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Switch PhD program: how to contact possible PhD advisors when already enrolled in PhD program?
Say a student is enrolled in a PhD program in the US and is in the first or 2nd year and has not started their thesis work but has only done coursework. The student has always been in the same lab (no rotations). Say such student for whatever reason wants to switch to a PhD program in Europe.
How should such a student handle contacting PhD advisors and other institutions? Should the student mention in the first e-mail that they are already enrolled in a PhD program or can this be mentioned in the first phone call? Or should it be mentioned at all? How much would this situation decrease the chances of getting accepted into a PhD program in Europe? Or should the student first quit the current PhD program before applying to any other program?

Email, honesty and avoid burning bridges.
You can freely email (and otherwise) contact potential PhD advisors, of course remembering that they are always busy, so you need to be concise and have something of interest to offer.
You need to be honest about your current situation. If you are not and then the potential new advisor finds out about it, it will look bad and will likely ruin your chances.
Do not quit your current situation. That would look worse than wanting to change/improve your circumstances. And if you fail to find a new position, you'll be left with nothing.

thanks for the feedback, I am just afraid that if I mention that I am already enrolled in another program in a short email I won't have a chance to explain more in detail in a phone call. I would normally attach a CV also in the first email but I would run into the same issue.


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What should be included in a departmental email policy?
I receive about 10k emails per year and send about 2-3k. In my department (the sphere I can influence) there are those who almost never respond and those who respond as soon as I have hit the send button. There are also those who send mails on weekends, in the middle of the night, seemingly expecting answers fairly immediately. The record was probably the mail that was send shortly after midnight on a Sunday night about stuff that needed to be sorted out by Monday morning. In short, different person have different views on how and for what email should be used. I should add that in my system, the university email is strictly not to be used for private emailing.
I am therefore interested in hearing about if and if so how one can establish an email policy which provides guidelines for reasonable emailing practices within a department.
I have heard about guidelines against sending mails from off duty hours, about avoiding disputes over email, and about reasonable (expected) response times, etc. but have so far failed to locate any good sources for such practices and guidelines.

If you could explain the management context of your institution / system's culture it would help.  If you're under New Public Management with the right to audit and direct you're in a different situation from an elected rotating department chair who can advise and form consent.

@SamuelRussell Our system would be the latter with rotating positions for head etc. (3 year basis). In essence all faculty are otherwise on an equal basis, a very flat organization where the head is ultimately and formally responsible for personell, finances etc. With a policy or guidelines to good practise and behaviour it is easier for everyone to adjuste expectations and behaviour if deviating from the "norm".

Can you add some information about what exactly you want to accomplish with the departmental email policy? Is it to reduce email load? Avoid confrontation with colleagues on email lists? Reduce overwork and stress? Other?

I strongly disagree with any policy which would prevent me from e-mailing at any time of day or night. But the issue seems to be that people are expecting immediate responses, which seems quite unreasonable. In my view, the relevant policy is "When are working hours?"

Setting policy without understanding what your objectives are is a fool's errand.  If you do know what your objectives are, the first question you should ask yourself is: Is setting a policy really the best way to achieve those objectives?  And, in an academic department, if you answered "yes" to that question, you might want to ask yourself that question a few more times until you achieve enlightenment. :-)

@Anonymous The policy is simply a document that outlines desired behaviour. Of importance here is for example what expectations one can have on response times. In general such a policy would be a consensus document not a top-down decree.

After searching and collating ideas from numerous internet sources (a simple search provides plenty of sources of variable quality and usefulness) I have come up with the list below. In my own case there are over-arching rules about usage of university e-mail, which for example makes it clear that the university mail should not be used for private purposes and that all e-mails are public documents. Since each organization probably have such central rules, I have omitted such points and concentrated on good practises in the professional email correspondence.

