is quite likely to break when its surroundings (OS, interpreter, dependencies) evolve and
abandonware

are not scientific misconduct even if it is not "best programming practice".
Trust in their results?
That's a difficult one.

On the one hand, with the possible exception of computer science, the scientific ability of the authors may be quite uncorrelated to their software development abilities (see linked answers above)
On the other hand, if their software doesn't calculate what they think (claim) it does, then also the scientific content may be compromised.

For the case in question:

I tend to think that crashes (or stopping with an error message) are often relatively harmless in terms of scientific integrity of the paper. Short of blatant misconduct (claiming results that weren't obtained) this points to the code not being robust/maintained in an evolving environment (or data/formatting subteties) and not necessarily an incorrect implementation on their system.
I'd be more concerned about the lack of unit tests confirming the results of calculations that actually run through: statistics offers lots of possibilities to have logical error which lead to wrong but often even plausible numbers. That's what is scary to me...

What to do

Be extremely nice to them.
In many fields, it is not (yet) standard to publish code at all. They did you a favor in giving you an implementation that presumably works on their machine. In fact, as long as it takes you less time to fix & test their package than to write & test your own implementation of their paper, you have a net gain!
I don't want to insinuate that you are not nice to them.
However, my experience of some 10 years as (more or less active according to the ressources described above) maintainer of an R package is that the majority of help requests is answered with RTFM and many bug reports do not provide a minimal working example that I can reproduce and there are a few insistent and obnoxious help requests that suck up your time like a black hole because they try to offload the time they should put into learning R onto you package maintainer. While I try hard to treat all requests in a professional, friendly and timely manner, I also sometimes fail in that (most often fail is: timely). (And I have to say that those bad experiences are offset by also receiving extremely well written issue reports, sometimes with immediately usable pull requests and finding online contributors whom I'd otherwise never have known and even occasional "thank you for this package" emails. But there's a whole lot of truth to bad interactions producing far more impression than good interactions.)
You may just have had the bad luck to happen to be the one after a couple of toxic requests and/or may have inadvertendly triggered such an alarm with the authors.
Again while that is not the ideal interaction, you best bet to get the issue resolved is to be so supernice as to convince the authors that not all interactions on the internet are bad... Gives you good karma, too.
Encourage collaboration and make it easy for them: do put in the time to dig into those lines for debugging. Or write an R workaround and ask them to be so kind as to review your suggested changes.
In order to get the code up and running, ask them whether they can provide you a sessionInfo () of their system and the versions of the relevant underlying libraries. The logical step after you trying several configurations that didn't work is to try and get a reproduction of "their" system to work.
Of course, it is completely fine if you decide to stop sinking time into a not-so-well designed package and either

write your own implementation of the model described in their paper, or even
completely abandon that model if you distrust the science behind it.

"They did you a favor in giving you an implementation that presumably works on their machine." I don't think that is the case at all. I think that papers based primarily around the application of software are essentially useless without an available copy of that software. Thankfully bioinformatics is a field which largely recognises that.
Re "However, my experience of some 10 years[...]": I have made very clear (to you and to them) that I am running the code from their paper.

@aocall: In terms of interpersonal skills and solving the issue = debugging, I think it may still be good to treat them as doing you a favor. And yes, the paper being a bioinformatics paper indeed does raise expectations in that respect, also for me. However, from your post while you say that you are bioinformatician it was not clear to me that the paper was in bioinformatics as well. (I frequently deal with statistical methods papers from other fields than mine)

I don't think there is any point in pretending that pointing out a fatal error is asking for a favour. Whether they fix it or not is immaterial to me at this point. My concern is primarily that re: published results they have said "Meh, works for me".

No pointing out that their code is crashing on your setup is not related to any favor of the authors - that's you being nice to them. So is narrowing down the issue to a couple of lines. Similarly, would you follow through with the debugging to the actual fault would be even nicer. It's asking their help to debug a crash that they cannot easily reproduce that is asking a favor IMHO. But of course, you're welcome to disagree.

