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Asking for data as a student - ease the pain
I'm a bioinformatics bachelor graduate. The group I'm currently working for does not produce its own data. So I often have to search the literature for available data sets. Luckily, tons of interesting data is now freely accessible over the web - which is really great.
However, sometimes data is mentioned in the paper, but not published or the download links do not work anymore.
I noticed that asking other groups for data can be really painful. I usually do not get a reply on my first email to the corresponding author. It does not seem to matter how many details I provide in that email about whom I am working for, what I am intending to do with their data, etc. Putting my supervisor in CC does not seem to help either.
The solution is very simple: After a week or so I ask my supervisor to forward my mail to the authors. The next day I usually have a very polite email with the data attached in my mailbox.
This is annoying in many ways: Firstly, I am waiting quite some time for the data. Moreover, I have to ask my supervisor to write emails for me, which is wasting both his and my time.
I'm quite surprised that some (many?) researchers apparently tend to ignore requests from students.
I'm wondering if this is a common problem and I'm looking for advice about how I can improve my emails to increase the chances of getting a reply.

I'm quite surprised that some (many?) researchers apparently tend to ignore requests from students. — Why are you surprised by this?

@cel Asking for anything that people are not legally required to do sometimes needs social or political power. You have found a way to accomplish your goal, so, what is the problem? If you are afraid of your advisor's time, write e-mail for him (or maybe it is not a big deal for your advisor anyway).

@JeffE Do you advocate that it is good that for a given content of an e-mail people should be judged based on their position in hierarchy?

I advocate that it is understandable that people reply to other people they actually know before they reply to random strangers.

@JeffE I can understand your point that people might not want to share data with some random student. But I really don't understand why someone would ignore the request of a student of fixing a broken link to data.

There are similar questions on this site for students requiring source code, such as What action to take when questions regarding a published paper are ignored by its author?. In your case you need data but as you have already seen yourself, sharing data is hardly a volunteer action.
Sharing data is a form of collaboration and collaboration needs equal (or almost equal parties). You benefit from taking the data but how does the other party benefit? You will probably say that the other side will increase his citations but how you guarantee that you will actually get something published if you are just a graduate student at his beginning? When your professor contacts them, two things are guaranteed: a) The confidentiality of the data b) The fair use of the data, including citation. When you contact them, none of these two conditions apply.
Second, many times graduate students just collect data without a clear understanding of what to do with it. It is easier to send a dozen emails to request all sorts of data than actually getting job done on the ones you have. You said it yourself:

...tons of interesting data is now freely accessible over the web

So, why do you need extra data, when there are already many available datasets for you to use? Have you already published something with the freely available data? Have you even compiled a similar dataset? Would you actually share your dataset if you had one? If the answer to most of these questions is NO, then these are the things you must focus on and not waiting to get another dataset for the sake of it.
Also since collaboration requires equal partnership, you will see that these things get easier when you have established yourself, even as a junior researcher. If you have some good publications (using the freely available datasets or the ones that your professor got for you), then when you request additional data (on a polite email introducing yourself and leading to your homepage and google scholar profile), you will not get ignored, because the dataset holder will know two things: a) That you know your craft and his dataset will be used in a fair way (citation included) b) That you may collaborate in the future, so saying NO to you is not beneficial to him. Until then, I do not think there is anything much you can do than using your professor. But since this has already happened more than once (and there are many freely available datasets), I doubt you really need all these datasets you are collecting.

Hi Alexandros,
Thanks for your answer. Please don't think of our work as randomly mining datasets for gems and publishing the results. We are trying to answer very specific questions and therefore are looking for  datasets from various experiments that we can use for validation and hypothesis testing.
It's not like we can just use any dataset, but we're searching the literature for specific data sets for each problem we have. Of course not every dataset will suit. Often you see during the analysis that some question just cannot be answered with the data you have, or your hypothesis is wrong.

From the publication alone it's almost impossible to jugde how useful this data might be. People do not tend to mention limitations or biases in their papers.
I see your point about fair data use. But I don't understand why that would make someone think about stop sharing the data. For me asking for data is not about collaboration, but about understanding and testing the hypotheses they made in their paper. And ideally, I should have access to all data that is used in some figure to see if their claims are right.

@cel "...I should have access to all data that is used in some figure to see if their claims are right". No, this is wrong. Their work has already passed peer-review. You are not their reviewer, nor do they have to prove anything specifically to you.

But in my opinion that's not what science is supposed to be. Things are not right just because you found some other scientist who believes you. If you published your hypothesis you should expect that the scientific community would like to check your results as well.
But that's more philosophically than helping in this argument, I guess.

@Alexandros If the data is from already published papers, then asking for it is not collaboration (similarly as citing others is not collaboration).

@PiotrMigdal You can cite someone without his help. Giving you his data requires effort. Also without his data you might not have a paper. Even if he implicitly agrees to not include him as a co-author he still deserves a mention in the acknowledgements section. As such, this is still some form of collaboration.

Collecting the data in the first place was probably neither free or easy. A good scientific paper should describe the experiment so well, that believing the hypothesis by reading the paper is possible. If you would like to have further evidence, you should do a replication study and collect new data yourself. This is much better for science than analysing the same dataset twice.

@Alexandros If there is a paper based on this data, it should had been already be made public. And we need to insist on it. ("Also without his data you might not have a paper" -> "Without a theorem you have no paper.") If it is new data, I agree wholeheartedly. (And in any case acknowledgement is deserved.)

@mmh No. Without dataset it is not possible to test if the method was correct. Yes, it is time consuming and expensive, as any other part of research. I can say as well that "I have a proof that X, but I am not sharing details, because it is long, technical and I want to write a few more papers on it." It is not bad science. It is not even science.

I think I was not clear enough. When publishing the proof of X, you share the details about the data to the degree that replication of the whole experiment is possible. For example, say I study the Alzheimer's disease. I scan 100 people with MRI. Cost is ~50000€. When I publish the first paper, I give a sufficient description of the data. I don't give away the original dataset, because I can't afford giving away 50000€ for the first one who asks. I rather explore the dataset further myself. If you think my methods are bad, you should do a replication study, OR write a letter to the editor.

@mmh I have no tools to check whether you methods are bad. I am just saying that studies that were not made as much reproducible don't push science forward (as far as they could). Sadly, I am aware that the current academic system rewarding only papers is suboptimal. At least, if there is embargo period to write a few papers, do you intend to publish (i.e. make public) the data one day (I guess you don't need to pay for doing so).

You could read the methods section from my paper. The costs for publishing the data would be: 1) Because it is possible to recognize and individual from an MRI, I would need to anonymize the images and the associated metadata, 2) I would need to ask permission from an ethical committee, 3) I would need a significant amount of disk space for hosting the data. I'd say the overall cost is > 1k€. Anyway, I do agree with you that there would be benefits from open data. However, it does not come for free.

And another argument for science becoming more open source. @Alexandros: Your argument against sharing data supposes there is no reproducibility crisis in science.


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Using a software screenshot in a paper
When writing a paper which, as an aside, talks about the design of a user interface on a particular piece of software, can one insert a (correctly labeled and referenced) screenshot of the software to help readers understand - or does that cause copyright issues?
For example, I wouldn't use a photo unless I held the copyright, or a diagram - but I'm unsure of the legal position of a screenshot...

If you're displaying the screenshot as part of a paper on user interface, the use of the screenshot will almost certainly fall under "fair use."  Make sure you cite the software properly, and you should be all set.

If there are restrictions, you can always ask for permission to include the screenshot in your paper!

To add to @aeismail's comment: And people who develop software are usually very happy when someone reuses their work and give them appropriate citations.

The answer, like many copyright questions, is complicated.
First, the images of the software interface is almost certainly copyrighted. As a result, the exclusive rights to reproduce images of the applicatoin lie with the copyright holder (i.e., the creator of the software.
However, as another answer has suggested, the use of a single screenshot of an application should almost certainly qualify as Fair Use under US copyright law or something similar and analogous under other systems. In other words, it's a small and relative inconsequential reproduction that you can do without having to ask for permission.
However, fair use is notoriously tricky and subjective. there is a multi-prong balancing test at the heart of fair use that is complicated and that makes it hard to know for sure whether a use if fair or not. As a result, many journals are risk averse and will systematically block many types of "probably fair" uses. I've had difficult conversations with production staff members and editors about the use of software screenshots before.
I would say go ahead and try to have the conversation with your journal editor or production staff. The worst thing they can do is ask you to take it out.   This, of course, is what you would do preemptively now if you choose not to include it in the first place.

Are there harder criteria of what accounts for fair use? For example, when taking a screenshot of an image you created in an image editor or of a graph of a function whose formula you gave to a function plotter, in either case the possibility to share the visual output is essential for the usefulness of the software; and while the program was essential for the output, other programs would have achieved the exact same output (think of plotting a constant function) given your input, which thus is the essential contribution here.