Be courteous. Beware that written communication is more likely to be misunderstood than personal communication. Include courteous greetings and closings to prevent your e-mail seem demanding or terse. Don't hesitate to say thank you, how are you, or appreciate your help! Sign your name and include contact details in the footer of the mail.
Be concise and clear. Keep e-mails brief and to the point. Make sure your point(s) is (are) clear from the beginning. Be sure to fill out the Subject: field and that it accurately reflects the content of your email. It is sometimes better to write several mails than to fill one mail full of questions on different topics, alternatively number them. Save long conversations for a telephone/Skype/personal meeting.
Proofread. Read your email out loud to ensure the tone is that which you desire. Avoid spelling and grammatical errors. Try to avoid relying on formatting for emphasis; rather choose the words that reflect your meaning instead. A few additions of the words "please" and "thank you" go a long way!
Avoid emotions. Do not attempt to solve emotional problems or issues over e-mail. Instead, suggest a personal meeting. Always wait at least a day before attempting to send or answering emotional e-mails. Keep copies of all such correspondence and seek advice from colleagues to prevent issues to build.
Received e-mails. Always try to answer an e-mail within a workday or two. Always acknowledge the receipt of a mail as soon as you can if you are not able to provide a comprehensive reply within a day or two.
Sending E-mails. Never use an old email to hit reply and start typing about an entirely new topic. Do not send e-mails during weekends or off hours since this may give off the wrong signals or excuse yourself if you do. Do not expect immediate answers to your e-mails. A couple of days is a reasonable delay. Use a phone or visit the colleague if something is urgent.
Using Cc:, Bcc: and Return Receipts. Include addresses in the To: field for those who you would like a response from. Include addresses in the Cc: field for those who you are just informing. Remove the addresses of those who your reply does not apply to when replying to an email with multiple recipients noted in the To: or Cc: fields. Use Return Receipt sparingly since it can be viewed as intrusive and annoying; save it for when you really need to know.

These points can be summarized by: Mail others as you would have them mail you!

I would not be happy with a policy against sending e-mail during weekends or off hours (or even a suggestion that this is something that requires excusing yourself).  From my perspective, it's fine to send e-mail whenever it's convenient for you, as long as you don't expect a reply at an inconvenient time for the recipient.

I would upvote this except for the part about not sending on the weekends.  People have different schedules; but more to the point, I might be thinking about something on Saturday and fire something off.  The second part about "do not expect immediate answers" should be good enough.

-1 This is a very late downvote, but the don't-send-emails-on-weekends bit is a sufficiently bad misunderstanding of the purpose of email (esp. in the academic context) that I think it deserves being documented.

@DanielR.Collins, I am not sure what you want in terms of documentation? There are plenty of arguments around such as those provided by this BBC article

I wanted to document my downvote and reason why, as I've done above.

Do issues like this really need a policy to govern them?  If someone in a department has a problem responding to emails in a timely manner, it seems to me that it would be better to counsel them directly.  Creating a policy for it may come across as passive-aggressive.
Corporations may have formal policies about how to answer email, and how to organize your desk, and how to change the toilet paper in the restroom.  But academics are used to a considerable degree of autonomy, and dislike being micromanaged.
My humble opinion.

I've heard of a few trainings that help new employees get integrated inside a large organization. In my case, it was an offshore division of a large, IT company who was training its employees on how to communicate effectively.
That said, the goals of your organization, a University, would be very different from a multinational.
Nonetheless, here's some of the notes from that training:

When you write email, write email about one topic only. If you need to discuss another topic, that should be in a separate email.
Ensure that the contents written in the body of the email are about the subject.
Write very clear, descriptive subject lines. ("ex: Problems with implementing FooBar" vs. "Got a problem"). Often it is helpful to include square brackets that describe the project of your email as well. Ex: "[Budget 2013] Need review of the FY03 proposals by Friday."
If someone asks you for help and you know who to contact, instead of just telling them to contact John Doe or Jane Doe, reply to the original sender and CC John and Jane as part of your reply.

I don't know if these are helpful at all - this is mostly a list of examples rather than an actual straight-up policy.

