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I filled the crucial gap; co-authors did the rest–who should be first author?
A fellow researcher shared with me his notes where he attempts to solve an open problem in maths/computer science. Both he and his student have been trying to solve it for over a year, and by now they are not actively working on it anymore.
Shortly after he shared with me his notes, I found a trick to solve a crucial step they were struggling with, leading to a resolution of the open problem.
Who qualifies for first authorship in this situation if this leads to a journal/conference article (where the authors are not listed in alphabetic order)?

As someone who works in a CS field with non-alphabetical ordering, I think the question description requires more context: How original was their framing of the problem statement? How original was the solution approach (the "steps" that they came up with)? How original are their ideas for the steps that they solved without you? Was there any implementation and evaluation performed, and how much non-trivial effort did it involve? Ideally, one would need to hear their perspectives, too, since the answer to each question may vary.

Up to the step where they got stuck, their approach was original enough in my opinion---they did good work. I also think that they spent most of their time trying to solve the ''crucial'' step. I guess what I am trying to find out through my question is whether there is an obvious/accepted thing to do in situations like mine, which from the replies here, does not seem to be the case.

That's a valid conclusion to make from the answers so far. By the way, one possible option not mentioned so far would be a co-first authorship.

The fact that you are asking suggests that you want to be the first author. No problem, just ask/ discuss with them by giving short arguments on why you prefer that.  It may be they have counter-arguments. But a discussion (even per email) is a good thing in any case. Be ready to accept/respect their point of view too.

My gut feeling (I don't work in CS or TCS but I talk a little with people in adjacent areas) is that 1st authorship should go to the person who shared their notes with you; you say yourself that you solved "a step that he was struggling with", which indicates that he and his student had already done significant work to attack the problem. Of course it may be the case that your contribution is somehow the decisive one.
All this said, if you have a diplomatic way of asking this person "who did you think should be first author" I would do so: he may offer 1st authorship to you, or he may not. It is hard to say more at this level of generality.

Despite my answer: if there is a good/useful/suitable publication venue which does not require authors to be listed "in order of contribution", I would go with that, for the reasons outlined in Buffy's answer.

I think it's more important to consider the order which is used for most papers in the journal, rather than a required order (which is rarely specified anyways). In a journal where most papers are ordered by contribution, an alphabetical order may be interpreted as: "Author A contributed more than author B who contributed more than author C, which happens to match alphabetical ordering".

My advice is to use alphabetical listing and detail the history of the solution in an acknowledgements paragraph. This may be overly generous, but will likely lead to a better relationship with everyone in the future. This can pay more dividends than the momentary rush of being first author.
I especially recommend this if you and your colleague are a bit established and this won't be a first paper for anyone but, perhaps, the student.
Collaborative relationships are an asset and they should be carefully managed.
Where I have deviated from alphabetical listings is in closely collaborative relationships where one of us (not myself) was clearly the leader/driver throughout. But it was obvious to all of us that he should be listed first. (Computer Science, where alphabetical listing is pretty common).

I interpreted the OP as asking "what should we do if the eventual submission is to a venue which imposed an order of authors that is not merely alphabetical. I think I have seen this in TCS proceedings sometimes?

@YemonChoi. I find close parsing of contributions and the resulting fights (detailed in many questions here) to be destructive to collaboration. If it is forced by superiors, you have to live with it, but we can do better.

@Buffy I take your point, and indeed I dislike ordering of author-names, for the reasons you mention; but nowadays in terms of career evaluation (tenure/probation/the dreaded REF in the UK) people -- perhaps not the OP -- will care and fight about such things, sadly.

Thank you for your answer. The points you made are exactly what makes it hard for me to know what is the best strategy. I should mention though that I am a PhD student, and first authorship matters quite a bit at this stage I guess.

I would still work to preserve the possibility of future work. It is just possible that a simple discussion with all parties will resolve it nicely. And note that this is just one paper, not your whole career. There will be other papers. Think long term.

+1 for "Collaborative relationships are an asset and they should be carefully managed."

Tongue-in-cheek comment, obviously, but "alphabetical listing" works really well when your name is "Buffy". Not so well when it's "Yates".

Alphabetical listing potentially makes sense as a general policy, but not when the names of the three authors are already known. If I know my name comes before the other two authors and I suggest using alphabetical listing, it's going to look a little dodgy regardless of my actual intentions.

@mai, the reason that alphabetical (or random) name listing works is that in the fields that use it, there is an assumption that we all contribute "equally" even if differently. We are a collaboration, not a hierarchy. No one in my field cares whether I'm listed first or last. And we do make exceptions, occasionally, when there is a need to do it. But alphabetical listing won't work in a hierarchical system, or in one where people feel they need to battle their colleagues to be on top of the pile. Sad.

@Buffy, what I meant is that in a field where author order matters, and I know my name comes first, suggesting alphabetical ordering to my co-authors will make it look like I simply want the first-authorship.

It is hard to assess who actually deserves first authorship, as much depends on how big that one step is, what else was done etc. However, you clarified in a comment that you want to know if there is a standard way to deal with such situations.
There is:
Standard solution - TALK with each other

Find out who of the involved parties wants to write a paper on this - the original question statement and a solution involving your trick for that step.
Once that's clear discuss with all involved parties what each party contributes and how the authorship order should be.
If there is disagreement, you can shift around some of the remaining work, either to shift someone's opinion towards yours or to make the remaining work fit the majority authorship order.  For instance, if the others agree one of them should be first author, not you, you might want to leave all or most of the write-up to them. If it hangs in the balance between you and someone else, you might offer to write several parts, like introduction, state of the art overview etc. in addition to describing your little trick to shift the amount of contribution in your favour (make sure the others agree this will also affect the author ordering).
(Aside from that a not recommneded ultimate step that will burn bridges is always to disagree and withhold your consent to write that paper).
Write the paper.

Who qualifies for first authorship in this situation if this leads to a journal/conference article (where the authors are not listed in alphabetic order)?

First of all, from the conditional phrasing of your question I will take a wild guess and speculate that this scenario is entirely hypothetical (more so than you may realize) and will never actually happen. In all of math, and essentially all the parts of computer science where “solving an open problem” is a thing, the convention is that authors are listed alphabetically. Thus the easy answer for you would be to follow the norms of the discipline you are publishing in and likewise list the authors alphabetically. The question of who contributed “more” in a situation like you are describing will never have to be answered, and indeed most people (myself included) consider it nonsensical and would never even think to wonder about such a thing.
In the unlikely event that you will need to specify an ordering to the contributions of the different authors, a simple solution would be to include the statement “all authors contributed equally” in a footnote somewhere. Again, this seems to me to be the closest approximation to the truth. Of course, from a practical standpoint you and your coauthors will need to have a discussion about this and come to an agreement, and hypothetically speaking this could be a source of some contention. But given that you’re working in the context of the (fairly healthy) publishing culture of math and CS, I see a good likelihood that this won’t happen.

"In [...] essentially all the parts of computer science where “solving an open problem” is a thing, the convention is that authors are listed alphabetically." A counterexample would be software engineering, with an example for a now-solved problem being "Typecheck all variants of the Linux kernel".

@lighthousekeeper thanks. Yes, that’s why I added the weasel word “essentially”...

My last CS journal experiences - granted a few years back - were all that the order did matter and was not alphabetical. I think the weasel problem is rather that "solving an open problem" is way too broad, allowing any weasel to find counter-examples in virtually all branches of CS, while you might have meant it in a math focused sense - and for very 'mathy' areas your 'essentially all' might be true.

Downvoting. All cases of Maths and CS papers were not alphabetically ordered. I know from friends, that they use the ordering. But your statement, even with "essentially" it is IMHO wrong.

I found a trick to solve a step

To me, that doesn't sound like first-authorship-level contribution.

...journal/conference where the authors are not listed in alphabetic order...

Other answers claim that maybe you're being hypothetical here. I'll assume that is actually the case - but suggest that you change it! If you three are all in accordance, I suggest you list the names alphabetically despite the accepted norm, and add a small (foot)note to that effect. Maybe others will take your example too and we'll get rid of author ordering in another venue.

I think finding the "trick" could very well be the main contribution in a paper, especially math or CS.  But it has to be a really good trick.

@nomen: But it's a "trick" for just one step. Also, OP did not say it was a deep and heavyweight trick.

Agreed, I'm just saying. :-)

Obviously the one who puts in the work to write it all together gets to be first author.
Who that is, you have to decide together. Collaboratively.

My understanding is that in subjects where one has a concept of "first author", this is not necessarily how the system works. FWIW I work in a subject that doesn't have a concept of "first author" and am very glad of that, but your answer is not going to help the person asking this question

@YemonChoi Hm, I come from such a subject, and yes it is. Except that some profs think its a waste of time and prefer to order a postdoc to do it instead of letting the student (who gets to be "first" author) learn how to do it.

Well, anecdotally I've seen stories of profs ending up as first author by virtue of being the "lab director" rather than the person "who puts in the work to write it all together". But you speak from direct experience and I don't, so fair enough

At my college, authorship is done in order of contribution (if evident) or alphabetically. Generally, to prevent conflicts, its done alphabetically, but that's not the case here.
In that case, then you would only be considered an author if your actually wrote any of the paper. It's difficult to tell if you actually wrote part of the paper, or if you just solved the problem and they wrote the paper, but either way they did more work on the paper. You could be listed as a contributor, but not as an author. This article explains the difference.