Definitely, but one major issue will be resolution. A screen shot will typically yield a very low resoluton image which for most journals will be too low (recommendations are ypically 300 dpi in the final published figure size, which is usually impossible to achieve with screenshots. I would therefore recommend to make use of any possibility to zoom the window and then make a screen shot of the window as large as possible on the screen. If you are designing your user interface as you state in the question you could consider making a mock-up of the interface that is identical in every respect but which is based on higher resolution graphics, vectorized or bitmap based. Since you have access to all the original graphics elemnts this should not be difficult.

I disagree.  Screenshots should be printed at normal screen resolution, so that they look as much as possible like the screen.

I've found that including screenshots in papers at normal screen resolution works fine in a two-column format, simply because a figure in that format is pretty small to begin with, and because screen resolutions are decent these days.  The one caveat I have is that text can be unreadable unless the program has the ability to increase the font size.

As a former professional printer, I highly recommend printing out that page with screenshot from your doc or PDF on a regular printer and see how it looks. On an iMac with a 1920x1080 desktop resolution, the 300dpi equivalent of a full screenshot is a crisp 6.4 x 3.6 inch image. If one has access to Photoshop this is achieved by Image->Image Size, untick "Resample Image", then set resolution to 300. The resulting dimensions is the non-resampled image size at press-quality resolution.

Generally yes, you're allowed to use screenshots that you create yourself.
Depending on the publisher, they might ask for copyright approvals on the screenshots.
I believe that, as long as you yourself created the screenshot, you're the owner of it (just as if you take a photograph of something, you hold the copyright, not the creator of whatever you're photographing), but this is still, I believe, a legal grey area.
As mentioned, be sure that you provide a proper citation to the software.

This answer is not generally correct: Depending on the jurisdiction, the publishing of photos of copyrighted works of art, for example, can be highly problematic for the photographer.

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Why are oral tests and exams not common in American educational systems?
My family originates from Russia but I only have experience with American academia. My parents constantly describe oral exams whereupon a student is required to choose one of many cards that have a certain amount of questions on them and then after some time preparing be able to answer the question verbally to the professor, who can then ask follow up questions.
In my mind, this offers numerous benefits; it's much harder to cheat this system as you have to verbalise your answer so copying is not an option, verbalisation is shown to help with memory's retention, because you don't know what topic the teacher/professor will follow up with you have to more deeply to impress the professor, and many more.
The drawbacks seem limited to me; more people standing around waiting to do the exam isn't great, nor is the fact that this will be a bit more subjective to the teacher/professor.
Is there some specific reason as to why this isn't done?

Note orals exams are common in grad school in the US.

@DanielHatton: what does the literature say about validity and reliability of written (text-type and multiple choice) exams?

An oral exam takes me about 30 minutes (including preparation and discussion afterwards). I have about 110 students in my class. Doing an oral exam for that class would take me about 55 hours. This is not the only class I teach. I teach about 5 classes per semester. In order to avoid some of the subjectivity my department requires that an additional staff member is present. So implementing this for my courses would take about 55*5*2=550 person hours. That is just not practical (not to mention that my colleagues won't thank me for the additional work I give them as they have to sit in for these exams).
I know how long an oral exam takes because I do use it sometimes, but for practical reasons I can only do that for a small number of courses and I have to justify why this is necessary to my colleagues.

For comparison, how long does it take you to grade a short answer exam generally? I feel like it would take a similar amount of time as administering an oral exam which would then be graded. Also, how do you choose when you do an oral exam versus a written one?

If I'm reasonably efficient about it, a 2 hour written short answer exam takes me about 5 minutes per student to grade.  Even that would be impractical if I had 500 students.

Coming from a Russian academic system, I've seen oral exams organized  for a cohort of 100 students. It required around 10 instructors, so that each instructor had to listen to 10 students, which is doable in 5 hours. A great deal of subjectivity was inherent to those exams, alas.

@Mettle Alexander Woo's assessment sounds about right. For most answers you can quickly see whether they are right or wrong without reading the entire answer. This may be dissapointing to students that all those carefully crafted sentences aren't read, but there is a limit to what we can do. Another option is to use multiple choice. Those can be scanned automatically, so that is just a matter of bringing the stack of answers to the appropriate department and wait till they email the results. Designing a good mulitple choice exam is however a lot of work, so that only works for large classes.

@svavil I've seen oral exams organized for a cohort of 100 students. It required around 10 instructors... which is doable in 5 hours — In my department, each of those 10 instructors would be teaching their own cohort of 100-400 students, so doing what you describe fairly would require 100-200 hours, or roughly a continuous week without sleep.

@JeffE In fact, I have classes ranging from 50 to 120 students and I usually dedicate a couple of weeks to oral exams (8 to 20 students per day, depending on the class: for some classes I do a 20 min oral exam, for others up to 45 min - 1 hour).

As others have pointed out, oral exams take a lot of time.
I'm not familiar with the US education system, but I'm in a country where, from the elementary school to the university, verbal tests and oral exams are quite common, and I've administered oral exams for about 20 years (with a duration from 20 min to 1 hour, depending on the class). I'll thus try to outline what factors, apart from tradition, allow to administer oral exams in a manageable way.
The most significant factor is probably the structure of courses and exams. In my country, there are usually several exam sessions in a year and students can take an exam in any one of those sessions. And, frequently, for very small courses, professors allow students to take the exam whenever they wish along the year. This means that if you have a course of, say, 100 students, 50 will probably take the exam at the first session, 30 at the second and 10-15 at the third session and the rest along the year (of course, at each session there's also a bit of backlog).
Second, for many courses, there are both a written and oral tests. Those who don't pass the written test are not admitted to the oral test and fail the exam. This means that of 50 students that try the exam at the first session, maybe only 20-40 pass the exam (in the past, just 10 would not have been uncommon), and this further limits the number of oral exams that you have to deliver each session.
Third, there is a certain freedom on how to administer the exams. Some professors will thus make the oral test optional: students who decide to not take the oral test cannot get a top grade (e.g. they can get a B, or equivalent, at most). And, usually, it is remarked that the oral exam can also worsen the grade. This, again, allows to further reduce the number of oral exams (in my experience, only about 10% of the students try the oral exam if it's optional).
In addition to the above points, there is also the acceptance of the stress of the oral exam and the subjectivity, or perceived fairness, of the evaluation (and a few comments here show that this is a controversial point, probably worth of a different question).

Very interesting. Based on your comment to another answer, another important factor seems to be that you're asking questions of varying difficulty, in order to challenge the students and understand how far they can go. Thus, it seems like oral exams can give professors a better idea of students' abilities at the top end, especially if written tests are more aimed at distinguishing passing from failing or if many students score near 100%.

The schedule is a big difference, then. In the US system, a course typically lasts one semester (15 weeks), and final exams occur right after the end of the semester, usually all within 1-2 weeks.  A permanent course grade must be assigned very shortly after that, so there is no way for a student to take the exam at a later date.  And there aren't large blocks of unscheduled time during the final exam period, so it would be impractical to schedule all oral exams in that short period even if it weren't an excessive amount of work.

How can students who take the exam 1/3 of the way through the class be adequately graded for the content that they haven't covered?  Or is it only over the first third of the material?  Do the students who take it at the final session get tested on the whole of the material or only the final third (to make a comparable breadth)?

@guifa I don't understand your question: the exam is taken at the end of the class, not 1/3 of the way. There are no intermediate terms. And students get tested on the whole of the material.

You said multiple exam sessions... how far apart are these sessions?  To me, the general understanding of exam session is a period of only a few hours, so I assumed you meant a week in January, a week in March, a week in June, especially as you said some professors allow the exam to be taken at any point in the year.

@guifa There are several exam sessions in which the students can take the whole exam, not just a part of it. And if they fail in one session, they can retake the exam in any later session. If one has many students, an exam session can last for a couple of weeks. In my university we have a total of four exam sessions along the year: two exam sessions at the end of the classes, separated by two-three weeks, one in September and one in February.

@MassimoOrtolano What happens if one course requires another course as a prerequisite, but the student hasn't yet taken the exam because they scheduled in February?  If they go ahead and take the next course, if they fail do they need to wait until the next year to retake?

@guifa  Prerequisites are checked only for attendance, so you can take the exams in whatever order you wish. Of course, if you take them in the wrong order, you'll probably have a higher chance of failing.

I am going to speak solely from personal experience as a student in Russia going through 5 oral exams right now. In my university, the lecturer is usually just one of about 10 professors from the department in the lecture hall where we take the exam. These people most of the time have drastically different views on how you should explain one concept or another and what level of understanding deserves an A. This brings me to my main point - grades which are given during such an oral exam simply are not equal to the knowledge of a particular student. I have many friends who didn't deserve their grades and many who deserved much better. This, unfortunately, means that your luck, charisma, and sometimes your looks/gender determine your GPA and consecutively your further education.