These are fine guidelines, but the problem is that they are extremely elementary.  They might be fine guidance for new employees who have never used email in their life, but not for experienced faculty who deal with hundreds of emails each day.  If my department chair sent our faculty a policy with these guidelines, I would be slightly insulted.  (What, does he think I don't know how to use email?)

Being highly responsive (and attentive) to email may be in direct conflict with productivity; only some messages have truly high priority (and senders often don't have full perspective on this).
For some faculty, the measure of productivity is funding and publication, which are unlikely to correlate strongly with email responsiveness in general.
Other faculty may have a role that requires responsiveness.
Faculty should have clear overall goals, and expectations for mundane tasks (like email) should be set with those goals in mind. For some, email might best be relegated to short bursts once a day (with selected emails assigned high priority, of course).

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How do you manage to work on multiple research projects?
Things that make multiple research projects different and single project:

Inertia that sets in once I have spent a few weeks on single one of them. The 'switching cost' seems too high to me, and it leads to not much being done first few days of switching to the other project.
Pressure of producing 'visible' results every few months to keep manager/sponsors happy.
Pressure of keeping up with literature related to multiple topics.

What can I do optimize my work productivity?

Delegate tasks to grad students/post-docs, if you've got them

Tunnel vision can become a huge problem and can really bog things down.  When I need to take a mental respite from one research project, I hop on another one and use it as my 'vacation'.  Rinse, rotate, and repeat.

There is no easy solution to the "task switching" problem; it really is a strong function of how you work.
In my previous job, I had a rather distressingly large number of projects to work on—as many as eight or nine, depending on how you define a project—at any one time (oddly enough, my academic position requires me to work on just as many projects, but in a supervisory capacity). For me, what helped to have to "task switch" was the fact that I had to provide regular progress updates at team meetings, and meet deadlines for the project. I couldn't spend weeks on a single project, because then I'd have to scramble to meet the approaching deadlines for everything else I was working on. So deadlines and meetings where you have to talk about your progress are good ways to make sure you keep on top of things.
With respect to literature, I'd suggest setting aside some time each week for literature searches and literature reviews. I'd also use this as a chance to "switch gears" for a bit—use this time to keep up to date on the project that isn't taking up the majority of your time.
Finally, if you're going to put away a project for several weeks or more, then you should definitely keep good records before switching your focus. Make sure you leave yourself a note of what you just finished working on, where you left things off, and what you think the next steps for the project should be after you return to it. That way, you're not figuring out where you left off—you've told yourself how to get yourself back on track.

Your answer helps a lot. Many thanks!

So you have highlighted some of the negatives of switching between topics, but you should also consider some positives:

These projects open up different journals/conferences/spaces/collaborators to work with, which is always nice.
It can help prevent burnout. If you're sick and tired of working on the same thing day in, day out, you can switch for a little while to freshen things up.
It can actually boost productivity. If you've hit a wall with something, or it's just going to take a long time for the first project to finish, you can switch for a little while and let the previous project cook on the back burner while you get something else done.

There's definitely a time management problem, and it is occasionally a hard one, but working on a single project puts all your eggs in one potentially failure prone, potentially exhausting basket.

Research assistants. I really don't understand why someone would spend an hour tediously filling numerous arrays of vials with cell-growth solution when they could just pay some high schooler $12/hour to do the same. Or even unpaid volunteers/interns.
Think of all the new research we could do if every researcher used at least one research assistant.

Having both been and supervised said people, the time it takes to get them up to speed to the point where you can rely on their results is non-trivial. It also doesn't help with any aspect of the OP's question beyond purely mechanical tasks.

Okay well maybe we're thinking of different types of work. Or maybe you need to work on better methods of debriefing them on your projects.

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Should I use reference manager software?
Should I use software for managing my references?  What is the benefit of it?   I can write down the references by myself, so I'm not sure what the benefit is.

Define "managing"; you are a researcher, and without the right questions, you won't get the right answers. Under managing, I can imagine (1) assembling the file with information about the books and articles you read/cited (a bibliography file, .bib in LaTeX parlance); (2) assembling a hyper-referenced system organized by keywords CiteULike; (3) setting up the directory structure on your hard drive to store the pdf copies of the articles; (4) combinations thereof; (5) something else.