And, of course @Lewian's suspicion that they may have tried to fob you off is a possibility as well (which I did not include in my answer as it is already in Lewian's). Still, Murphy's razor makes me assume for now that they do not have bad intentions (misconduct, fob off) when "smaller/dumber" explanations (it does and did work on their system, they think they did you a favor and that you were not sufficiently polite to make it a pleasure for them to spend their time on resolving what they think is your issue) are sufficient to explain their behaviour.

Unfortunately this situation is very common. As cbeleites says, a crash is much less likely to derail the validity of results as we are talking about "runs" or "doesn't run". While it is true that most bioinformatics papers do require code to be available, I can tell you as a reviewer of such papers, its rare that things "just work" or install smoothly. Most authors mean well, but as has been point out, once we are published our employers give us 0 time to maintain thing, and bit rot is a real thing.

I do, of course, disagree. I think thoroughness is a reasonable expectation in order to address issues, niceness much less so.

@aocall if people learn that niceness is not a reasonable expectation when communicating with you then you can expect many more unanswered emails

It was implicit when speaking about "issues" that I meant it in the sense of software bugs, though I take the point.

fwiw, I found a working commit in their git repo from last year. Their results also don't seem to replicate :D


text:
Is it okay to repeat core findings of a cited work in detail?
Excuse me for keeping things abstract, I do not want to include more details than necessary.
I'm working on an internship. The internship goal is applying known (published) information and evaluating it in practice. I will conclude the internship by writing a report.
I want to include as much information as necessary in my report for it to be as comprehensive as possible for the reader. This allows the reader to decide if they can skip ahead (instead of me). I do not want to leave details out that may be critical for the readers understanding, even though they seem almost trivial to me, as that makes the report harder to read.
That said, my question:
Is it good form to repeat the core content of the original work in my report, or should I keep it as brief as possible? Is there an accepted middle-ground, or is it not that important as I think?
Of course I will not literally copy-paste content. I will cite the original work and explain exactly what my contribution is(n't), and refer to the original publication.
My fear is that it seems indecent to "copy" findings that someone spend a lot of effort on.

When you say "core content" I'm assuming you mean the conclusions and, perhaps, something of the methodology. The "findings" of the work.
If you properly cite the other work, you aren't copying it. You can quote it or paraphrase it accurately, so long as it is cited. But your basic inclination to be complete in this case seems correct. This is especially true if you need to interpret (and justify the interpretation) of the other work(s) in any way. If your readers need to make their own interpretations, things might be more confusing to them as well as being painful to have to find and read the other papers.
I'm assuming, of course, that a reader of your work won't need to actually completely digest the works on which you base  yours.

It is a matter of degree, @JochemKuijpers. I can't make that judgement, of course.

I want to include as much information as necessary in my report for it to be as comprehensive as possible for the reader

That is what you want. Is it what the organization where you're interning at wants to receive?

This allows the reader to decide if they can skip ahead (instead of me).

Well, you could instead perhaps attach a summary as an appendix instead.

Of course I will not literally copy-paste content.

Why not? Maybe it makes sense to attach a few pages as an appendix. After all, we're not talking about a scientific publication here but some internal report. Of course, there may be copyright issues to consider.

Is it good form to repeat the core content of the original work in my report, or should I keep it as brief as possible? Is there an accepted middle-ground, or is it not that important as I think?

This is much too dependent on the specific context: What kind of report you're writing; the recipients' expectations (see what I wrote above); the length of that content relevant to the length of your own work; the question of whether the original content can be summarized, or whether it's already a summary etc. Personally I would be averse to quoting "too much". I'm not aware of some formalized rule for a middle ground.

If copying directly to an appendix is an option, I might as well add the original publication, so sadly that would not have been a solution. In the end I included all the relevant information in a properly structured document (PDF with chapter/section page links), so it is easily navigatable. I think I made the right decision, but as @Buffy correctly pointed out; the choice is very much dependent on the specific circumstances.