New researchers who aspire to official authorship status may see the title of “contributor” as a relegation or demotion in rank, but for other, more experienced researchers, it may simply be a pragmatic recognition of the fact that you may have provided valuable resources but didn’t actually contribute to the writing or editing of the research paper.

Basically, you made a contribution, but you did not author all or part of the paper. That would put you as the last in-order at most, or a footnote at the least. So, we go like this:
[Name, Student], [Er, Research], [U, Yo], [Tor, Edi]


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Doing part of my PhD remotely in Europe while working full time?
my US company offered me the prospect of doing my PhD (in public health, public policy, international development or something similar) at a European university while retaining my employment. They would also pay for the PhD. My thesis would be based on a research project I was already going to pursue in my work. I already have a Masters in Economics. Would a university be okay if I only worked out of the university for the first and the 2nd and 3rd year was finishing my research in the USA? Thanks!

Does the company already have in mind a particular university (and advisor), perhaps in place from on-going joint research? Has somebody from the company done this before at that university?

The company does have a relationship with a couple of universities there, but I was wondering if I would be able apply to other universities.

I suspect that your company has some specific ideas, although if they didn't bring that up when discussing with you its kind of odd. I would have thought something more like your manager having a meeting with you and saying "Goldy, would you like to go to Oxford to work on a PhD with Prof. BigName?" I would get clarification from management on what the company would, and would not, support.

You would need to check that with both the university and with any supervisor/advisor you would have. I'm pretty sure that such relationships do occur, even if not common. But being less the norm, you need to work out the details.
In some ways the supervisor might be the bigger block than the university. It might take a trip to Europe to finalize any such arrangements. But you first need to determine if they would even consider such a situation. The answers will vary.

Thanks, it seems like you think this is not out of realm of possibility. I am okay with mid-tier universities, so not sure where to start processing of narrowing down list of schools. The process is very different in North America, that I am more aware of.

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text:
In what format I should share a semi complete business & technical innovative idea in enterprise
Question
Does this fit a Yellow paper or a Whitepaper or other kind of document?
Context:
What is my document about ?
I am developing an idea, out of a business need. It is not an algorithm or a 100% technical specification to solve the problem, it can accept a wide range of solutions. To put you in context, it is about:
"Evolving ETLs with future business specifications". For this, I wrote a document presenting many ideas, a study of the existing techniques and technologies. Along the lines, and in the first section of the document, I exposed the problem and how I see the new solution. Therefore technically it is not 100% specified, because I have not 100% the knowledge and experience nor I have the time to develop more (this is why I want to throw the document).
Why do I write this document ?
As you know all, in a professional environment (without necessarily a research subdivision), other developers are not just there to discuss ideas. Even seeking knowledge (at least in my space) is not easy. Simply asking for a review from other say experimented developers in the same field of study also can be out of scope, they are already working on on-running products and not necessarily looking for innovation (let's say it, without $$ or reputations).
The core purpose of the document is to:

Save my work, even when not 100% specified.
Share knowledge and in a way seek indirectly help and get the attention of more experimented peers hiding somewhere.
Prove some motivation.
Very probably, it can be a base for new products around the idea.
Push others to thinking (like some ppt presentation I saw in IT late meetings, some presentation with a lot of question marks "??")

Is this what we call a Yellow paper ?

To share new enterprise ideas, you should follow the procedure defined by your enterprise. I suspect a white paper would be suitable, since a yellow paper may reveal too many technical details that your enterprise might want to patent.

I am not sure about the terms, all whitepaper I saw were like very broad, roadmap like or a way of thinking, philosophical way of work and so..

Yellow paper, it is new to me, I read that in academic world, in research, A yellow paper is a document containing research that has not yet been formally accepted or published in an academic journal. It is synonymous to the more widely used term preprint.[wikipedia] so it a better fit I think... If the enterprise decide to patent, then I think I will be lucky ?!

@Curcuma_ The enterprise should surely patent if they are interested.

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Best eBook website for PhD students
What's the best "bookmine" academic targeted website for PhD students to find references for their studies ?
Thanks in advance

What is a "bookmine" website?

i coined the word just now :D meaning a website where many books are offered to download in a PDF format :)

If you don't have qualms about downloading from a site that has been convicted for mass copyright infringement, then Library Genesis is probably the largest one. It is basically Scihub's sister site for books.
Their Wikipedia page contains up-to-date links to access it (which may be blocked by some internet providers).
Check the legality of what you download. For instance, where I live you risk a 154€ fine for illicit downloads for personal use, without other aggravating factors. (I think at least -- IANAL.)


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How to know the ranking of the scientific journal (class A, B or C)?
I want a website that gives me the recent ranking (according to classes A, B or C) for journals.
Thanks

Which field and according to what criteria?

@Aolon, in computer science.

The question seems to be based on the rather odd assumption that there exists a one and only authoritative ranking of journals.

You can search for the journal name on scimagojr. Moreover, you can use CORE for conferences.

@Lee, I can not comment on your second question, but different metrics have different ranking systems. I am also in the Computer Science field. We mainly refer to CORE ranking for conferences (e.g., A*, A, B, etc.) and best quartile for journals (e.g., Q1, Q2, etc.)

A literature database service like Web of Science (commercial product by Clarivate, consult your research librarian) assigns topics to the journals indexed by them.  You then may see how well this one does in comparison to the others in the same field (added blue box):

(figure credit)
On occasion, you not only get a figure of merit, but a graph to follow-up the development, e.g., in Elsevier's scopus:

(figure credit)

Just a small addition: if you already are in Web of Science, you also can get a graph of the journal scores over time (in the Journal Citation Reports you see mentioned in the first image you show). At least that is how I did it today...


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Incorrect arXiv BibTeX citation
Upon displaying a new submission, arXiv automatically produces a BibTeX record. This (and other parts of the arXiv's) record is used by authors to cite the submitted preprint, and scraped by the bots of various aggregators (e.g. Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Scopus Preprints, etc.).
Because of the way in which arXiv stores information, such BibTeX records happen to contain serious mistakes (preventing for instance the correct identification of authors, also within arXiv itself) and such mistakes propagate without fail to the other aggregators and eventually make it into the literature.
Is there a way to either

fix the BibTeX record after an arXiv submission has appeared, or

provide the arXiv with a correct BibTeX record for a new submission, in such a way to avoid mistakes in the automatically generated one?

Note: arXiv support is unresponsive/unhelpful about this issue.
Edit: The problem is a matter of authors' names formatting.
In particular, arXiv treats names of the form FirstName LastName LastName as FirstName MiddleName LastName. This has been a known issue for many years, but no visible steps were taken by arXiv to fix the problem.
According to arXiv's help page for the "author" field, names of the form FirstName LastName LastName ought to be entered as they are. The example provided there is John von Neumann. Note that the BibTeX record of this name is correct, as its author field reads
author={John von Neumann}
and it is thus abbreviated as Neumann, J. v. and listed under N in the alphabetical order (since it is so, by convention, in German).
This problem however is language-dependent: on the arXiv the Dutch/Belgian van follows the same pattern as von, but in Belgian it is correct to list the name under V, so a BibTeX record of the form author={Eric Van Rompuy} (example from Wikipedia) would be incorrect (the correct one being author={Van Rompuy, Eric}).
Unfortunately, the German von is the tip of the iceberg.
The BibTeX record is in fact only an instance of much larger issue. Indeed, suppose to look up a name of the form FirstName LastName1 LastName2 with the arXiv search field. When you find the author you are interested in, you click on the link on the author name in the first relevant publication in the results. In this case, arXiv occasionally redirects you to the search results for LastName2, FN. LN1. which is usually totally uninformative.
Whether or not the author has an arXiv author identifier or its identifier is linked to Orcid, it does not matter at all.

"Because of the way in which arXiv stores information, such BibTeX records happen to contain serious mistakes" -- can you point out examples and/or be more specific?

Thank you for the comments. Yes, this is a matter of arXiv formatting metadata incorrectly.

It sounds like the only long-term solution is to persuade arXiv to fix their system. I wonder if anyone on this site works for arXiv or a similar organization and could give advice.


text:
Does this citation style have a name?
I was asked to turn a set of references into the following citation format:

[Qin2014] Z. Qin, G. Denker, C. Giannelli, P. Bellavista and N.
Venkatasubramanian, “A software defined networking architecture for
the internet-of-things,” 2014 IEEE network operations and management
symposium (NOMS), 2014, pp. 1-9, doi: 10.1109/NOMS.2014.6838365

However, no information was given as to what the name of this style is.
Already tried looking in this website: https://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByExample/, but with no success.
Does anyone know if this style has a specific name?
Thanks in advance!

That looks to me like a bibtex style, probably alpha. So it's not a formal style (e.g. APA, MLA), it's just a setting for the bibtex package. Overleaf has a full list of the styles.

alpha uses the authors' initials and a two digit year as the label, not the first authors name and a four digit year.