You do not need to use reference managers. However, if you use some reference managers like Mendeley then, some of the benefits are obvious:

The pdf of your article is linked to the reference itself.
You can organize references into logical groups (areas, subjects, disciplines, sub-disciplines) by utilizing folders and tags.
You can one-click save articles and organize them from your browser. This is invaluable in saving time on organizing.
You can sync across multiple devices like desktops, laptops and tablets. For instance, Mendeley has an iOS app which does this for you. I use Android so I workaround using Droideley or Scholarley.
You can read your articles inside the reference manager and then do useful things like highlighting and annotations which can then be saved as notes for future reference.
You can export to specific citation styles. This is very useful for someone doing interdisciplinary work. For instance, I have to constantly use the same or similar bibliography using APA style, ACM style, IEEE style.
They are very useful for multiple collaborative platforms. For instance, when collaborating with some computer science colleagues, I generally use LaTeX and Mendeley does a brilliant one-click job of exporting to BibTeX. When I work with social scientists, I generally use MS Word and there is a MS Word plugin for Mendeley which dynamically adds references in-line as well as the full bibliography at the end of the document.

I hope this has been partially useful to you. This is a little Mendeley focused and I am in no certain terms claiming that it is the best or the most useful. However, for me, it certainly has its advantages.

Mendeley also has a  android app.

@rv1234 now it does - it didn't in '13 when  I wrote this answer. :)

This provides a good overview of the articles you've read. Furthermore it is easy to change the format of your references (for example from APA to Harvard).
If you write different articles, it is easy to use the references that you used before.
On a sidenote: Google Docs has a pretty neat feature called 'research' where you can just search for the title and the reference shows up. In that way you do not have to use a reference manager.

Personally, I would say not unless it suits you.
I'm happier with a flat .bib (i.e. bibTex, for use with LaTeX) file, just managed in notepad++.  You can use the url field of a .bib to point to a local file, but I don't.  Instead, what I've recently started doing is to save a pdf of the reference with a filename based on (but generally longer than) the key I use in my .bib file.  I wish I'd done this sooner though!  That way I can copy a file and a folder to another machine, on another OS, with no internet connection (e.g. when travelling) and everything just plain works.

@NajibIdrissi possibly true.  It's the way I chose at the time of saying that there are good reasons not to, ad in particular not to blindly follow the herd when your situation is different.

@NajibIdrissi funnily enough jabref was the software I tried the hardest to like. As notepad++ is windows-only I'm now using jEdit; both of these editors seem more flexible to me than anything specialist (e.g. regexp find/replace).

I think using a reference manager is an absolute must if you have more than a couple of references and if you plan writing more than one paper/work. It is true that you can generate a reference list by yourself and insert the citations manually, but this will introduce error sooner or later. You will immediately see the benefit of a reference manager if you decide/are forced to change the reference style. A good reference manager with an appropriate Word/LibreOffice plugin will reformat the document automagically.
Collecting references, managing all the information about a publication, including abstract, your notes, keywords and tags are other options where reference managers shine. Most of them can be used as document readers and can collect comments and highlights. And all decent ones sync everything via cloud, have versions for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
There are several excellent options available. You can try Mendeley or Zotero and you will see the benefits immediately by yourself. Don't be afraid if you change your mind later, the reference databases can be rather easily transferred between them.
I am using a reference manager more than a decade and could not live without it. I started with BibTeX, moved to Zotero and later to Mendeley.

A quick update. Since Mendeley has encrypted its local database in version 1.19, it is extremely difficult to export its database to other reference managers. I personally migrated all my references and documents to Zotero and have been using it since then (again :-). Here is a description of how this can be done https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/mendeley_import

It depends. If you only want to write course assignments and then maybe a master's thesis and then leave academia, you might not need a reference management solution which will be most useful when you write multiple papers and books.
On the other hand, there is one reference management solution which is used not only (mostly) by researchers. It is being developped by a Swiss software company (I work for them) and it is hugely successful in Germany and other European countries. The first version of Citavi came out 10 years ago, but it is not yet known in the US. Citavi allows you to not only save the bibliographic information of titles you want to use in your publications, but it lets you save the quotations, your comments, summaries, and your own ideas, too. You can then organize them into the structure of your paper before you actually start writing.
The video "Citavi 5 in a nutshell" shows how it all fits together, and how Citavi can help you to be more efficient while doing research and writing.