Another aspect not mentioned (I am not sure if this is made concrete somewhere) is that oral exams do put students on the spot (they are in now way anonymous). This opens up the universities of being sued, if a student feels uncomfortable.
Even worse, a student could accuse the professor of some bad behavior in this situation, as a retaliation of a poor grade.
Grading a written exam can be done together with the TAs, and it is easy to get a second opinion, and spread the grading over several people, thus reducing the grounds for a student accusing a teacher for treating them unfairly.

I actually did that once, as a TA in basic computer science for CS majors. 90ish students, 10-15mins each group of 3 students, it took me the best part of two weeks, including days from 7am to 9pm.
I was only able to do it because I had a lot of "free" time as a TA (MS student, but I didn't have any courses of my own and my work was ahead of schedule).

NEVER AGAIN

Why? Because it takes an insane amount of man-hours (even if you do in parallel) and it doesn't inform you of anything you don't know already. After a while, it is fairly easy to spot the good students, the lazy but good, and the bad students. In that specific course, the marks for that oral exam were remarkably similar to the ones of a regular written exam I applied two months later.
Unless you want to see how the student behaves when "put on the spot", it serves no purpose.

I don't think I understand the setup you had. The numbers you give should only have resulted in 7.5 active hours of exams, so it is not clear what took all the time.

The scheduling was not necessarily optimal (unused gaps between groups), sometimes it took more time per student, etc. I might have misremembered some parts, I'm sure of the number of students (default 2 groups of 45) and the weeks (the events are still on my calendar) but it was in 2007...

Cheating can be a problem with oral exams just as much as with a written exam. The issue is foreknowledge of the questions, rather than the ability to verbalize the answers. So you’d be dependent on having a large stack of questions, which leads to a question of fairness. If you randomly select questions to answer, how are you sure that students across the class are getting roughly equal difficulty in the questions they’re supposed to answer. All of this has to go into the preparation time for the exam.
And none of this deals with the enormous time constraints of administering the exam to a large number of students in a class. While I have done such exams when I had 15 or 20 students in a co-taught class, I would never even consider doing it for a lecture course of 50 or more students.

It's 20 years that I routinely administer oral exams (actually, first a written exam and then the oral part, with classes of up to 100 students), and I have to disagree with this answer. First, you really don't need a large pool of questions because there are concepts that are difficult to master and explain even if you know already the question. Second, you really don't want to be fair in oral exams, that is, you want to challenge more, with the most difficult questions, those who can aim to top grades. Of course, in the assessment, you will take into account the difficulty of the question.

you really don't want to be fair in oral exams — What?! This strikes me as blatantly unethical.  Yes, I really do want to be fair in exams, no matter how they're given.

@JeffE I beg to differ in the interpretation of fair: for me, fair means that to higher grades you get more difficult challenges, not that everybody gets the same type of questions. Otherwise, you have grade inflation.

@JeffE This seems to be a cultural difference between the US and Europe, in my limited experience. In the US it would be outrageous to ask different students different questions,  but it sounds relatively commonplace in some other countries.

@StellaBiderman: Just to clarify: What Massimo is probably talking about and what I am familiar with is roughly as follows: Each candidate first gets a basic question from the same selection of questions and depending on the answer, they get either get further questions to weed out mistakes in their answer or proceed with a more advanced question. Every candidate is treated the same way, but it is interactive (which is one of the advantages of an oral exam). I have seen failed exams which ended at high-school level, whereas good exams ended at current research – for the same course.

And to further clarify: “Fair” doesn’t mean “identical questions” but “identical protocol for assessment” — everyone has the same opportunity for the same grades, and similar responses to similar questions yield similar outcomes.  I would consider the protocol @Wrzlprmft describes to be completely fair, assuming there’s a neutral protocol for when to shift the difficulty up or down.

@Wrzlprmft I appreciate the further clarification, and stand by the comment that many people in the US would be outraged by this.

@JeffE Wrzlprmft's description is correct, but there's really no "protocol" (whatever you mean by that), as there is no protocol for many things of life: one improvises according to their experience, and sometimes an oral exam can take unexpected directions.

@StellaBiderman Wrzlprmft's description is correct, but in twenty years of teaching I've never heard anyone being outraged by this or complaining about my unfairness.

@StellaBiderman This year for the first time I had a bunch (6-8) of students from the US, for an exchange program. They were 3rd year students in the US and my class is in the 2nd year here. None of them passed the class, which was for them much more difficult than expected, but my impression is that they also had a culture shock about the exam. One day, when two of them came to review the exam papers, we were about to start the oral exams. I then suggested them to listen to a few oral exams, to understand how they wor,k because it would have been useful if they planned to retake the exam.

And when I told them that they could listen because oral exams in Italy are public, that is, anyone — even the layman from the street — can listen to oral exams, they were clearly shocked.

@StellaBiderman When I had to do oral exams in Germany, everybody received the same set of “starting” questions to look over before the exam starts. The issue is what the progression should be to identify how well the student understands what’s going on. But even the oral exams I had in the US didn’t “follow a script” beyond providing the initial topics for the discussion.

@MassimoOrtolano, in some countries public oral exams would violate privacy regulations. What is the situation in Italy these days with regard to the General Data Protection Regulation?

@JW I'm not a lawyer, but it's probably possible to have public oral exams fully compliant with the GDPR. Every university I know of has a data protection officer and documents addressing exams and GDPR, but there doesn't seem to be any specific limitation for oral exams (that I could find, at least). Second, I have a practical attitude: the day in which regulations will make it too difficult to do my job the way I think it's best, then I'll happily stop teaching.

@JW I do not know the Italian system but what I have seen in other European countries is that oral exams are public but the grades are not. Oral exams being public even seems to be a legal requirement in some of these countries.

@JW Typically in Italy the student can require the exam to be private (I do not know if this is a law or just a custom). Basically no one does though - the exam being public is seen as a guarantee for the student that the professor won't be blatantly unfair (there are plenty of witnesses after all). Moreover a lot of university activities are open to the general public (for example, lectures) and there's a general sense that this is how things should be - even grades being private is a relatively recent development.

I'm teaching in the US system and, because of the pandemic, I started using oral online exams for my midterm and final exams.  I find I can get an A/B/C/D/F decision on a grade within about 5 minutes, and a more nuanced grade within 10.  This is approximately the same time as I spend grading traditional written exams (I'm a slow grader).

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What if your reviewer told you need to cite author A and Author A is you?
It is common practice in my field to remove self-citations completely in a manuscript for consideration. Even if you use neutral language like: “Author A said XYZ” (with Author A being myself), it is frowned upon. One of my senior colleagues was telling us she got a review that said she needed to read more works of Author A and cite Author A more and her not mentioning her shows a distinct lack of the literature! (She is Author A.)
This is quite an amusing situation but while it is under revise and resubmit still, she is considering withdrawing it and submitting elsewhere because saying “Hey, I am Author A and I think I know my own work quite well” wouldn’t really cut it, right? How would you respond to this largely negative review without compromising anonymity? Or would you just let the editors know?

Did the paper cite relevant work from A? If so, I would correspond with the editors - they make the final decision, not the reviewer.

Yes, a common problem. One of my postdocs once wrote a paper and, for double-blind review, meticulously elided any ever so slight reference that we could be the authors, but cited ourselves in a subdued way as if we were a 3rd party. The reviewers were furious about  us not giving properly emphatic credit to  us. It's nice to have reviewers so committed on our behalf, but, on the other hand, the paper was rejected. We were not sure whether we should laugh or cry.

This is a legitimate question for the editor, as it is impossible to solve this just between you and the reviewer. For the editor this is one of the "nicer" problems, as there is no one to blame. It is also an easy one to solve: (s)he can just ignore all remarks by the reviewer on this topic. Remember, reviewers only give advise, the editor is the one who decides.

@CaptainEmacs ouch!

This problem seems to be the result of citations becoming a sort of currency.  Originally, they were only there to help the reader, so there was no reason to avoid self-citation.  It still seems counter-productive to do so.

This seems like evidence that it's a bad policy! In my field of computer science it is standard to include third person self-citations in double-blind submissions.

@Thomas Which does not help, see my comment above.

@CaptainEmacs I don't see why third person self-citations would be problematic. Just cite your work like you would anyone else's.

@Thomas Yes, that's what we did. But obviously not emphatically enough :-)

If it's a wide practice in your field to remove self-citations at the submission stage, and a well-known practice, then reviewers should be aware that the conscious omission of author A should be a sign that author A might be an author of the work under consideration. This suggests that the reviewer may not be aware of the convention—perhaps it was written by someone relatively new to your field.
I would just proceed by incorporating the comments, and explaining to the editor why you broke with convention.

This seems really strange, doesn’t it?  Shouldn’t one be expected to self cite in the field they work in?  In any case, if the reviewer requests it, why not break convention?  What field is this?

This might not be @aeismail 's field but in my field (social sciences), several of the top journals make it explicit that self citations must be removed (but can be added later when the reviews come back and if it is good to be published)

You did your part to remove self-citations when you submitted. The reviewer is demanding you address it. This is a catch-22. The only other advice is to ask the editor how to respond to this.