Could be the alphadin style, which uses the old DIN 1505

According to the link you provided, should it be [QDGBV14] ...?


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Am I allowed to provide the Camera Ready Copy (CRC) / Preprint of my paper published in Springer Workshop Proceedings online on my homepage?
my work was accepted as workshop paper and the conference was held some weeks ago. Until now, the paper is nowhere published. Last year, the Spriner Workshop Proceedings needed 6 months to publish it. I want to provide the paper now on my homepage and/or research gate and/or arXiv.
Am I allowed to provide the CRC version on my homepage/research gate/arXiv? What do I need to add to this "pre-print", e.g. as footnote? What are the typical Spriner Workshop Proceedings rules regarding providing the own work? And I am allowed to do this before it is officially published by Springer?
Thanks in advance.

The Springer Copyright transfer agreement that you would have signed explains what is allowed.

To avoid problems (in the future), put work online before signing copyright transfer agreements. (Noting that there may exist venues at which publication will be precluded.)

@GoodDeeds The only thing I have signed in advance of the workshop was about the recording during the conference. I never got any document from Springer. I also just submitted the pdf, not the latex sources. But since some months this seems to be ongoing practice by Springer...

@user3352632 Then you probably have not submitted the camera ready for the proceedings yet (which could be different from what the workshop page used). Also, not all workshops have official proceedings, so check that. I don't know what's typical, but I have usually seen Springer allow putting papers on arXiv. For example, the agreement for LNCS is here.

Yes, I do not see any reason you cannot. If you like, you put a header or footer that the paper was presented in ABC conference and the official version can be downloaded from the Springer website to save yourself from copyright issues. But I think, even without that header you should be fine. (Still, having that line in header/footer is better).
Putting it on Arxiv is more wise and professional by the way. It can give your work credibility and readability as well.


text:
Leaving academia to join company's R&D department - How to deal with not publishing anymore, losing the cutting-edge knowledge and decreasing h-index?
I have chosen money over h-index / google scholar profile fame. Now I am working on applying the things in reality, giving me a big chance of a great contribution to the company. However, I am not feeling very well as I know that I never will publish a paper, never work on improving algorithms, and never read the current top-tier conference proceedings.
I am in fear of losing the cutting edge knowledge and decreasing h-index, and not being able to show the world what I am working on via publishing papers. I will use more established technology to apply it to the problems.
How to deal with not publishing anymore, losing my cutting-edge knowledge and decreasing of my h-index?
I am not confident about my decision. The team will not publish any papers. What are good arguments for persuasion, and how can I still remain visible in the academic environment?

Why would you care about your h-index?

@TimRias: My fear is that I sold my knowledge too early without achieving the maximum reputation I could have achieved in academia.

Your h-index by definition cannot decrease unless papers start getting retracted: it can only stop going up, and even that may not happen immediately.

Acceptance, of the fact that you can't have the cake and eat it.

For what it's worth, the fact that when you talk about academia you talk mainly about your h-index, "achieving maximum reputation", and "showing the world" something, whereas when you talk about your new job you talk about making a contribution to something, makes me think that you probably made the right choice.

Interestingly, in my discipline, i.e., engineering, industry people get to IEEE Fellows much easier than those in academia :)   Further, when I was in the industry, I used to view academia as focusing on useless theoretical ideas/widgets/contraptions/etc,  Moreover, I worked for a company that was way ahead of academia by 5 to 10 years.

Don't tell me, you cried all the way to the bank

Even if you stay in academia, why do you care about your h-index? It just pushes you to publish low-quality papers, self-cite your papers, ask people to cite your papers, etc.

@Yacine Self-citations do not count towards h-index (or at least, not the ''proper'' one).

You look at your bank account and feel happy. That's how you deal with it. If your bank account doesn't make you happy, stay in academia.

"I chose to work for a living and now I'm worried about my StackOverflow reputation" :-)

I think it's very telling that you mention things like "h-index" and "showing the world what I am working on". These are signs of external validation and prestige, and academia has a highly structured, very inward looking ranking system (nobody, and I mean nobody, cares about your h-index outside of academia, and relatively few within it, actually) that people tend to internalise to the point that they can feel diminished as a person if they are not successful in those specific metrics.
If you had said "I'm worried that I won't be allowed to pursue non-conventional ideas" or "I will miss theoretical discussions with other really clever people", I would perhaps try to reassure you that these things exist in (parts of) the corporate world too. But you didn't. So my recommendation is: make like Elsa and let it go.
Personal anecdote time: some years ago, I slowly became aware that I did not, in fact, relish the idea of leading a research group. But I felt that not pursuing a PI job would prove that I was, after all, a failure; that all the work I'd done until then was for naught. Those are not good reasons to stay.
Shortly after, I left academia, and I am now a clinician. Because of my field, I actually have a lot of chances to contribute to publishable research. I rarely do it, because, to be honest, it's the least interesting part of my job. I have stimulating conversations with clever colleagues from much wider fields than before. I do novel stuff - not high-impact-factor novel, but this-didn't-exist-and-now-it-does novel. I've not looked at my citations in years, and my h-index is probably stuck - I've no idea. I still lurk on Academia SO because I like to be reminded that my decision was right :)

Not only do people outside academia not care about your h-index, but the overwhelming majority of them won't even know what that means.

@bta They won't know it means outside academia, although it's quite quick to explain what it is.

@Tom They still won't care. Saying "I work at company x" or "helped build product y" is more important for the vast, vast majority of people.

@Tom you can easily explain how it's calculated. "What it is" isn't quite as easy - a (crude) metric of publication output? Of research seniority? Of employability in academia?

@Ottie I mean, it's fairly clear that physicists who write a lot of extremely influential papers have extremely high h-indices.  Not hard to explain how it is a decent metric for a person's ability to balance both quantity and quality in their research publications, you would have to be deliberately trying to not understand.

You cannot do both. You made your choice by joining a "non-publishing group". In all likelihood, you will find your new career to have many challenging problems to solve. You will not loose your edge in thinking and problem solving and you will have to continue to learn new things. The relative paucity of people trying to join academia from industry is witness to life in R&D to be interesting and rewarding.
Please remind yourself that an h-index is not a measure of happiness and of personal worth. In fact, if you derive your feelings of self-worth from work, you are running big risks of being unhappy for long periods of your life. Some people need therapy to get over bad thinking habits like that.
All big decisions usually involve moments of regret for the path not taken. Your feelings of regret are normal.
Industrial R&D is not a prison. There are examples of people leaving industry in favor of an academic career or within industrial R&D choose a less remunerated job with more interesting tasks.

There's an old proverb: "You made your bed, now lie in it". Historically at least, there were companies that had research journals (IBM, HP) and companies that didn't (Burroughs). But retrospectively there are people in both groups who are recognised in making significant contributions (e.g. Waychoff in the Burroughs case) not to mention those who manoeuvred themselves into consultancy roles and got the best of both worlds (Knuth, Dijkstra, Barton).

If you are considered highly valued by your company and you live in the right place you can, in fact, do both to some extent. I don't know (or care) about h-index, but you can keep your skills up. It involves getting yourself associated with a university as a "highly valued" adjunct instructor/professor. I've known people to do this.
Some people in large corporate research organizations, who don't publish there, negotiate a bit of space for themselves (time, effort,...) and become adjuncts at universities. They can employ their normal field skills in teaching, perhaps advanced courses, but also, and more important, develop collaborative relationships with the research faculty. As long as their research doesn't impinge on the company's interests this can work.
It may take some effort, however, to develop such a relationship, both negotiating with the company and becoming known to an academic department and finding ways to participate. You have to think of it in other than economic terms, though, since adjunct pay is normally very low (sometimes insultingly so). But keeping your mind alive on interesting problems can be its own reward.
This probably requires a lot of face to face interactions, hence the importance of "place". And it requires that you stay highly productive in your main employment.

I'm a lawyer, which is distinct from most other academic fields in a few ways that are probably directly material here. Still, I occasionally publish academic papers or chapters while maintaining a law practice. I suspect its easier for lawyers to do that than most other academic fields, but I can directly testify it is possible at least in this field to do a bit of both.

@TimothyAWiseman, some employers constrain it.

Not knowing what field you're in, I do know of some researchers in social sciences who formally leave academia to work in industry but still want to do some research (but aren't really interested in teaching or be an adjunct). What they do is become "affiliated" with a center at a university, rather than a department. This allows them an institutional seat where they can access institutional resources (like journal access to stay up to date on the latest research) and a home they can use to publish from. The university benefits because they don't have to pay the individual and potentially get their name on research, and you get the institutional home. Obviously, the success of this depends on how supportive the company is with you spending time on research, and that's going to vary by manager/team/org as well as finding the right type of center that fits your research interests. But I think it can be done if continuing to do research and publish is really important to you.

Disclaimer: I think you used them as a rethoric figure, but I still think it is indicative or a certain "affirmation through science" bias.

I have chosen money over h-index / google scholar profile fame.