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Is it acceptable to use a microscope in the office and not in the laboratory?
I often see microscopes inside the office rooms of professors as well as other teaching members. They may not use them on daily basis but once in a while, or sometimes heavily used by a few of them. Some of them examine hospital slides received by that department from patients sputa to look for hazardous organisms (e.g. TB bacilli).
My question, according to the quality assurance standards of teaching laboratories, and from the safety point of view, is it acceptable to use microscopes inside offices instead of laboratory rooms? Is it acceptable to use them inside the office while wearing the casual clothes instead of the lab coat, and without gloves?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not unique to a medical school setting, but rather it applies to any non-laboratory setting.

This really depends on local laws: which country are you in?

In any scenario, the "use of a microscope" itself won't be a problem. Handling samples might be.

@jvb In some systems, a microscope might not be allowed in an office.

@MassimoOrtolano I don't really know enough, but I think this might be a ethics/good practice question and not a legal question.

This question is highly specific to your organization, location, and specific duties. I strongly recommend you take this question to your department administrators and get an answer from them.

I am pretty sure it is explicitly regulated by local laws and rules. It is nothing to do with ethics.

@tonysdg, the question was reworded as requested.

given the wide scope of Academia, it is hard to imagine this question is off-topic: a microscope is linked with teaching as well as with laboratories. Where does the difficulty come from?

@doctorate: My issue with this question is that it strikes me as a boat programming question. The main question you ask -- is it acceptable to use microscopes inside offices instead of laboratory rooms? -- doesn't really fall under the topics you should ask about here. Yes, it affects academics in teaching hospitals -- but the heart of the question (and the best answers, IMO) has nothing to do with academia.

"look, there is this sample with a new virus similar to one that can be found in bats, I got it from the guys at the special Wuhan lab ..."

I see three main potential issues in the use of a microscope informally in an office, rather than in a laboratory environment:

Safety: some samples might be potentially hazardous to a person handling them without laboratory protections.
Sample damage: some samples may be vulnerable to contamination or damage through exposure to an office environment.
Ethics: information on a patient or student subject may be exposed through informal handling of a sample.

If all three of these can be dealt with (e.g., through proper sample preparation and reasonable precautions against exposure of adverse information), then I see no reason that a microscope cannot be used in an informal office environment. I am not familiar with precautions around the particular samples you mention in your post, but many fixatives used with specimens are extremely effective and might well render samples quite inert.

good points to consider, as you pointed out in ethics, I would say privacy issues alone can be a good reason for no-go. Such practice would encourage others to do so, and some of the offices are shared among the staff members.

+1 Having had a microscope as a child, this answer strikes me as obvious.


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Invitation to anti-plagiarism service Turnitin
I received the following unsolicited email:

Subject: A new account Turnitin has been created for you
Hi NAME SURNAME,
you have been added as a teacher to the account, xxx, by Turnitin xxx Administrator.
as a new teacher, you are joining a global community of training experts. We are pleased to have you with us.
Are you ready to configure your classes?

With a button  lending to a Turnitin signup page, whose address is similar to:
https://www.turnitin.com/password_reset1.asp?utm_source=getting-started-instructor&utm_medium=webpage&utm_campaign=onboarding
However, isn't Turnitin a paid service?
Have you perhaps received this invitation and, if you registered, how you use it?

This looks like spam to me. Are you teaching at an institution that could have automatically signed you up? If not, just delete it.

@astronat: When my institution does so, they send us an internal email first.
What I don't understand is why the link button points to https://www.turnitin.com.
If it is a spam, then it comes straight from Turnitin, which should be a respectable company.