And maybe the reviewer hasn’t submitted to the journal and doesn’t know the policy?


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After PhD, no support from PhD supervisor
I am writing here to get good advice for my career. I completed my PhD in Mathematics last year. I was quite happy after my PhD that I have gained a PhD degree, but I don't have any idea what I could do with this degree. Normally people apply for postdocs after doing PhD to become more independent and gain more exposure to research in their field. However, what can they do if their supervisor does not support them to apply for postdoc positions? What if their supervisor says "you are not an independent researcher, so I don't think you could really sell yourself as an independent researcher?"
I am stuck in my career after having lots of negative feedback from my PhD supervisor, who always says not to apply anywhere, and just stay here (my country) and integrate yourself with your colleagues. How could someone stop you or discourage you to apply anywhere else in the world?
One of the biggest and toughest situations for me is the field I had chosen for doing PhD has no funding all around the world and I can hardly find postdocs in my field. And even if I find an advertisement of a post relevant to my field, my supervisor discourages me from applying by saying that that is not exactly relevant to the field (topic) in which you had done your PhD. It's so weird to me that is it necessary to have the same topic for a postdoc to apply in which a person had his PhD? Can't we slightly change our research topic relevant to the field (same background).
The main problem is to apply for any postdoc we need a strong reference letter from our PhD supervisor. What can people do if they doesn't know what their supervisor writes about them in the reference letter? I spent four years in my PhD and not once did I did realise that my PhD supervisor is unhappy with my work. But now when I am back in my country on completion of my PhD my PhD supervisor has negative thoughts about me that I can't sell myself as an independent researcher, I will need guidance and direction.
And he is probably true, because most of my work in my PhD was done by him. And he never let me be independent throughout my PhD. I don't even know how people find topic of research/problem to work on and how do they find techniques to attach on the problem. I had been given a problem with my supervisor and direction as well. I had done all the coding by myself advised by my supervisor and later analysing results and proving those results was done by him. In the end of my PhD when I was writing my research paper I put his name on it where he said no to me and writing paper solely with my name only.
Currently, I am a lecturer in my country. However, to survive in an academia I have to publish papers and supervise master's students. However, I am not feeling myself independent in research, due to the reason I am applying for some postdoc positions, where I have no support from my PhD supervisor. What should I do at this point? Should I leave academia? Should I go to industry? To join an industry what skills I do need to have? How can I make myself a perfect candidate?
I am really stuck in my career without having any support from my PhD supervisor after PhD. I am looking for some really good suggestions for my career. I shall really be grateful.

For questions on industry, try workplace.SE. For your academic career: why don't you apply for somewhat related postdoc positions and see what happens? You don't have to listen to your advisor anymore. Become independent.

I applied for some postdoc positions but I have a doubt on my supervisor's reference letter who probably not writing good about me. I always got rejection where ever I applied.

I am a lecturer in Pakistan.

This sounds tough, but congratulations on making it through your PhD! To understand exactly what your advisor's judgment means (and what his recommendation is likely to say), it may help to know how others from your program or with your advisor have fared. Does this professor just encourage them to stay as lecturers locally? (Is this how this professor got started?) Or has he encouraged some students to seek postdocs internationally?

His previous PhD student faced a tough time too while doing PhD with him. But the student was clever and he collaborated all his work with his second supervisor. But I came to know all this thing near completion of my PhD where the things was not in my hand and I had to complete my PhD in his supervision.

most of my work in my PhD was done by him — Oh, no. That was a serious mistake, both by you and by your advisor.

To answer the question about career advice:
I think that math is a particular hard field for folk to really find their place in, if pursuing a long-term career: there is less research money than in some other technical disciplines, and since math is a required "core" subject at many colleges and universities, it can make the teaching feel less satisfying to many instructors.
My advice: Go get a job outside of academia where you make money or make or difference. I'm currently a data scientist at healthcare system (I studied PDEs), and there are tons of industries that seriously reward mathematically competent people that can do good work. Many don't even care if you're an "original researcher".
Just as a short, anecdotal list: I have math-oriented, Ph.D. acquaintances at banks evaluating small business loans, in the petroleum industry building geological models, at social media companies doing research, at nonprofits working on high impact projects, in civil service creating policy, at logistics companies at the cutting edge of operations research, at consulting companies doing who knows what... the list goes on. None of them did their Ph.D. in the specific discipline that they're working on now.
Towards making yourself a good candidate: It's hard to give blanket advice, as it really varies based on industry, company, and sometimes group. I suggest that you start applying to jobs that look interesting. Just the act of applying will focus your mind on the sorts of experiences, connections, and skills that you may want to make yourself more attractive as a prospective employee.

If you can't get letters from your ex-supervisor, try to get letters from your collaborators.

Welcome to Academia SE! Your answer may be getting downvoted because it is so short, and while it doesn't address the entire (overly broad, and highly situation-specific) question, your answer suggests a practical strategy.

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


text:
Publishing a creative, important result – does it create any real finance opportunities (jobs, etc.)
I often fantasize that when I will get my work to successful end, then I will have new possibilities open – and that maybe I will even receive scientific job offers. The work is obtaining new important results in computational sciences.
But then I get to the ground, think that giving someone job is rather a necessity for the employer – and not an act of appreciation or even not an act of support. Then, my results are important and useful, so someone may need them. However, the results can be understood, used and further developed by some other scientist. So it will not be necessarily me, who will get the job.
One related example that comes to my mind is Stephen Wolfram, who is independent because he is earning money himself. So he was not appreciated by someone, instead he won his share in software market.

Sadly, there is not a strict correlation between doing good science and being financially successful. It is entirely possible to do "creative, important work" and still not be well rewarded for it. For instance, one could have published these results in an obscure journal that very few people will read. Or, as another example, the researcher might be a poor "salesman," unable to convince readers and fellow scientists of the merit of his work.
In general, you need a combination of both networking and technical skills to forge a successful career as a researcher: the contacts will help you get interviews for jobs; your technical knowledge will get you the job.

The part about convincing readers and fellow scientists reminds me many life situations, where e.g. some people easily influence a group to move to some place (e.g. a cafeteria) and others struggle and struggle and nothing happens.

When I worked for HP (in the storage area network division), much of the published research articles were for things that it still took several years to bring to market. Generally, it was about 5 years between the first papers and the time a product made it to market. Even things used everywhere - SQL - took 9 years to go from research paper (Codd's paper was in 1969) to first commercial product (Relational [now called Oracle] was released in 1978) with several large companies (including IBM) trying to bring a product to market. In software development, academic research runs 5 to 30+ years ahead of in-the-field practices.
As for Wolfram, I don't think he's a good model to emulate, as he fits the model of a crank more than the model I would attribute to a good scientist. Despite that, I bought his book and use his software.
Another example I can think of where creative important results don't translate to success is Long Term Capital Management. Founded by 2 Nobel Prize winners in economics, it was the first massive Wall Street bailout in the 1990s after the Russian financial crisis resulted in Soviet/Russian bonds going belly up. One of the founders was the Scholes in the Black-Scholes model, which is one of the most important equations in finanace.
Discovering something great and/or important takes a different set of skills than bringing that discovery to market.

aeismail's response is on target, and just to extend it a bit more, you will find few researchers who make money directly from their research. All your work is owned by the university and patents you file are owned by the university.
That being said, it is fairly common for a researcher to found his or her own company based on their work. There are numerous examples of this, but just to give two examples from my own experience:

Psychology Software Tools, the company behind E-Prime, a popular psychology paradigm programming language, is owned by Dr. Walter Schneider, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Computational Diagnostics, Inc., a company offering neurological monitoring services, is run by Dr. Robert Sclabassi (recently retired), who has numerous publications in the field of EEG signal processing.

Aside from creating a startup, some professors will consult externally for a fee. Anecdotally, depending on how well-connected the professor is, I know a number of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who did consulting work on the side.
Often, if researchers have business acumen and interest, they will follow one of these two paths.

It should be pointed out that many universities and corporations will engage in profit sharing on patents and other intellectual property.


text:
Literature research: Are IEEE and ACM covered in Scopus?
We performed a systematic literature review using the three databases Scopus, ACM Digital Library, and IEEE Xplore. Comment from one reviewer was that Scopus contains the other two databases, and thus searching ACM and IEEE is redundant. Our results do not indicate that Scopus covers the two databases.
Question: Does Scopus cover the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore databases?
The empirical search results suggest that it is not sufficient to search in Scopus and get all results from ACM and IEEE also in Scopus. However, there are at least two things that could be partially responsible for the empirical results not always helping here: (a) The time lag in updating the indexes (when and how often are the ACM and IEEE databases integrated into the Scopus database?) and the search methodology (in ACM, full text is apparently searched by default (instead of abstract, title and keywords), we got more articles in ACM than in Scopus, but could not attribute this to the search methodology. However, we cannot exclude errors on our part here.
Furthermore, there are systematic literature reviews in well-ranked journals that search all three databases, among others, e.g.:
Johnson, D., Deterding, S., Kuhn, K.-A., Staneva, A., Stoyanov, S., & Hides, L. (2016). Gamification for health and wellbeing: A systematic review of the literature. Internet Interventions, 6, 89–106.
Our search for "official information" found the Scopus Content Coverage Guide 1. Here IEEE is mentioned as indexed, ACM does not appear, but there is a rather large "Other" block of 60%.