I think you made the correct decision, because chosing h-index / google scholar profile fame over money would have been a choice you can afford only if you are rich.
And even then, no one cares about h-index or google scholar profile fame, so it would be a choice like "I have chosen to wear my underpants inside out over money".
Who knows if Einstein was wearing his underpants inside out while he was thinking about general relativity. And who cares, if you do interesting thing your h-index or google scholar profile will be more interesting, but the contrary is not given (and absolutely not necessary).

A couple of comments:

You might still publish papers in a future job. Many R&D teams in industry do in fact go to conferences and publish papers. You probably won't be in the same job forever, so at some point you may be able to find one which moves you closer to academia.

In some fields, academia is not as "cutting edge" as industry. This may not be true of your field, but in my field (machine learning) it is certainly true that many academics are working on things which simply aren't applicable in the real world. For example, there is a technique called SMOTE which is very famous. The paper in which it was introduced has 20,000 citations, and people are still publishing papers about it. To be blunt, it doesn't work. An argument could even be made that it is worse than useless, since it can easily mess up results if not applied carefully. There are many other examples too. Of course, your field may be different.

You totally nailed this.  I move in and out of academia because there's not money to do semiconductor research in academia.

Responding somewhat narrowly to your "never work on improving algorithms" comment - I think you will find that industry R&D, which leans more towards engineering than science, still consists of making substantial novel improvements to existing art. The difference is merely in how the usefulness of improvements is judged - academia judges improvements on their novelty and ability to create new lines of questioning, while industry judges improvements on their usefulness to applications. Plenty of those useful improvements will happen to be novel, however! We don't have a problem of industry not producing novel ideas, we actually have a problem with industry producing a lot of novel ideas but not being very good at sharing them with the wider community.
Based on your comment I assume you're in computer science or an adjacent field. Working in embedded engineering, I can tell you that I use a lot of the ideas that CS academia outputs - and I have to modify them substantially for them to be useful in application.
So don't despair, you won't be stuck doing rote implementation of algorithms while academics are out having all the fun. You'll have plenty of novel work to do, and your publishing background may allow you to help with the problem of industry failing to share its improvements, your employer permitting.

The other answers cover the motivation/prestige aspect very well, but I wanted to touch on the concern about "never reading the current top-tier conference proceedings" and "losing my cutting-edge knowledge"
Since you mentioned algorithms, you're likely in a computer science or computer science adjacent field, which have greatly embraced open access publishing. Even in a more closed publication field, you can likely finagle some subscriptions as a member of a the R&D team. Read them! Early in my career the proceedings publication days for top conferences honestly felt like nerd Christmas. If I had a free hour throughout the day I'd read a paper or two. As I became more senior, I started a weekly reading group to keep the rest of the team up to date on our field. I never received anything but enthusiasm from management on these efforts. Even if I reach for more tested tools in the day to day work within industry, there's immense value in knowing where the cutting edge of your field is.
Academia is great for giving you time and space for studying your field deeply, and a rich community of brilliant minds to converse with. But don't underestimate how close to cutting edge you can keep just consuming hundreds and hundreds of research papers over the years.

I don't know what industry you're in or what type of company you're working for, but many of those aspects of academia you mention are still present in a corporate environment.
You mentioned worrying about not staying current with published research.  The last two places I've worked have been fairly large companies, and they've had corporate subscriptions to various library services.  Anybody in the company could freely access a wide variety of research journals.  It's usually pretty easy to request the company add a subscription to another journal that's relevant to whatever I'm working on.  You can have access to all the information you need to stay current, and the company pays for it.  Some companies will even cover the costs for attending an academic conference on a relevant topic.  If your company doesn't have resources like that, don't underestimate what's available in your community.  Public libraries often have access to a variety of research journals (a good librarian can find you anything), and some community colleges will let locals use their library resources for a small membership fee.  Professional societies (ACM, ASME, etc.) are also a great way to keep your knowledge up to date and have access to things like conference publications.
Also, companies publish research a lot more often than you might think.  You can see published papers when companies partner with university research groups, or want to attract other organizations to research the same topic.  One of the most common cases, though are so-called defensive publications.  These are ways of releasing research publicly so that it becomes prior art and prevents anyone from patenting it in the future.  Maybe the company decides not to commercialize the idea right now and doesn't want to risk someone else's patent blocking them if they change their mind down the road.  Maybe they hope the technology will become part of an industry standard (many standards bodies do not allow patent-encumbered technology).  I - despite being on a "non-publishing team" - was a co-author on a couple of papers for technologies that my company ultimately decided not to pursue, but were very similar to something that we did commercialize. Publishing our research helped build a safety margin against patent trolls.  A lot of these defensive publications get published through special-purpose publication services (such as Questel's Research Disclosure, or IBM's own Technical Disclosure Bulletin) that are designed for maximum visibility by lawyers and patent examiners, not necessarily maximum visibility by other researchers, so the academic world doesn't always see them.  Those papers can, however, rack up a very large number of citations on patents.

Many, but not all, companies encourage people to write articles about non-confidential parts of their work, or personal projects. Especially if the article helps showcase something the company would like to encourage. So there are opportunities to publish, if not usually in academic journals.
Companies also encourage folks to come up with patentable or near-patentable ideas. That's another form of publication, and even if you and the company aren't awarded the patent it certainly boosts your credibility. Indeed sometimes the goal is to establish that an idea is not patentable so it can be used safety but isn't restricted.
Depending on your field, there are also opportunities to present at industry conferences, or to get involved in industry standards, or things like that. Or to lead internally by researching new ideas and helping determine their value to the company, and try to lead adoption if you can show management they're worthwhile.
The company may also have a research division, which is often more like academia than the rest of the business and which in fact may have a publish-or-perish culture (though the publication may have to be internal).
In some companies, the only way to reach the highest technical ranks is to have a history of just this kind of technical leadership on top of performing outstanding work on immediate job requirements.
So if you really want to play public  prestige games, your company may or may not give you opportunities to do so. Talk to your management.

I did the same thing some 20 years ago and had severe doubts about my choice.
I was not a top-notch scientist, but very interested in new technologies. I loved to teach though. The jump was even bigger than you, going from physics to IT.
I never looked back.
Sure, I did not publish anything directly and my scientific knowledge was reduced dramatically.
But there were so, so many positive aspects - way bigger than the drawbacks (of course this is very individual and subjective)

First, money. I have a family and a life outside of work so I want to be able to live comfortably while I can profit from it.
Second, funding. I am not anymore in a frantic search for grants or kneeling before some boards to get money to travel, for a laptop or whatever.
Third, the medieval culture. In academia, it was a matrix and you had to pay your respects. In the industry, you may have a lot of bullshit and buzzwords, but in R&D you will likely avoid it to some point.
and then several others without a particular order: work/life balance, traveling, international relationships by default, ...

If you are very lucky, you may still publish - but it may not be that important anymore (no more publish or perish). You can manage PhD students which is very rewarding intellectually.
Science will always be in my heart, I kept very close relations with my friends who stayed in academia. I moved forward, though, and I am now part of a highly innovative industry and do not regret it.
I will probably discuss with my company about teaching at the university as a pro bono activity for our society (especially at less fortunate schools). This is another thing you can consider.


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Why does Researchgate not include the booktitle tag in their bibtex for inproceedings / conference papers?
After I always found incomplete entries in the bibliography of theses, I investigated the cause and discovered that Researchgate (RG) does not output a booktitle tag for inproceedings in BibTeX, even though the conference and everything else is correctly specified on the paper's page.
My bug report about this was never answered by RG. There is no good way to contact them either. You just can send messages. However, the real problem is: Google Scholar crawls the entries and then often outputs the one from RG as default (although the paper link is to another source, when you change to BibTeX). It's a pity that you can't change anything on Google Scholar, even as an author, but it's only crawled there. This is different with RG, which wants to be a "network", where you enter the papers yourself, but have no possibility to create the BibTeX correctly. This is annoying and makes little sense to me. If Google crawls it from there and rates the entry higher than that of LCNS or your own university, then you automatically get the incomplete one from RG displayed at GS.
This certainly leads to many students receiving point deductions for incomplete bibliographies simply because RG does not produce a complete BibTeX. What can be done about this?

Those students are not receiving deductions for incomplete bibliographies just because RG did it wrong; they are receiving them because they used a random .bib entry they found on the internet and didn't double-check it.

This is not specific to ResearchGate, but in my experience almost all commercial websites that do provide bibtex entries provide very bad ones. This prominently includes Elsevier and Springer for their own stuff.

@FedericoPoloni you are right. RG is not to blame for students not checking things and not working properly. But my point is more regarding why they don't care about providing BibTeX properly.

Nobody knows why Research Gate does what it does. Most likely, they simply don't care enough about such as secondary feature, since their business model isn't to sell reliable bibliographic information to users, but to sell user data to other companies.
What can be done about this is not to rely on the bibliographic data that Research Gate supplies, but to conduct a proper literature research using more conventional sources.