@antonio: What I don't understand is why the link button points to turnitin.com – Are you sure about that?

That being said, I do not see much we can answer better than you can. We cannot tell you whether the mail is legit, and if it is, we do not really like to evaluate their services.

by Turnitin xxx Administrator.

Ask xxx if they created an account for you. If they have no idea what you are talking about, or xxx is not in your organisation, mark as spam and move on. That Turnitin is a paid service matters little, as many universities pay for it on organisational level.

It happens that I have received the email informing about the activation of the service in my university. So, sorry for the inconvenience. Probably, I should remove the post, do I?

@antonio you could turn your comment into an answer and mark it as accepted. This way, if anyone runs into the same issu and looks it up here, they can find an aanswer that works.

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Would you recommend publishing in interdisciplinary academic journals?
I am a post-doctoral researcher in social sciences and work on several topics that may not only be interested to the discipline itself but also to a wider academic audience, I suppose (hopefully).
Besides trying to publish in the disciplinary journals, I am also wondering whether it makes sense to publish in academic journals that have a broader scope (such as PLOS One or EPJ Data Science).
Is it worth trying to reach 'other audiences' or is it better to speak to your 'direct' peers by publishing only in social sciences journals? And does it make sense career-wise to publish as widely as possible or is it rather seen as to fuzzy and lacking focus on contributing to the own academic field (i.a. people in hiring committees may not know these interdiscplinary journals and can't assess whether this a good academic achievement or not)?
Any recommendations or personal experience on this are very welcome.
Thanks in advance!

Choosing a journal is all about trade-offs in audience vs. effort. Who do you want to talk to, and what type of effort do you want to put in so that you can do so?
Personally, I publish in a mix of field-specific journals and broad interdisciplinary journals. In my experience, the review times are pretty similar (a couple months) for interdisciplinary journals and most field-specific journals. Some field-specific journals, however, can be far slower, depending on field and journal.
In my own case, I find it advantageous to publish in the broad interdisciplinary journals in two main cases:

When the research doesn't fit cleanly into a particular disciplinary "stovepipe", I prefer to put it where categories don't matter so much, rather than try to fit it onto a field-specific journal's Procrustean bed.

When I'm reporting on something that doesn't make a "pretty" story, like work on scientific infrastructure or a report about a study that was only partially successful, I prefer not to try to puff up "novelty" or "impact", but just go to somewhere like PLoS ONE that explicitly rules those out and just focuses on validity.

One still must, of course, judge the respectability of the publications. Places like PLoS ONE are fine, but publishing in predatory journals is poison. Likewise, you probably have work that is best presented to people in your field in a field-specific journal: if you don't, why is it your field?
Note, of course, that there is likely to be a great deal of field-specific variation, even down to specific sub-disciplines within a field. I'm coming from a world of computer science, engineering, and biology, and cannot say what social scientists in your specific sub-discipline may believe.

From my personal experience, there are pros and cons. We published several articles in such journals (megajournals including PlosOne, SageOpen, Heliyon) and frequently dealt with long (very long!) peer review times. Such journals often have difficulties to find an academic editor for submissions and this may delay your publication. I understand that it is my subjective experience and you should not take it for granted. Just another point to consider in terms of your question. I recommend field-specific journals.

I don't think that long waiting times are a unique trait of interdisciplinary megajournals.

From my personal experience publishing in a journal outside my main field as well as working as a copy editor for a journal in an affiliated, but still external field, I will say that some of the more common problems I've encountered include an unfamiliarity with conventions in one field from another, ranging from the types of citation formats used, to terminology that is well known in one field, but which needs greater explanation in another. In other words, it can be a lot of work for a writer to publish in a field outside of their main one due to being unfamiliar with the conventions of the other; conversely, it can be a lot of work for the editorial staff on the other end. This is not to say that you should not publish outside your field, just that it might be more time and labor on your end. Best of luck in all your endeavors!