Seems fairly easy to test: Did your Scopus searches yield articles in ACM or IEEE journals?

Do you mean to ask if there are journals or conferences indexed in the IEEE and ACM databases but not Scopus? If your results do not indicate so, can't you just point out a few results that can be found directly through IEEE and ACM but not through Scopus?

Thank you for your comments! I added further information to the question for clarification.

When you say IEEE do you mean IEEE Xplore? And by ACM do you mean the ACM Digital Library or the ACM Guide to Computing Literature? Please be precise with the exact name of the database, or else there is no possibility of getting an accurate answer.

Scopus has a complete source title list you can download at the bottom of this page ("Download the Source title list").
If I filter for IEEE the column Publisher imprints grouped to main Publisher, I find 350 results (distinct journals/transactions indexed in Scopus).
The IEEE website, hwoever, speaks of 393 journals (see here, left-side menu). It thus raises the suspicion that not all IEEE journals are indexed in Scopus (probably 43 are missing).

Most likely the newer media are not indexed.
Some examples I found not to be in Scopus' source title list:

IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (since 2020)
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (since 2020)
IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (since 2020)
IEEE Transactions on Signal and Power Integrity (started in 2022)

It is likely that there will be similar patterns with regards to ACM.

In my opinion, it is highly unlikely that Scopus covers everything in IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library. To know precisely, you will need to look for the documentation on each of the three sources (Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library) to find the exact full lists of their coverage and then compare these lists. Given that these are three independent database sources and they are constantly adding (and to a lesser extent, removing) sources independently of each other, I think the chances that the three of them would perfectly overlap are close to zero.
On a side note, just in case you are not aware, Scopus is fundamentally different in nature from IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library. IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library are full-text databases that archive the full texts of most of the articles in their databases. However, Scopus is an abstract database. That means that it does not archive full texts directly. Rather, it only archives abstracts (along with titles and keywords, of course). For full-text access, Scopus links directly to your institution's library with all the databases that your institution has subscribed to. If your institution has full-text access to the article, then Scopus will link to it. But if your institution does not have full-text access to the article, then Scopus cannot provide it, either.
In this way, Scopus is analogous not to the ACM Digital Library (nor to IEEE Xplore) but to the ACM Guide to Computing Literature which works similarly as an abstract database. Since this is also an ACM source, it is most likely that the ACM Guide to Computing Literature fully contains everything in the ACM Digital Library and a lot more. Although it probably does not overlap 100% with IEEE Xplore (because IEEE is independent from ACM), I would guess that it probably overlaps better than Scopus because its research domain is closer. So, if you want to search in just one place, I think the ACM Guide to Computing Literature might be your best source.


text:
Showing figures from a paper in presentation
I'm giving a talk summarizing someone else's paper and I'd like to show some figures from their paper during my presentation.  It's an informal talk to fellow students and a few professors at my school.  Would it okay to just have a PDF of their paper up on the screen showing the figures needed?  Should I obtain permission before I do this?

Do you mean a published paper, as in a journal? If so then yeah there's absolutely no problem showing it directly. If you want to pull figures from it and put them in your talk, just make it clear where they're from.

I've personally seen this done in talks all the time, just make sure you leave a footnote referencing the work.

In my field, mathematical physics, I've seen many presentations with figures from papers, and it's perfectly acceptable to do so providing you reference the work either at the end on a separate slide or as a footnote.
If the figure does not consist of data collected by the authors, but rather, for example, the graph of a function, then you could of course plot it yourself and include your own figure. There would be no need for citation.

"There would be no need for citation" - Except if you need to cite the function itself :-) Nice answer!

@darthbith Yes, I considered that, but generally functions themselves aren't cited. Rather, if there is a result about a particular function, then that may merit citation.

The thesis writing guide of Tampere University of Technology (Thesis Writing Guide at Tampere University of Technology, p. 35. March 2014.) says the following about using figures from other sources in your thesis. As the theses are published, I believe the following applies also to presentations:

If a table or figure is cited from another volume [i.e. published paper], the in-text
  citation is placed in the caption or the heading of the table. The
  full reference is listed at the end of your thesis.

and

If you edit a figure or table taken from another source, for example,
  to ensure that colours, terms and notations match the rest of your
  thesis, you add ”adapted from [15]” to the citation.

These recommendations are legal at least in Finland. Even though we have quite similar copyright system with the other western countries, your local system might differ.


text:
How can a miscitation in google scholar be corrected?
I discovered that the journal article Ten Migrant Returnees Ilongos, Mindanao Vignettes and the Memory of Nation published by the Philippine Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (PJSSH) which I authored is now authored by a certain H.V Banez. See Links below
http://pjssh.com.ph/index.php/PJSSH/article/view/169/72?fbclid=IwAR0Z0ZfdW9-StIjclUD7KRCvuICQr0BUmXug3aqsV0-NuC0Ge5ZWUFg-bGg
http://pjssh.com.ph/index.php/PJSSH/issue/view/30?fbclid=IwAR0HJ5sD0YPAI5CQXj3co3pLquyxX145-zMTd9CDUo9GKPYwg7RWjPcu6Yc
https://scholar.google.com.ph/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Ma+Arve+Banez&oq=

See https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/106764/64

We don’t run google - you need to contact them.


text:
My professor is not teaching his online course himself, but uses publicly available videos instead. Is this appropriate?
I'm taking a graduate course online this semester, and have noticed a few things:

Professor has assigned us a mid-term, a final, and a research paper as the coursework for the class. These are the only grades we will receive this semester from this course.
Each week, he assigns us a chapter to read, and around 8-9 hours of videos that are supposed to serve as supplementary instruction.
The videos are publicly posted YouTube videos from the textbook author, Coursera, and other online courses.
He has not provided any of his own material for this course. No PowerPoints, no lectures, no notes, no study guide. Nothing of his own work.

At no point in the course description, or anything provided before registration did he indicate that the course would be structured like this.
Is it an issue that we're essentially taking an uncredited Coursera course for a grade and graduate credits?

But, as far as I can tell, it's not uncredited.  Your complaint seems to be that the professor hasn't provided any original material.  Are you a doctoral student or a master's student?  In either case, and especially the latter, it is up to you to identify the new material.

Sorry, misused the term there. What I meant is uncredited in terms of copyright, not course credit. Neither the professor who made the videos nor Coursera itself are being properly attributed as the organization teaching the course. And while I am a Masters student, it seems reasonable to expect the professor to give us more guidance than just throwing a textbook at us and make a few YouTube playlists.

Whether or not you think this is unethical you certainly have reason to complain that the professor isn't doing a good job of teaching the course.  You can and should make that clear in any course evaluations that you fill out.

Are the mid-terms and finals the work of your professor?

What do you mean by "no study guide"? Point 2 seems to describe exactly a study guide.

"Each week, he assigns us a chapter to read" But I thought you said he wasn't teaching.

Is this a course which was originally planned to be online, or a face-to-face course that was abruptly moved online due to the COVID-19 outbreak?

If the professor is available for discussion and questions, this may be a flipped course, which is highly appropriate for the grad level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

The question is unclear, as it is tagged with COVID-19 but does not mention if the course was planned as online or forced there.

Does any course info or pre-registration provide any material besides the substantive content? I've never seen anything list the format.

Might pay to notify coursera to see what they think.

I would bet that YouTube is far better at delivering videos than any platform that your university has cobbled together in the last few weeks.

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/97843/our-instructor-threw-together-freely-available-youtube-videos-and-wikipedia-arti

@TerryLoring The Covid-19 and Coronavirus tags were not added by the Question asker but by subsequent editors (who, by the way, I think acted inappropriately) and seems to have been a complete assumption on their part.

@neutralParadox -- there are a lot of questions in the comments -- consider editing your post to address some of them.

As of now, the OP has made no mention of Covid-19, so I have removed the Covid-19 tag.  The OP can add the tag if they want to.  To the other users, please do not add the tag if the OP has not mentioned that the question is related to Covid-19.