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author name conventions: how to prevent misindexing?
Fact: Papers/preprints' indexing systems (e.g., arXiv, Scholar, Scopus, WOS, ProjectEuclid, etc.) systematically misindex and/or incorrectly display author names that do not correspond to the most common English name formats: "FirstName MiddleName Surname" or "FirstName MiddleName Surname1-Surname2". A typical example is the indexing of "Name Surname1 Surname2" as "Surname2, N[ame] S[urname1]".
Such misindexing (real-life examples in parentheses) negatively affects some authors' careers, and especially

authors' identification ("So this paper is yours as well? But the author name [Surname2, N. S.] is different from your other papers [Surname1 Surname2, N.]. How so?")

authors' bibliometrics (Some authors regularly spend their time with Scopus/Clarivate/Scholar clerks trying to convince them that they authored a certain paper and that their name is what they say it is, and not what some software thinks it is. This costs time and effort that could be invested otherwise, especially since, typically, each paper must be dealt with separately).

job opportunities (1), because misindexing has a disruptive effect on bibliometrics, and in turn because bibliometrics is related to academic profile/status.

job opportunities (2), because of the bibliometric requirements in some academic systems (e.g. the Italian ASN habilitation or the Russian VAK habilitation, the German habilitation in some universities for some fields)

the perception of authors in their community ("Oh really? You have experienced such misindexing problems? Perhaps you should be more careful how you enter your name in the databases!")

Question: How, if at all possible, can one prevent such misindexing of their name from happening?
What steps can be taken to address this problem systematically and/or on a broad scale?
By "systematically" I mean "referring to a single author's publication list" (as opposed to "referring to a single misindexed paper"). By "broad scale" I mean "as a community effort, concerning more than one author at a time".
Nonanswers: I am aware of only one partially satisfactory solution: using a unique author identifier such as ORCID. In fact, in my experience, this just helped claiming authorship of misindexed papers, but does not prevent papers from being misindexed.
Why this is a sensitive issue: People identify themselves with their name more than with every other aspect of their lives (their community, their country, the color of their skin). In most cultures people have a name: they do not choose to use that name for registration purposes. Using a different name (e.g. dropping a second surname, removing a space, adding a hyphen) is not an option.
Let me provide some examples where misindexing is particularly diminishing:

there are single surnames consisting of more words, and in which the same word can have a different meaning and bear different significance in the name. Example: "Dos Santos" vs "Dos Casas" (Spanish).
there are single surnames in which the same word can be either a legitimate standalone name, or a per se meaningless particle. Example: "Dalla" vs "Dalla Casa" (Italian)
there are single surnames consisting of article + name. Example: Le Fleur (French), El Hosseini (Arabic), etc.
there are single (sur)names with a meaning: "ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz" (Arabic) means "son of the Servant of the Almighty" (where "son of" is the standard patronymic particle, and "Almighty" is a theonym). Any misindexing of this name, such as "ibn", "ibn ʿAbd", "al-ʿAzīz" not only sounds ridiculous to any native speaker, but also turns the meaning into a potentially offensive one.

What I believe is an origin of the problem: It is well-understood that misindexing spreads and "reverberates". This is because most indexing systems import metadata from original sources (in my field of research: arXiv), without any form of consistency check. Example: Scholar imports metadata from arXiv; Elsevier submission "via arXiv" imports metadata from arXiv (and not always combines them correctly with the authors' data stored in Elsevier's EMSS).
This motivated addressing only the misindexing issue on arXiv in a previous version of this question (below).

arXiv "authors' name" field is well-known to behave poorly, especially for indexing purposes. In particular:

arXiv's conventions seem to be based on the standard English name format: "FirstName MiddleName Surname" or "FirstName MiddleName Surname1-Surname2". Nearly every name not satisfying this convention is misindexed. The foremost example is probably "FirstName Surname1 Surname2", which is usually indexed as if Surname1 were a middle name. Worst case scenario is the name format "FirstName SurnameParticle Surname":
It seems that arXiv has an exception for "FirstName surnameParticle Surname" (note that here "surnameParticle" is lower case). For instance German surnames starting with "von" and Dutch names starting with "van" are indexed all right (actually, arXiv provides "John von Neumann" as an example), but nearly everything else falls in the 'misindexed' category. This especially includes most names with capitalized SurnameParticle's, as commonly found in romance languages, Semitic languages and others.

arXiv's research field removes first names when clicking on 'author' links. This forces to reenter the queried author's first name and is particularly damaging to people with common surnames.

Whereas these problems are both virtually well-known, it seems that nobody successfully lobbied to solve them. Is there a way to do so? What attempts have been made?
Supposing one were interested in addressing the matter, what would a good angle be? For instance, should one argue that arXiv's indexing system is bad for third-party databases (e.g. it propagates these sort of indexing errors to Scholar, etc.), or should one argue that arXiv is discriminating authors on a cultural basis?
While I have no insight in how exactly arXiv stores author names, I would expect that implementing names' parenthesization (as e.g. in BibTeX) would not be impossible. For instance, author names could be entered as
{SurnameAuthor1, NamesAuthor1} and {SurnameAuthor2, NamesAuthor2}
I understand this might be a gargantuan task – especially given arXiv's hardline on backwards compatibility –, but some compromise solutions might be implemented, such as fetching the correct names from ORCID profiles (at least for those authors who have one and linked it with arXiv).

ArXiv is free.  As a consequence, it has no money to do anything and any proposal had better be accompanied by a source of funding.  So the first part of a good angle is to find the money to pay for it.

@AlexanderWoo I do see your point that what I am asking might be costly and I agree this would be the best way to go about it. However: (1) the alleged cost obviously depends on the current implementation. (2) Luckily, arXiv has a way of improving over time (thanks to its contributors); my question is rather how to prioritize what I perceive as a community's necessity, so that it can be addressed as funding allows. (3) Maybe it is just my perception, but I do feel that arXiv owes restitution to the authors whose names are misindexed. "It's free, so take it or leave it" doesn't cut it for me.

If you manage to convince the ArXiv board that this is important, then they have to turn around and go convince the people providing their pitifully small amount of funding that this is important.  It would be easier to cut out the middle step and go convince Simons (or maybe you can interest Ford or Mellon) that this is important.

Academia SE can’t do anything about it, so this reads as a rant not an answerable question.

@JonCuster I disagree. At the very least there might be Academia SE users who know more about arXiv name indexing and are willing to share their insights. As pointed out above, the difficulty in the implementation of what I am asking for is an important factor. Additionally, I am asking about what has been tried, which can hardly be construed as ranting. Finally, Academia SE is the perfect environment to survey whether this is perceived as a real necessity or rather just my personal fight against windmills. I think I am in good company though: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ap.html

@Dirakka - I just realized you might not be American and don't know how funding works in the US.  There is a long tradition in the US of very wealthy people donating some of their money to fund various activities.  For example, orchestras and museums in the US are funded mostly by private wealthy individuals, not governments.  About half of the funding for the ArXiv comes personally from Jim Simons, a multibillionaire and former math professor who left academia to start a hedge fund.  (He also is responsible for 10-20% or so of total research funding in pure math.)

@AlexanderWoo Indeed I am not American :) Thank you for your clarification. In my academic community there is some hope that arXiv will eventually replace journal publication altogether. Whereas this is currently an outlandish prospect (and one should be careful what one wishes for), maybe crowdfunding projects with such impact as the arXiv's might be a good start. I might add that, in the case of arXiv, the internationalization of its users' community calls for a more diverse funding as well, but that is my wishful thinking.

@Dirakka - Everyone would like ArXiv to have more diverse funding, but crowdfunding $1M a year every year (without some headline donors) hasn't been pulled off for too many things.

Even if multiple-past-name support were added to arXiv, the much much harder part would be retroactively reindexing existing papers.  ArXiv does not know which triple-named authors are using a middle name and which are using two last names.  Each of those names would have to be disambiguated manually.

Finally, Academia SE is the perfect environment to survey whether this is perceived as a real necessity — As much as I sympathize with the question, this is the wrong platform for an opinion poll.

@JeffE ArXiv does not know which triple-named authors are using a middle name and which are using two last names. Yes, this is clear. It was also my reason to suggest a possible solution that involves ORCID (or any other id, for that matter). It is self-evident that willing arXiv users should contribute the task somehow (e.g. by reclaiming authorship of their preprints). However, depending on implementation, I think there is much room for automatism. For instance, author names could be converted to the new format upon association of the author profile with ORCID.

This is way, way too long. Also, be aware that old posts with no upvoted answers are likely to be automatically deleted, so I wouldn't put too much effort into maintaining this post (unless you think your changes could lead to it being reopened).

@cag51 Thank you for your comment: there was an error in a name translation and it seemed right to fix it. In fact, I did not understand why the question was closed in the first place, so I am not sure what to modify in order to have it reopened.

For one thing, it is way, way too long.

Just use the standard BibTeX way out: "Last Names as you Want them Written, First Second Third Name". I.e., "de la Carrera y Cajal Rodríguez, José Miguel Antonio" (very much made-up Spanish name).

According to the guidelines, that would be interpreted as two authors: https://arxiv.org/help/prep#author: "Multiple author names should be separated with a comma"

@Dirakka In BibTeX, author names are separated by "and", not by a comma. The answer by vonbrand is brief and could be revised, but it is correct.