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When writing referee's report after paper revision, can I discuss the reports of other referees?
I reviewed an article for a journal, suggesting some revisions. The authors made revisions and now the journal has asked me to do a second round of reviewing. As well as the revised manuscript, the journal also sent me the report written about the original submission by the other referee of the paper.
I'm not a very experienced reviewer. This is the first time I've got to see someone else's report on a paper I've reviewed. When writing my report about the revised paper, am I allowed to discuss or respond to the other reviewer's comments? (When I've received referee reports on my own revised manuscripts, I've never seen referees discussing each other's opinions.)
In this case, reviewer 2 and myself wrote very similar reports, with reviewer 2 being a bit harsher. There is however one point in reviewer 2's report that I'd like to reply to directly. They criticise the authors' results X because they don't also show Y. Showing Y at the same time as X has been a long-standing goal in our field. But nobody has ever succeeded, and recent studies suggest that probably X doesn't imply Y after all. The authors do a poor job of defending themselves. There was no mention of Y in the original submission and I didn't mention it in my report either.
In general, is it okay to write in a referee report "The other referee says... but actually...". Or should it be in a separate comment to the editor? Or should I try to rephrase so that I'm responding to the authors instead of the other referee (not easy in this case).
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems to me (i) I'm supposed to be reviewing the paper, not reviewing the other referee, and (ii) if this should go to yet another round of revision, it shouldn't develop into an argument between the referees!

For what reason and purpose would the editor provide you with the other reviewer's report if not to take it into consideration?  The usual assumption is that if your boss/supervisor asks you to do a job, and hands you materials for that job, then it is within reason, if not entirely expected, that you utilize those materials to complete your task.  If you think this material may have been provided in error, why not clarify the issue with the editor?

Not sure if you should do it but I frequently see my referees fight each others in their reports.

Review are not an appropriate location for a direct argument between the referees.
There are, however, appropriate ways to respond to what you see as a mistake by the other referee.

First, you can make a clear statement of the positive value in the paper, implicitly contrasting with the other referee.  For example, in this case, you can simply talk about how significant and publishable the authors work on X is.  If they now mention Y in their paper, you can note that you are not concerned about it, for the reasons that you stated above.  In your open review, keep it purely about the paper.
Second, however, every review form comes with a place for confidential comments to the editor.  This is the appropriate place for you to respond directly to the comments of the other referee, saying things like "I think Reviewer #2 was too harsh, because...", since it is the editor's job to synthesize the disagreements of reviewers into a decision on the paper.

Finally, you probably don't have to sweat it too hard: since the paper wasn't rejected after the first round, that usually means the editor thinks it has the potential for publication, with appropriate revision.

Yes confidential comments to the editor is the way to go. Both bullets are excellent.

Before making comments confidential, consider the authors or other reviewer might learn from the information.  Excessive secrecy, in the long run, may make the review process less effective.

If the editor sent you the other referees' reports, it clearly means that you are expected to take them into account if you wish so. Otherwise, the editor simply wouldn't have made these other reports available to you.
Your duty is to the editor (and science, but this is more philosophical). Your report is addressed to the editor, not the author. Your goal is to let the editor, who may not be an expert about every single aspect of the paper or the field in general, have the clearest view of what the paper's strengths, weaknesses, contributions to the field, novelty... are.
If that includes clearing up possible misconceptions brought up in other referees' reports, then clear them up. Do it diplomatically and use all oratory precautions you deem necessary - a frontal attack is rarely convincing - but do it. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't explicitly contradict the other referee, but I would definitely say something about how Y is something important but that its precise relationship with X has been a long-standing problem, paraphrasing (and quoting) the studies you mention.

In general, is it okay to write in a referee report "The other referee says... but actually...".

No, it's not okay, don't do it: referee reports are not forums of discussion between reviewers, they lack the mechanism for an efficient discussion, and it's the authors' duty to defend themselves. In addition, after the second round of reviews, reviewer 2 would probably not have any chance to reply to your remarks.
If you really feel that the second reviewer made a totally wrong comment, maybe you can report this as a comment to the editor, but take into account that the editor might choose to ignore it.