I had a lecturer that behaved in the same way 20 or so years ago (before online teaching). He gave us book chapter references and some problems to solve.  He had one of us present a short summary of the material on the blackboard each week (he sat in the audience and made minimal comments)

My personal opinion, which is nothing more than that, is that yes, this professor's behavior is possibly inappropriate. Flipped classrooms can be a wonderful thing, but then instructors can hold online discussions, "virtual office hours", moderate discussion forums over the Internet, or otherwise engage with their classes. If your professor is doing that, then great! -- take advantage of it.
That said, with the COVID-19 outbreak everyone is in very unfamiliar territory. In principle you could complain to a department administrator, but your issue is likely to be ignored. And keep in mind that other obligations may have ramped up significantly -- for example, your professor might be at home all day, with small children whose daycare just closed.
One possible course of action might be to suggest other course activities to your professor. For example, would you like to participate in an online discussion forum, moderated by the professor, where the videos are discussed? Have "virtual office hours" at fixed times via videoconference, where you can ask questions and listen to others' questions? Pick something you'd like to see, and ask if your professor if he would mind doing it.

Could you perhaps include an explanation on (when and) why, in your opinion, this professor's behavior is possibly inappropriate?

@a.t. It sounds as if the professor is basically not interacting with the class at all. If that is the case, then I take issue with his behavior. "Interacting" can be creating original material, assigning and providing detailed feedback on homework, hosting discussions via videoconference, actively moderating discussion forums... there are a ton of options. But if the professor has mostly just said "Go learn this material on your own", then why should a student pay tuition for that?

Thank you for your elaboration! For completeness: In that case the student could, for example, decide to pay for the certificate that, many believe, assures, or increases the likelihood, of a minimum of some level of quality of the enjoyed education. Or the student could, decide to pay for the tuition because they, or people whom they think they might depend on in the future, (e.g. when getting a job), think a professor (often) selects/composes/creates information that is required to complete a course, successfully. Or because other (online) platforms do not compose information that well.

@a.t. then the tuition fees should be reduced. Charging $10000 per year for a certificate and nothing more is extremely inappropriate, to avoid using stronger/more controversial words. Especially if the professor's decision to "not teach, not be available for questions, basically not do their job" happens after the tuition fees have been paid.

no, it isn't inappropiate.

If your instructor is available for questions, comments and discussions, then you can learn a great deal this way, potentially.
I recommend that you try to do just that.  If, after at least ten days of really trying, you have difficulties, or find yourself concerned that you may not be properly prepared for courses that build on the one you're currently taking, then I recommend that you reach out to a department administrator.  Present it as a problem you are having, not as a problem your instructor is having.  However, do lay out in as neutral a tone as possible, a description of the current course format, and if your instructor has been unresponsive to questions, do include that information.  Draft the email and sleep on it.  The next day be brutal and remove any trace of whining or complaining.  Just state the problem as a problem you are having.
Hopefully you will not have a problem.
Happy studying!

The mid-term will also serve as a good guidance on the accuracy of his material. If he gives you a test where material was not covered, then it is a problem. If it is covered, then it isn't a problem.

Your question is stated as "is it an issue". In this form I believe the right answer is "no, there are no issues". In some fundamental subjects like calculus or linear algebra I don't even expect for an average teacher to prepare "own" materials that would be different from more or less standard textbooks (after all, this is the purpose of textbooks -- to serve as standard teaching/learning materials). Next, I don't see any principal differences between "a textbook" and "a coursera course".
I understand you might dislike this way of organizing a course, but that's a completely different matter. At the end of the day I think you should be more concerned with acquiring appropriate knowledge rather than pondering on teachers' attitude. I believe Coursera provides decent content, so you should be happy (given that your submissions are properly evaluated and graded, and you receive appropriate guidance and feedback).

What you've described sounds like a very standard online class.  The only thing missing is some kind of method for direct communication with the professor.  Usually this would be accomplished through discussion boards although there are other options, e.g. live sessions via Zoom or WebEx.  If the professor has included something like that to allow you to ask questions and get immediate feedback then I don't see anything out of the ordinary here.

Indeed: Personal access to a teacher's help is in my opinion the essential extra you get from a course you signed up for (and, I assume, pay for) personally; as opposed to simply studying on your own, potentially using the same online resources.

There doesn't seem to be any contravention of norms or flouting of rules here. Professors are not bound to create original content; they are required to obtain appropriate permissions while using existing material. That does not seem to be the case here.
It may be argued that this isn't an ideal way to teach, but I assure you, you will find enough people to argue on both sides (on this site as well). Pedagogical instruction is far from being homogeneous, and every teacher has a different way of going about it. I would suggest approaching it with an open mind, actively engaging with the resources suggested (including the professor/teaching assistants) doing the assessments to the best of your ability.
After doing so, you will be able to identify specific problem areas, which can then be highlighted in whatever means your institution allows (feedback forms, direct interaction, mediated interaction, dropping the course etc.)

With points #1, #2, and #3, he/she outlined the topics of the course including checkpoints to grade the participants' ability to apply the techniques the course is about.  Depending on the field and level of instruction, he / she may think there is  no need to create original material in the sense of «the instructor created new slides», and reasons may include

there already is sufficient material made accessible by others (e.g., textbooks, the Coursera sites you mention), as well as
he / she assumes participants of his / her course advanced this much that they are able to identify additional ressources by themself of in exchange e.g. with other attendees.  The actual learning is not that you hear an instructor literarally reading slides, nor the mere writing on the green board.  It is about you familiarizing with the topic.
Especially under current constraints, he / she possibly intended to apply the concept of flipped classroom where participants of a class attend the lectures to discuss and clarify their questions during the self-study instead of «only» listening to a monologue.


text:
What are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?
Having taught calculus for several semesters, I've noticed that the number of students attending lectures are gradually declining (especially for the 9am session). I would not be worried if they have learned the material by themselves so don't see the need of coming; However looking at their exam scores I concluded that a lot of them are not doing so well in the class when they miss lectures.
So what are some good ways to keep students coming to lectures?


text:
API, EULA, and scraping for Google Scholar
I love Google Scholar as my go-to place to search for papers. Some features like "forward-citations" and their nice-ish  autogenerated bibtex are life savers. However, sometimes I (and others) wish we could write scripts to help us:

Google Scholar with Matlab

Automatically building a database of forward and backward citations

However, Google Scholar does not provide an API, their robots.txt disallows scrapers on most pages of interest (for instance the cited-by results are not suppose to be accessed by bots), and if you try to make many requests (as a bot would) you will get an CAPTCHA.
Last year they used to have a EULA that said:

You shall not, and shall not allow any third party to: ...
(i) directly or indirectly generate queries, or impressions of or clicks on Results, through any automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means (including, but not limited to, click spam, robots, macro programs, and Internet agents);
...
(l) "crawl", "spider", index or in any non-transitory manner store or cache information obtained from the Service (including, but not limited to, Results, or any part, copy or derivative thereof);

Some Google services like custom search (for which I could find a EULA) still state this in section 1.4, but the link in the SO answer is now dead and I have not been able to find a new EULA for Scholar. From anecdotal evidence, I know that you can get in a decent amount of trouble of you try to circumvent Google's efforts to prevent scraping of Scholar.
Is there an official source where I could look up Scholar's terms of service? Or does the new unified ToS Google unveiled mean that I should be looking for the terms elsewhere? Is scraping still disallowed?

Publish or Perish uses Google Scholar, so somehow they should be able to "directly or indirectly generate queries".

@AlexanderSerebrenik I don't know how Publish or Perish uses Google Scholar, but I know how Mendley uses it: they require you to click a button for each individual search of Google Scholar. If they automatically did the Google Scholar meta-data search for each paper when you import a folder-full then they would violate the old Scholar EULA. That is why they make you click for each query: if each query is accompanied by a click and not part of some script or loop then it is in compliance with the old EULA. Does Publish or Perish do something different?

I think that they do exactly as you describe...

Not too sure if you are looking for this.
See One policy, one Google experience released by Google

On March 1, 2012, we changed our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
  We got rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and
  replaced them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. The
  new policy and terms cover multiple products and features, reflecting
  our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience
  across Google.

That means all of the Google services have the same ToS, which is available here : Google Terms of Service
Here's a quote from that page

Don’t misuse our Services. For example, don’t interfere with our
  Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface
  and the instructions that we provide.

The page is still available, but no longer contains that constraint AFAICS.


text:
How do I ask a professor to recommend me to another professor to hire me as a teaching assistant?
I have been admitted into a college in the US for a master's program. I am applying for TA positions under various professors because TAs get tuition benefits.
One of the professors who taught me as an undergrad (Prof. X) knows a professor in the department where I will be studying (Prof. Y). How do I ask Prof. X to recommend me to Prof. Y?

Before asking for the letter of recommendation, you should ask your new department how TA positions are handled in your new program: you'll want to know

does Prof. Y even need TA's—not all courses get TA's assigned;
who is responsible for deciding who will TA which course;
when the decisions will be made.

If you find that Prof. Y needs a TA and that you'd be capable of doing the assignment, then you can approach Prof. X and ask if he'd be willing to recommend you to Prof. Y as a potential TA candidate.

Perhaps you should just apply to prof y and just mention prof x - prof y will ask their own questions as they wish.