@Jake thank you for your comment. However, I am afraid that you (and vonbrand) miss the point. I am trying to feed my name to the arXiv, which creates a BibTeX record for my work by its own (anglocentric) rules. The 'guidelines' I am mentioning above are the arXiv's, not BibTeX's. If I were to enter a comma in the arXiv name field, arXiv would assume that these are the names of two distinct authors


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How would I judge the status of a researcher without talking to them or reading their papers?
I was using Google Scholar to judge the rank of a researcher, but then realized I couldn't find everyone I wanted to and came across this question which highlighted this problem. Looking at Scorpus, which was suggested in that same answer, seems to downvalue any non-Elsevisor publications and not have any current data (from the last year). Microsoft Research seems altogether unintuitive to use and doesn't seem to have h-index at all. I tried PublishorPerish, but filtering data to find the correct researcher's papers seems ridiculously difficult.
I would like to be able to judge status somewhat programmatically, understanding there may be some flaws in this method, as it would be somewhat cumbersome to do it by hand on the scale I would like to. I will probably supplement it my sorting the top 3-5 by hand, but I would not like to do the entire set by hand.
Is there any proper solution to this problem? If not, what is the generally accepted method to do this?
At the behest of many people, I am a student, but this question is geared to generally understanding the current methods of researcher evaluation, not necessarily just by students

It'd probably be useful if you could explain the context more, i.e. why are you judging the researcher's status in the first place? In the context of choosing a research group it might be the wrong question to ask, for example. And the h-index has a large variability between fields and subfields, see e.g. this, so using it indiscriminately to compare two researchers' status is certainly overly simplistic.

Was this not the question you posted about an hour ago and then deleted?

@SolarMike No. I haven't posted and deleted a question recently.

@Anyon Surely there's some way to compare researchers then?

Yes, surely there are ways to compare researchers. Which way you choose depends on what your goals are, and for many of those goals you might not find any of the necessary information in a database. Search and tenure committees judge researchers all the time, but they don't rely on any one algorithm. Students judge them, too, in deciding who to work with.

@BryanKrause - I'm looking for an understanding of both how tenure committees, judges, researchers, or students would judge it. Are you sayinh this is too broad for one question and should be broken down into 4 different questions?

@lwl59438cuoly Probably each of those is also too broad even by itself, but before asking new questions, I'd spend an extensive time searching through existing Q&A here that addresses all of those topics.

Some example search terms to get you started might include: https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=tenure+decision https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=search+committee https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=choosing+advisor

Do you want to judge status or quality? Many quality researchers may not reach the status they deserve because of their country, race, gender, or any other sort of biases.

@AzorAhai--hehim I guess I would want status. I was operating under the presumption that quality would eventually lead to status, but you do make an important point that I had not considered. I don't understand how I would even quantify status, so quality will do if status is not achievable

@lwl59438cuoly Well, I think status is much easier to answer, but it depends on whether you think it's useful if you actually want quality.

@AzorAhai--hehim How would you judge the status? How would someone have good status but not be of high quality. I was under the assumption that there are 3 groups - "high status, high quality", "low status, high quality", and "low status, low quality"

@lwl59438cuoly The short answer is look at people who are asked to give talks at conferences --- especially keynote talks --- join panels, travel to universities to give small talks. However, this is biased towards White men (in the US). So you'd be less likely to identify high quality people by doing that.

@lwl59438cuoly I guess the most obvious and extreme example of "high status, low quality" would be someone fraudulent like Schön before being exposed.

I would not dichotimize - it's not high vs. low, but rather I'm saying status is not a perfect predictor of quality, and is biased in known ways

I upvoted the question because I do suspect it is a question in many peoples' minds. But, at the same time, I do think it seriously missed the mark, even while being a natural sort of question. In any case, it's not that everyone is comparable by being assigned a single numerical score. (I know some people wish it could be so, perhaps administrators by number of external funding dollars...)

@paulgarrett I don't think OP is expecting it to be a fair comparison. The question explicitly states that OP will go through the top 3-5 and sort those by hand, so it simply has to be a "good enough" measure to eliminate the rest of the dataset

You still haven't answered the question of why you would want to attempt this - since the answer obviously depends on what you need the information for. Personal opinion alert: academia is already fatally status-obsessed, why bother feeding into the grossness of the academic star system?

Assuming the question is about status and not quality:
Job title is a strong indicator of status.  The meaning of each title typically depends on the country.  For the US, as an example, named professorships have the highest status, followed by professors and associate professors.
The status of the university is also a strong predictor of status of the researcher.
"Status" is not quantitative and attempting to rank status is not productive.

The best signifiers of status in a community will be being invited to give (plenary/keynote) at the (top) conferences for that community, and to win the prizes and awards that community bestows.
Having many highly cited papers will often correlate with that (publishing papers other people are interested in contributes to gaining status, high status makes your papers more likely to be cited), but this can be gamed; and there will be cases where people earn high status with a single remarkable accomplishment not translating well into citations, stuff like that.
As mentioned in the comments, quality and status are different things. As much as we'd like academia to be a pure meritocracy, it isnt. In a similar line, you won't be able to see who gets invited to give plenary talks, only who accepts. Some people being unable to travel (ill health, no funding/remote location, care responsibilities) will distort the picture.

Conference invitations in some fields (the ones I am familiar with) are biased towards men.

@AnonymousPhysicist I'd claim that that is a facet of women often not been given the status they deserve; not an issue with how well conference invitations work as indicator for status.

My comment was context for your answer, not a critique.

Your answer discusses post-invitation bias. I would upvote if you discussed invitation selection biases, per Anon's comments.

Another issue here is the correct time-frame.  Does someone with more invited talks in the past 20 years with no talks in the last five get ranked above someone with half the number of talks in the past 20 years but several talks in the past five?  I think the question is impossible to answer without knowing for what purpose the ranking is to be used.

Use Scopus, because:

Sure it's maintained by Elsevier, but it also includes non-Elsevier papers.
Even if it does not have data from the last year, papers published in the last year probably have not have had time to accrue enough citations to change the h-index of well-established researchers.

Alternatively you could use a database such as Google Scholar or Web of Science.


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Two weeks prior to PhD viva, what should I do?
update: I passed my viva this week, thank you so much for your kind support!
Thank you so much for your encouraging comments in my previous post regarding PhD thesis submission (What should I do the day before submitting my PhD thesis?). Now 1.5 months have passed by and my viva will take place in two weeks. I took a short break after submission and have recently started looking at my thesis again. I am wondering if you have any tips for PhD viva? P.S. I am a PhD student in social science in the UK and my viva will take place via zoom. Thanks so much!

So, @JoseeLuis, did you pass? :D

@astronat yes!! Thanks for asking! I will update in the original post :)

Congratulations Dr!

Here are some of my tips, coming from someone who had a Zoom viva in February (in the UK). My field is physics rather than social sciences, but I think all of these tips apply nonetheless.

Make a list of potential questions that you could be asked in the viva. I did some of this as I was writing my thesis, as inevitably you have to summarise or cut parts that are too long, so these are ripe topics for questions. I also made use of lists of viva questions that other people have prepared; a particularly extensive and useful example is at the end of this blog post: http://salmapatel.co.uk/academia/phd-viva-preparation-steps/.

Practice answering these questions out loud. Get someone to quiz you if you can. Especially practice the length of your answers -- don't just say yes or no, but don't waffle for five minutes either. Focus on answers to "soft" questions such as "tell us about your thesis", as they'll likely start the viva with something along those lines and it will relax you if you can answer that confidently and smoothly.

Summarise your thesis. I made notes on the key points/arguments of each chapter, as well as noting any key figures or tables that I might need to refer to. Since your viva is on Zoom, you can even add bookmarks and annotations to your pdf document, and have that open on your computer while the viva is ongoing (I did this, but in the end didn't refer to a single one).

Re-read key papers. I identified about fifteen key papers in the literature that my research was based on, or whose methodologies I had followed, or had key results that mine agreed/disagreed with. I made sure I knew the main points of all these papers and how they related to my work. I think this was the most valuable piece of preparation I did, as it made me very confident that I knew the literature, and I answered some questions in the viva very well by explicitly referring to these key works.

Have a mock viva. You can ask your supervisor to arrange this. It doesn't have to be as long as the real thing (mine was about an hour). It's a chance for you to get familiar with the set up (although we're probably all old hands at Zoom by now), and practice answering some of the more general questions. This really helped relax me and demystify the process. Make sure to arrange it about a week before the real thing, so you have time to act on any suggestions they might have.

Don't over-prepare! You know your own work better than you think. I was so worried that I needed to revise all of undergraduate physics and the background to every topic in cosmology, but in reality the examiners asked me very few questions that didn't directly relate to my research. It was also fine when I said "I don't know" (which happened quite a lot!); they guided me through an answer and seemed happy to hear my reasoning.

Other observations: the external examiner asked me the more "nit picky" questions, while the internal asked basically the same questions for each chapter: "tell me about this chapter", "what was your contribution?" for chapters based on multi-author papers and "choose a result or figure from this chapter and explain it to me". You will probably have an independent chair in the meeting too, though they will stay silent throughout unless there is a problem. The Zoom viva will probably be shorter than if it was in real life -- mine was barely over two hours and I left almost disappointed that it wasn't longer!
A great answer about what to expect in a viva and how to answer those "soft questions" is here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/59811/49043.
Good luck!

Great answer, one small addition, it can be helpful to have a quick look at recent publications of the opponent to get a feel for what they are interested in.

What not to do: get defensive (or worse, combative).  When I was a grad student, I watched a PhD student who had a simple (and obvious) error on one of his slides try to argue his way out of it.  All of us grad students watching wanted to run up, and whisper into his ear "change the sign on the second term in the equation" (or whatever it was), but we couldn't.  It was a horrible thing to watch.  When you are asked a question, think about it, don't think "oh, this guy is trying to 'gotcha' me", listen to what is being asked

I too had a viva in the UK and this is a great answer. One question that I hadn't expected was: The chair asked me about a mathematical condition I had in the appendix, a monster of a condition that I'm very much ashamed of in retrospect: He asked me if I could give an intuitive interpretation. He probably wanted to test my reaction and/or crack a joke. I was lucky that I'd struggled enough with that condition to be able to mumble some sort of answer. Point is: if you try to bury stuff in the appendix, some of the committee are sharp enough to "gotcha"! But don't overthink it.

Thank you so much! This answer and people's replies are super helpful. I will come back and share my experiences once it's over.


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What to expect from a PHD in Computer Science? (UK)
A little background, I'm currently studying a masters in computer science, and I've been wondering about how I should progress my career. I've found myself mostly interested in the research side of Computer Science, and I've been trying to figure out which would be the best steps moving forward.
I've looked into a couple of studentships with some interesting topics out there, but I don't generally see much information on the day-to-day life of a PHD student for this field. I understand each position may be a unique experience but I was wondering if anyone could share any experiences which may help?
Thank you very much in advance, Stay safe.

I've found myself mostly interested in the Research and Development side of Computer Science.  For research, a PhD makes sense. For development, it doesn't. You'll need to decide which path you want to take.

@user2768 Apologies, yes, I meant the research side.

This is a very broad question, and accordingly difficult to answer. So much of the PhD "experience" depends on individual circumstances: supervisor, project, department, living arrangements, work-life balance, your health and mental wellbeing etc. For "day in the life" type info, I can highly recommend Simon Clark's PhD vlogs on Youtube (physics PhD rather than Comp Sci, but they will give you a good idea).

@astronat Yeah, I understand how difficult the question is to answer, they're evidently a unique experience, and I would never expect anything clear cut which is why I asked if anyone could share their experiences. I have watched Simon Clark's Vlogs, they've been extremely informative, and a great resource but I was hoping for something similar but within the field of Computer Science. I know it's a bit of an ask though.

PhDs in the UK are different to their US cousins, so that is something to bare in mind. Specifically, UK PhDs have no coursework, and they have to be finished within 3.5 years, and the have a real exam - the viva voca at the end. Rather than just being superficial these tend to shape the life of a UK PhD student - you come in and are doing 100% research from day one. The time limit, combined with the viva exam mean that you are focusing on your thesis right from the start as well.

I don't generally see much information on the day-to-day life of a PHD student

Watch The PhD [Comic] Movies, sure they're make believe, but you can read between the lines

While the I've love PhD comics ever since I was a student my self, they do more represent the US experience of grad school than the UK experience.

Thanks, i'll check out those movies when I'm free.

First, let me say that this is probably better asked face to face (video call!) with someone in your current institution. You should be able to ask either your tutor or project advisor and they may be able to point you to their PhD student(s) if they have any. They can also say things which are either more related to your past experiences or area you want to study in.
That having been said, as an MSc student you will hopefully be doing a summer project at the moment. This is a self-contained piece of work with which you get some guidance from an advisor. A PhD can be considered like either one very big, less well contained project or several slightly bigger, somewhat well contained, linked projects. Due to this increase in size many people find a PhD mentally very difficult. There is one big goal - a thesis and viva at the end - but many steps to get along the way.
You seem in a good position in that you've found some posting which you find interesting. I strongly recommend contacting the potential supervisor and they should be able to answer many of your questions.

Yeah, you're right, I'm working on my final project currently, and you're right again. I should talk to my current tutor more about this too. I'm not sure if our university has any CS PHD students though, we're smaller but i'll definitely start up that conversation soon. Thank you :)

As requested, this is about Computer Science PhDs in the UK.
First, how professional life as a PhD student looks like will depend a lot on the supervisor. As such, it is very important to have a chat with them to see whether expectations align - and to understand that expectations go both ways. That said, there are some general features that will typically be present in some way, and knowing these should help asking about the right aspects.
Most of your time will be taken up actually doing the research. That includes reading up on the literature, discussing science with your advisor and others, potentially programming something or even creating some physical artefact, academic writing, and just thinking hard.
There will probably be some training opportunities (how to give presentations, how to write a paper, etc). Asking a lecturer for permission to sit in on their lectures is also acceptable. Some of the training opportunities may be mandatory, and maybe you're even expected to complete a module or so. This will be more extensive if you are part of a CDT (Centre for Doctoral Training); in other cases you may need to take the initiative to even learn about these opportunities.
There will be seminars, both on the departmental level and for smaller research units. Here you'll be able to listen to researchers (both from your institutation and from outside) to give talks about their work. Expect to be asked to present yourself. Sometimes there will be group meetings, where everyone working in a particular area meets maybe once a week. Journal clubs can be a good opportunity to get into reading the literature. These are typically organized by PhD students, so if there is none, maybe you can start it.
If you like travelling, then conferences are a great part of doing a CS PhD. There are national events such as BCTCS, but the primary focus tends to be on international meetings. Here you'll meet the few other people in the world that are enthusiastic and knowledgable about the same arcane aspect of computer science, and get to see something of the world in the process. Getting funding to attend a conference usually requires having a publication accepted for presentation there. How many conferences you'll get to attend will vary - I'd reckon that 2-10 during a PhD are usual values.

Thank you, this is a great insight.


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Gift to a second-advisor
I have just defended my MA thesis which I have one advisor who does not live at the same place with me, and therefore I have build my thesis and discuss all the results around bi-monthly frequency with an academics who works at the same institution with me.
She also came to my defense (which was at another city we live) and from the beginning to the end supported my and my work as if she is my primary advisor. (FYI, my main advisor even said to me that "you did all the work by yourself and I did not contribute anything). Plus, the academics I work with is also my boss and she's an executive person in the workplace. I have two questions in mind:

I want to give a copy of my finished thesis in a hardcover format, is it okay to give the final version with a hardcover one to the advisors? (+ I did not want to give it to my main advisor as he did not care/direct me at all) I heard some people give the hardcopy, but I am not sure about it. In fact I want her to read the Acknowledgements part that I thank to her in a detailed way..
I consider giving a nice present to her, could be a good quality pen etc, but should it be appropriate because she holds also an executive title at the workplace?

At the beginning, I was hesitant to work with her as people around may misunderstand it, but we started somehow. But since completing this thesis meant a lot to me, I want to give a nice gift to her? If it could be appropriate, what would be your suggestions?

Whether it is first or second it is basically the same issue.

Not quite. A much smaller gift would be appropriate for master's supervision vs PhD.

Barring any specific restrictions in your country or institution, a gift is fine in this circumstance. I'd suggest something small, fairly inexpensive, but thoughtful. I've got chocolates from a master's student sitting on my desk right now and I appreciated them. If you are from another country or region, some treat from your place of origin would be appropriate. Really, just a thoughtful card in which you've written how much they helped you is enough (and greatly appreciated).
I'd not give the hardbound copy unless they specifically ask for it. We supervisors only have so much shelf space and most of us don't have room for all the physical master's dissertations we supervise. I'd personally not want one. Digital copy, sure, but I don't have a use for a physical copy and your supervisor likely doesn't either.

Note: if you give food you do run the risk of bumping into unknown dietary restrictions. However, I wouldn't worry about it as it's the thought that counts. I can't actually eat the chocolates from the student which I have in my desk, but I appreciated the thought behind getting them. My partner will enjoy eating them!


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Is it okay to submit a paper from a master's thesis without informing the advisor?
I would like to submit a part of my master's thesis which is more or less close to an end. I wrote the entire thesis without having much feedback from my advisor as he's in a different city and we had literally no chance to meet except a few times. The feedback he had provided was too little and I want to submit a part of the thesis to a conference on my own. I will give his name of course while submitting but do I have to also inform him?
If I have to, then he might not approve this as he contributed very little and still he doesn't like my research much.
What should I do according to your experiences?

Should I inform him and bare his negative comments about not submitting at all?
Or should I submit as single-author paper as I, from the beginning to the end, was only not the writer (of course it's my thesis) but also the solely contributor to this thesis? (He even said it to me as " you did very much well in fact, on your own", in one of our meeting.)

edit: by giving his name, I mean not as a formal authorship, rather than as a footnote, sth like that.

I would be pretty mad if someone submitted my name on a paper and didn't even tell me first. Why not ask your advisor if they want to be a co-author?

No. No. I have repeated no because comments must be long enough.

"he doesn't like my research much" < - - If that is the, how do you think he will react when he finds out that, without asking, you put his name on your research?

@Kathy I thought it is not like a formal co-authorship, rather than mentioning his name as a footnote or so.