I guess the first question you should be asking yourself is: "is this a sincere recommendation"? What are your personal characteristics/skills that make you a suitable student for the TA position? That is a similar dilemma you will face if you join the corporate job market in the future. If you had interesting achievements in Prof X's course, and you stood out for whatever reason, I think it is perfectly valid to state your desire to have a recommendation.
If you are going to aggregate a hell lot of value for Prof Y, he will be truly glad that Prof X suggested your name, pointing out the characteristics he previously observed.
On the other hand, if you do not feel like you have much of a track record to justify a recommendation, I guess the best approach might be to directly contact Professor Y and state your interest. Remember to put yourself in the shoes of your boss-to-be: Professors usually have hectic routines, and they will love you forever if you are able to make them forget the operational, boring activities of the courses. They will have extra time to plan their lectures and produce scientific output.
tl;dr: "Ask yourself: what are the characteristics that will make me super useful to Prof Y? If you do not have them yet, what does it take to learn them?"
If, after this exercise, you would recommend yourself, go for it, ask for the recommendation!
Good Luck!


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How can I tell if a website is safe for conference registration?
I am registering for a conference in Canada but the payment link has a weird name like yizhifubj and the website is Chinese.
Is that normal? Are there any guidelines for determining if a registration website is “safe”?

No. It is not safe.

you mean it is a scam? it is used for an ieee sponsored conference

It seems safe. Why do you doubt it is? A quick google search reveals several conferences that use the site.

because its name and because google chrome marked the payment page as unsafe because of the https i think

So, no reasons really.

Have you asked the conference organizers?

@Roland "A quick google search reveals several conferences that use the site."

@Roland Hmm... You are right. Let me ask random people on the internet instead.

Naive question: does "yizhifubj" spell something in Chinese?

@NateEldredge "Yizhifu" = prepaid. "bj" = probably Beijing. The website www.yizhifubj.com redirects to PayEase.

The conference behind is called “International Conference on Mechanical Design and Engineering”, Beijing, China. Surprisingly the conference itself is listed in the nature directory of academic event and the papers should get published in a journal with the ISSN 17426588. That means, the situation is a bit unclear.

ICMV 2020 which is published by SPIE also uses this payment gateway.

You will not be able to get a definitive answer on this unless you contact the conference organisers.  Certainly the registration mechanism is - by modern western standards - backwards - and you are right to ring alarm bells and take extreme caution as it could well be a scam
That said, @GlenPierce answer is not the final word - and there are significant elements which indicate that the site itself is credible - these include

The actual payment IS done over HTTPS, and the certificate ties in with the domain name.  Of-course, this does not mean much, except that the domain has not been compromised.
The domain names associated with the site have been registered many years
The site purports to relate to academic.net - and, indeed, when you go to the academic.net website, the payment system does, indeed link to this domain name.   It is also relevant that most of conferences they have listed are held in China.
If you log onto the site, and change the meeting ID, it lists different headers for different ID's - that means that if the site has been hacked, its been hacked for a while, and there is a "non-trivial" amount of coding behind this - and yet Google have not flagged it as untrustworthy.

My inclination is to believe that this is more a case of incompetence then likely fraud (and this level of competency is not that uncommon in the parts of Asia I've been exposed to) - but I would still not register this site without confirmation from the organizer that it is legit.

It's definitively unsafe, it uses http, rather than https

Even if the actual payment is done over HTTPS, the pattern where an initial HTTP page redirects to a HTTPS one is still considered a questionable security practice by today's standards. The reason is that an attacker can rewrite the pages served over HTTP to point to a different malicious HTTPS page.

Not safe at all.

Http instead of https, never enter any information of any kind into an http site.
The mere fact that it's over http is such a huge flag that almost nothing else matters.
Wierd name. Weird names are evidence of unsafe sites. They probably keep getting blacklisted so need to create hundreds of sites to keep ahead of people writing reviews of their scams, blocking them from searches, etc.
Not a professional page. The layout and overall page design is poor. Real sites hire professional designers.

The payment gateway itself is over http. If your bank's ATM deposit drawer was a shelf that anyone could just walk up to and steal from, would you deposit your money via that ATM?
Even if these conference organizers are legit, they are not competent. This conference won't be good. People who are worth meeting won't attend simply because of this website problem. If they can't build a simple registration website, what else have they screwed up?

This is good advice in general, but none of it really resolves whether or not this is the real conference website.  Academic conference organizers rarely have the budget to hire professional designers and so things are often done by someone who just barely knows what they're doing.  Obviously the "safe" approach is to say "don't use it", but if it's real, then for OP that means not being able to go to the conference, which can have a career impact.  People don't always have the luxury of only being able to do that which is safe.

Real sites hire professional designers --- LOL I wish. It simply doesn't work that way in my part of academia, though. Small conferences and workshops have home-made sites and registration systems, ranging from home-made php, to Google forms or "send us an e-mail to confirm".

I very much doubt that money sent through this website will actually result in actually attending a conference. The payment gateway itself isn't even over http. If this is not a scam, it's such a massive security vulnerability that everyone who goes though it will be compromised. Skip this conference.

As to your last paragraph, I can say from experience that there is very little correlation between website design competence and scientific quality of the conference.  I don't know anything about this particular conference, but I certainly wouldn't make the judgment on that basis.  And there are many cases where a conference is important enough to me that I would gladly risk credit card fraud in order to attend (after all, the credit card company would typically eat any losses, not me).

Actually, the payment is made in another site through HTPS. Look: https://pay.yizhifubj.com/customer/i18n/i18n_input_card_new.jsp

That site is http, not https.

@GlenPierce https://ibb.co/m0B2DT

Well, I was trying to apply to a Chinese university and this portal showed up. Just like you, I got suspicious over the URL. The URL of the webpage where you require to enter your card details consisted of "https". This made it easier to go forward but I still had some doubts. I needed to apply for the university, whatever it was. The amount was 120USD. I processed and the payment was successful. The university received the amount and the application portal showed the status "Payment Successful". I was relieved. This is for all those people who encounter that weird-looking payment portal.

authors: طارق بك محمود


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Want to go to grad school but I lack expected coursework
I am, or was, a math major in a big state university, and just graduated this year and I am taking a gap year. I finished my undergrad in three years and took some extra math courses. I also have one-year independent research experience with an Honors Thesis and a research award by the math department. The upper division courses that I have are :  Linear Algebra, Analysis I&II, Adv Applied, ODE, PDE, Prob, Stats, Stochastics (All A's). some of them are in grad level. I also have an independent study on Fourier Analysis with Stien's book. As for the Application, I will have two very strong letters. Just haven't taken the GRE yet.
I understand that relatively good grad schools take the courses that students took seriously. And my problem is mainly about this.
However, every school's webpage that I looked at prefers students who also took Algebra and Topology, which I did not take for some reasons. But I am trying to learn Algebra with Artin's book and some more analysis with Stien's books myself in the gap year. Can someone please tell me just how much disadvantages would this bring me, and would what I am doing help with the admission process.
I am getting mixed messages about this. Some people say that I am pretty much locked out of top 50 schools, my professors could not really answer this, and my friends said it is not a big deal. I am very confused now. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Thanks a lot.

Not a mathematician. But, being "locked out of top-50 schools" when you have a research award and top grades in grad courses seems manifestly wrong. I would just mention your self-study of the deficient coursework in your SOP.

I’m honestly surprised your university let you graduate without taking Algebra and Topology, especially since you got honors.

It sounds like you have an excellent background in applied math, but are applying to pure math programs. Lacking courses in abstract algebra and real analysis is going to be a handicap in that context. Have you thought about applying to an applied math program?

to answer Charles' question. Yes, I did consider applied math program. In fact, If my profile is determined to be too weak for pure, then I will go for applied.

I have never been on an admissions committee and can’t really speak to if it’s actually disqualifying or not. However, even if we operate under the assumption that it is disqualifying that doesn’t mean you can’t go to graduate school, it means you can’t go to graduate school this year. You can enroll as a non-degree student in the university of your choice and take the necessary courses. This may be expensive or difficult depending on the country / situation, but if you really do need the courses it’s an option available to you. I know several people in the US who have done this in math and math-adjacent fields, more commonly for a MS degree but also for a PhD.

Thanks, Stella. That is what I am trying to do. I am trying to get a job in the university I just graduated, so the tuition would be very cheap

To be honest, I wouldn't worry a lot about what "some people say." Locked out is a pretty strong statement. I think you have a gap in your education, but you have filled that with other, also valuable, things.
I think that any reasonable admissions process will raise an eyebrow and look at what you have to offer overall. They may suggest a plan for filling the gap.
You are also well placed for applied programs by the way, if that is your interest and the reason that you took the courses that you did.
But when you apply, stress what you can do and have done, not your "weakness".
However, the best answer to this question is from someone in the admissions process (or a department head) at one or two of the universities you'd like to apply to. Likely they are willing (eager) to spend a bit of time with a prospective grad student.
My own history probably isn't relevant now (too far in the past), but I had only a very simple Intro to Topology as an undergraduate, but it became one of my top subjects in grad school. Likewise the first graduate course in Analysis (Measure Theory) was completely different from my undergrad experience. I loved it. Best. Thing. Ever. You can think. You can do math. No problem.
However, it will serve you well to try to fill what ever gaps you think you have. I would think that if you feel you lack in both Algebra and Topology that you work first on one, then the other, rather than getting too much on your plate at once.