@usergrad Okay, so ask him that. It lets him know you plan to submit and gives him a chance to make any comments, objections, etc. Far better for that to happen before submission than after.

Keeping on good terms with your advisor is paramount.  I would certainly discuss this with them before submitting.  If this is something that's uncomfortable for you, you should try to improve your relationship with your advisor or change advisors altogether.

You should definitely inform your advisor. It is very likely that his response will actually be useful for you, and in any case doing this behind his back can lead to an unhealthy situation. On the other hand, you are in no obligation to actually do what he tells you afterwards, if his reaction turns out to be unreasonable.

Your first priority should be to finish your degree. Without more information, I don't know whether submitting alone would jeopardize that or not, so find out first. Make sure you understand the rules at your university around theses and publication.
Also consider what is considered appropriate in your field. I assume it is economics, but I have no knowledge whether it is appropriate for a student to publish without his or her advisor. In some fields it would be fine. In others, it would be considered a transgression.
Your advisor probably knows all of this. If personalities don't suggest otherwise it would probably be best to ask him how you should submit your work to the conference and whether that would cause any difficulties.
My best guess is that he would say ok, but if not, consider what else he says in light of the first priority - completion.
At the level of a master's degree, a joint paper with your advisor still has value, so don't rule that out completely if it is the common practice of your field, or if it would help advance your cause.
But you are probably the best judge here to evaluate both the requirements of your university and the relationship with the advisor.

Under no circumstances can it be ok to submit with his name on it but without his explicit consent. This wouldnt be ok if he'd be enthusiastic about your research, and if he is not particularly fond of it, this will quite certainly end badly.
If you are confident that your advisor did not contribute to the planned submission in a meaningful way, the default course of action should be to sent him a message informing him of the planned submission and thanking him for the guidance received. That way, if he disagrees on not having contributed, there is a chance to fix stuff before they blow.

I interpreted it as an ack, not as co-authorship, but even that requires permission in some places.

I am based in Germany and had a similar problem recently. As it turns out, my university had a guideline which explicitly says that you are the sole author of you bachelor's / master's thesis, since everything else (e.g. co-authorship of your advisor) would be in conflict with the fact that the thesis should be an assessment of ONLY the student's capabilities. I suggest that you find out if your university has a guideline for such issues.
Having your advisor on board might have advantages later, i.e. when it comes to writing rebuttals or preparing the presentation.

Authorship on the thesis itself is not the same as authorship on a paper derived from the thesis. Distilling a say 100 page thesis to a good 6 - 10 page paper is a non-trivial task, and if the advisor had a role in that by for example proposing which aspects from the thesis to put in the paper and how to build it up overall, that would certainly have deserved co-authorship.

@silvado really? I give and get advice to/from colleagues about that all the time, even editing/correcting papers. We've never asked for or even considered coauthorship.

@guifa I agree that editing/correcting is usually not a sufficient contribution for authorship. But what I refer to here is essentially planning the structure of the paper and making a compelling line of argumentation to come to the conclusions.

@silvado I agree with you. To me, the original question sounded as if the supervisor would be hands-off and the paper would be an excerpt of the thesis.

For this answer I'll assume that you already figured out that publishing your results is not a problem per se (i.e., it doesn't put your graduation in danger or conflicts with other guidelines).
You shouldn't inform your advisor - you should talk to him before your continue. Preferably in person (don't you have to go to his university and present the results?), if that's not possible on the phone/videochat. Tell him about your plans and listen to what he has to say. I can imagine several different reactions:

Maybe he wasn't providing little feedback because he didn't like your work but because there were other things consuming his time (other students to advise, restructuring of departments, private issues, whatever) and he would be happy to be your coauthor.
He doesn't want to be your coauthor but is okay with you submitting the work single-authored (note that this does not necessarily mean he believes your paper is good enough to be published, maybe he thinks it's the fastest way to get rid of you).
He doesn't want to be your coauthor and suggests you don't publish.

If he wants to be your coauthor - problem solved.
If he doesn't, I'd say your fine to proceed with single-author publication. But please seek advice from another professor/PhD/grad student - anyone experienced with publications in that field. I've seen master theses being published, but they were excellent, not just good ones, and it's certainly not a usual thing to do. Talk to an expert before you submit anywhere, seek guidance on whether your results are good enough for publication and what would be the correct venue to do so. It's little time to invest now, but a lot of time wasted if you just go ahead and get rejected.

I'll also note that sometimes the advisor doesn't provide feedback thinking that you are doing fine and not wanting to get in the way. Not necessarily the case here, of course.

If someone contributed significantly to your research, you should offer them the chance to be an author on the journal or conference submission. They may or may not accept. Financial contribution (research performed in someone’s research group and hence using their resources) would nearly always count as significant, and usually (depending on the field) earn them first refusal on the last-author slot. Mentorship/supervision likewise—if you couldn’t have done it without them, or at least without someone playing the role that they ended up playing, then that counts.
If someone is a co-author, you should have them at least “sign off” on the full version of the final content that you are submitting, because it is being submitted partially in their name and will reflect on them.  Give them enough time to do so.


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How to show in your thesis that a related work was published after your publication and did a similar things?
I am currently writing my dissertation and at the beginning, I published a conference paper that proposes how something can be used for a special purpose. I have cited someones something who never used this before for this purpose. Two years later, this person publishes a paper like I had and proposing the same thing I have proposed before, but did not cite me.
Now I am writing related work and I would like to mention that I published this idea earlier. Otherwise one can think I have reproduced this work, but they reproduced mine. How do I write this correctly that in the meantime this paper was published after my original publication?

What do you mean by "...that I had proposed before"? Do you mean an uncited published result or just an idea? It isn't clear from what you write that it is plagiarism, actually. "proposes how something can be used..." is pretty nebulous.

I made a comprehensive literature survey which is very very similar and stated the same findings and then making the same thing as I have done. I proposed the idea and then I conducted data and showed on an example case that it works.

You can just share it. Perhaps mention it as a result "in parallel" or "independently".
You don't need to point out that you did it first or that they didn't cite you (this looks petty), just point out it exists and it's similar. Cite yourself, too, of course.
Readers can follow the two citation paths and see that yours was indeed first, and also that the other was independent. These things happen all the time, and lots of theorems are named after multiple publications of the same thing (sometimes including those "rediscovered" decades later, especially when a result crosses field boundaries and those from before the digital age).

Ok, I also found it would sound petty, but I would like to know how it is normally done.


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How to differentiate between the concept and the implementation in a computer science thesis?
A common structure of a thesis in computer science has the following structure:

Introduction
Related Work
(Requirement) Analysis
Concept
Implementation
Evaluation
Conclusion

Considering such a thesis, I would like to ask how can I differentiate which aspects are part of the concept and which is considered to be a part of the implementation?
My advisor's advice was: specific things and technical details are written in the implementation section, more general ones are in the concept. There are no strict rules but he can see the difference but not explain.
The problem is that I do not have a very generic concept, since my research question is very strict and the solution is not a generic one, it is for this specific purpose and doing it more generic, it makes no sense since it does not work or has any purpose.
So my question is: are there any other hints or question how I am able to differentiate what are parts of a concept and what the implementation is?
Thanks in advance!

"A common structure of a thesis in computer science has the following structure": I don't think that this is true, and I would think that you are free to adjust this table of content any way you see fit. But, to answer your question, I don't think there is any definitive solution, it is a matter of logical organization and taste. Take the path of least resistance, so that the reader can enjoy your manuscript without too much back-and-forth.

@Clément so you think this is fully subjectively and there are no objective rules or guidelines?

I would say that, yes. Try to follow logical principles to the best of your abilities. You can also move blocks around and see where they "fit" best.

I believe your thesis outline is for an undergraduate degree.

@VitaminE why do you believe this? And in what sense does your belief help to find an answer? Instead, labelling me as someone with less experience and knowledge in an indirect way is probably not the best style

@user3352632 I didn't label you.  I labeled the thesis.

Suppose that, five years from now, someone produces some "new" (open-source) software to solve the same problem that you're solving in your thesis. Of course, he might have used a totally new approach, but suppose that, after you study the new software, you see that it just uses your ideas, changing perhaps the programming language, the specific data structures used, and similar details. So you decide (perhaps indignantly) that this isn't really new at all.
I'd say that those ideas of yours that were copied are your concepts. The aspects that were changed without making an "essential" difference are the implementation.
(Of course, if you had invented an entirely new data structure, then that would become a concept rather than part of the implementation. But that seems to be a rare situation.)

In many other fields, what you have called "concept" is, roughly speaking, called "methodology. You have a problem. How to you propose to attack that problem.
Likely you have some insight (concept) into the inner workings of things that might be tested (verified, debunked) with an implementation, usually code, less frequently a logical analysis.
Back in the day people were trying to create effective and efficient garbage collectors for dynamic memory. There were many approaches. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science).
But each them has a high level description (concept) and an implementation (or several) to "prove" the concept. At a certain point in time a small percentage increase in efficiency was good for a dissertation. But without that implementation, it was just a dream.

To put it short, it's "what you want to do" vs. "how you really do it".

@OlegLobachev really "what I want to do" or "how I plan it to do and why"?

Both actually. The problem you are addressing and the approach to answering it.