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How to report a misconduct in methods in an article published by a top journal anonymously?
I found a potential wrong application of machine learning validation methods in one paper recently published in Nature Energy, which is the best energy journal (>50 impact factors). The authors used k-fold cross validation over a forecasting model on gasoline demand under COVID-19 with Google mobility time-series data and the COVID-19 data. They claimed they don't have over-fitting issue, as both training and testing cases reach R-square above 0.8. That should be wrong, as time-series validation should be considered instead of K-fold cross validation. It would be cheating to use K-fold in this case. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I reached the editor, and there is further evaluation ongoing since then. However, the editor does not promise to take the proper editorial action since I am not willing to disclose my personal information. Is that true? Could anyone make suggestion on this? How to report this misconduct in a correct way if I want to remain anonymous? Thanks a lot for your advice!

Is what true?

How do you know this is misconduct? That is, an intentional effort to deceive.

Perhaps the technical aspect could be queried (with neutral phrasing) over on Cross Validated.

Why not try PubPeer?

(Note: not a hard-core statistics person) Looking at descriptions of k-fold and time series, I don't see why one could not apply the k-fold methodology to a time series - one just has to partition the data appropriately. You would really need to rigorously support any accusation of "misconduct".

@Buffy I suppose you are trying to be helpful? But I think it is clear enough they are asking whether that is a normal valid response, and whether it is usual for editors to not take action without OP providing personal info.

"Misconduct" is not an appropriate term in this scenario. Misconduct is very serious and could ruin careers. But the more important question I have is are those authors known to you? I hope this whole episode is not coming out of some sort of rivalry. If you do not know them then why not send the authors an email seeking clarification? Check if they are replying you and then figure out the next steps.

See also the question https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/157911/80985

Two things here:
Firstly, if you want people to take you seriously, you really should use your real name. I quote:

Use your real name.
Not using your real name indicates that you are trying to avoid suffering any potential negative consequence of your claim being incorrect. Using your real name indicates that you are sure enough to be ready to suffer potential negative professional consequences if you are mistaken, so you can be taken more seriously. If you are not completely sure about your claim do not waste her time.

If you must be anonymous I don't think you have many good options. Some (many?) people simply aren't going to take you seriously. You would have to convince someone who is willing to use their real name to do the convincing for you.
Secondly, there is an important difference between misconduct and an error. An error is simply an error. It is a mistake, it isn't intentional, it can be corrected. Misconduct goes much further and claims that the authors intentionally attempted to deceive their readers. You deal with both differently. With errors, you do one thing. With misconduct, you do something else. Your description of the problem sounds like an error, not misconduct. Do remember that a misconduct allegation is more serious than an error. Everyone makes mistakes, but misconduct can lead to job terminations or awarded degrees being rescinded.
Based on your description you aren't alleging misconduct, you are alleging a mistake. Be clear which one you're alleging because they are different things. Confusing something like this does not bode well for being taken seriously either.

I don't think it is that simple. People are afraid of repercussions, not simply of tarnishing their own reputation by making a mistake.

In contrast to what the others have said, I believe there are reasons to want to be anonymous when reporting misconduct.
However, what you describe is not misconduct, but just bad interpretations of their data. Many, many papers use incorrect methods, or faulty interpretations. As long as this is not a deliberate attempt to mislead, it wouldn't be classed as misconduct.
While I understand that pointing out flaws in other peoples work is scary, particularly if they are more powerful than you, I think there is less of a case for anonymity. Of course in peer review you are often anonymous to the author, but you are not anonymous to the editor and it is understandable for the editor to want to understand who you are to judge who to believe - you or the author.

I won't comment at all on the validity of your criticism, because that is off-topic for Academia.SE. I'll only answer the more general question, though I will assume that the conduct is not really misconduct (as mentioned in a comment) but rather an argument about proper statistical approaches.

If you're not willing to attach your name to criticism, you put little weight behind it.
I'm not sure this choice rises quite to the level of a retraction, which would be done through the editor. A letter to the editor may be appropriate, which could be published in the journal (often after inviting a response from the original authors). If so, I'd suggest you convince a co-author to write the letter with you, preferably someone with a stable position (tenure), both to give it more credence and to give you a bit of protection (and also to verify your concerns).
These days, there is an alternative venue through social media where you may be able to raise an issue anonymously, but unless you already have a strong following it's probably difficult to get it picked up. Perhaps you could contact someone in the field who has a history of calling out errors in statistical approaches - I won't recommend anyone specifically but there are several blogs and Twitter accounts devoted to exactly this.

"If you're not willing to attach your name to criticism, you put little weight behind it." Why? If an error is identified, it is identified. It is an error. Regardless of whether it was John, Mary or someone else who first identified it.

@AndrésE.Caicedo I didn't say it makes it not an error, I said it puts little weight behind it. In this case you have N=? authors putting their stamp of approval on the paper, plus probably 2-3 peer reviewers, all who have given their names to the editor. The editor may not be an expert on this particular statistical issue, and OP seems to be making a pretty serious allegation yet won't even put their name on it (and they are sufficiently unsure to ask here). For them, it's something like 6 voices they trust vs one they don't know.


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How valuable are research assistant positions to an academic CV in the humanities?
A bit of background: I just completed my MA at a large Canadian university, and I will be starting my PhD in Sociology in the fall (at the same large Canadian university). Over the course of my 2-year MA, I worked as a teaching assistant (TA) both years, and also held 6 different research assistant positions with different faculty and projects.
For my PhD, about 30% of my total funding is tied to a guaranteed TAship for the next 4 years, so I will be working as a TA no matter what. As the summer progresses, I've started to receive offers for new research assistant positions in the fall from faculty in my department and other affiliated departments. Currently, I have 3 offers. They're all very part-time (a few hours a week each, tops), so I could theoretically accept all of them from a time-management perspective. I held 3 positions simultaneously in addition to my TAship in my MA and did not find it overwhelming, nor did it compromise my academic work in any way.
Before accepting, however, I've been trying to calculate the cost-benefit analysis. The extra money is definitely nice, but I have enough funding that I could survive without it, although my finances would be tight. Overall, how valuable this experience would be to my career is a bigger factor than the money.
With all that in mind, is accepting as many research assistant positions as I can manage (without compromising my other work) a reasonable career decision in terms of what future hiring committees (in the humanities) would likely be looking for? Again, I'm in the Canadian context, and my understanding is that most positions are seeking a solid mix of both teaching and research experience here.
Does the reputation/prestige of the faculty members I am working for matter in this case? (The way it would for an advisor?)
I recognize that one of the other major factors is whether or not taking all of these positions would compromise my ability to publish, but the flip side of that is that it's not entirely uncommon in my field for research assistants - especially at the PhD level - to end up co-authoring papers with the faculty they work for, so it may actually open up more doors for publication. I have two small/less-prestigious publications accepted so far (an interview with a senior scholar in a journal, and a chapter in an edited book), and I'm working on two others currently that will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals, so I'm in okay shape as far as publications go relative to where I am timing-wise in my career.
Sorry if that's too much context, just trying to be thorough!

This question is very similar and might be of interest: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/134440/is-ta-ing-worth-the-opportunity-cost-of-having-more-time-for-research

Usually the value of these small RA positions is not money, but getting your name on papers and being in a good position to launch new projects alongside the faculty member.

I'm a faculty member in a Canadian university who hires a lot of RAs (and who has sat on hiring committees), so I can speak to this.
In general, you need to really watch the balance you take on. The extra money is great, of course, and if you need the funds you ultimately should take these positions - the hourly rate is good.
In terms of CV building: some RA work is great, especially if it can dovetail with your research project (i.e. accumulating knowledge for your field) and if you can get a publication as a co-author. Others may involve more clerical work. The important thing is that the RA position in and of itself is not a real addition to your CV when it comes to hiring, but the effects of it can be: a publication, skills, or having a faculty member who can write a positive letter of reference.
The reputation or prestige of the faculty member would I think only really matter if they wrote you a letter of reference or co-authored with you.

The value of these types of RA positions lies in the connections and research experience (seeing up close how a successful faculty member puts together high-impact papers, learning skills).
You should select RA positions based on whether the position is likely to position you well for relationships with high-productivity scholars in your area. These can then lead to mentorship relationships and joint research in the future.
In addition to looking at the faculty publication record, you could talk to past RAs. Some faculty use RAs as a stepping stone to joint work, and some just burn through RAs on grunt work tasks. You obviously want the former, not the latter.