You have given an argument that it is not necessary, but I am unconvinced that it is "not okay" or in any way inappropriate.  Inability of referee 2 to respond is not a reason not to comment on scientific claims of referee 2.  Please revise.

@AnonymousPhysicist The way the communication is structured during a review doesn't allow any fair debate between the reviewers, neither direct nor mediated by the editor. The structure of a review is inadequate for such a purpose. If we have to accept this, we would have to restructure the peer-review system, which will probably happen sometimes in the future

I disagree with this answer. Referee reports are not discussions between referees and authors, either.  Editors are under no obligation to ask authors for responses, nor to ask referees to respond to authors' responses.  Everything that written in a referee report is a comment to the editor, which the editor can choose to ignore.

@JeffE I didn't say anywhere that referee reports are discussions between referees and authors, nor that the referee's have to respond to author's responses (where have you read this?).

@JeffE An editor can choose to ignore the referee report, but if you read, e.g., this reviewer's guidelines, you will see that it says: " Please note that when reporting on a revision we expect you to read the author reply to your comments and check the changes in their revised manuscript, then decide if the revision is now suitable for publication." Thus, a reviewer, is frequently expected to read authors' replies.


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Equivalent of 'above/below the bar'
I've just come across some academic positions in Ireland described as Lecturer above (/below) the bar. What should this be understood as equivalent to in other naming schemes?
(A basic search didn't produce a reliable answer.)

Do you have a link you are willing to share?

A payscale difference roughly equivalent to Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in the UK.

Most of all, I'd check if below the bar gives access to the cellar :-)

The academic grades in Ireland vary somewhat from one university to another. Something like the following is fairly typical:

Professor (aka Full Professor)
Associate Professor
Senior Lecturer or Statutory Lecturer
Lecturer (above the bar)
Lecturer (below the bar)

The last two, which you ask about, may also go by somewhat different names such as as 'college lecturer' and 'lecturer' with no parenthetic qualification.
Most new academic staff are appointed as lecturers (below the bar). After a certain number of years' service, a lecturer below the bar is eligible to apply to progress 'above the bar'. An application form may have to be completed and these days perhaps even another interview may be required, but it is a largely straightforward process to progress in this way. (The next stage, becoming a senior lecturer or statutory lecturer, is far from straightforward and is generally competitive, so you may very well have mathematicians, Latin scholars, botanists and chemical engineers competing for a handful of posts.)
Note that the question of permanency (tenure) is a separate issue: an applicant may well be appointed as a Lecturer (below the bar) in a permanent capacity.
In summary:

Lecturer (below the bar) and lecturer (above the bar) are generally the two most junior academic positions in an Irish university.

While this doesn't answer your question regarding other naming schemes, I hope this clarifies where these grades lie.


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Plagiarism-checker to prevent self-plagiarism
I am working on my PhD thesis and have to write a monograph based on my publications. To prevent that I plagiarize myself, I came up with the idea to automatically check my thesis against my publications.
Is there already a tool for this work-flow?

Input: PDf of thesis and a pile of PDFs;
Output: annotated PDF of thesis.

You should really read some of the questions and answers under the plagiarism tag. Self-plagiarism has different degrees in different fields. I don't think we should reopen this here. Also, there's appears to be a lot of disagreement about the "staple three papers together" style of dissertation, so watch out for that in responses here.

@BillBarth is right. There are disagreements b/w the two issues. While ''stapling three papers together'' is made to look taboo, I belong to the school of thought which says that a thesis IS a report of what you did in your PhD, i.e. stuff covered in your publications etc. I think it is a meaningless hassle to keep rewording yourself to avoid issues with these stupid plagiarism checker softwares. The spirit of plugging plagiarism is getting abused with these. You may find this question to be somewhat useful. However, your aim is different here

Of course there are different point of views an requirements on the issue in general, and I think a solution for this will be useful for other applications as well. If I find something useful, I post it ...

Summary:

Make sure you understand the standards of self-plagiarism relevant to your project.
Your institution's LMS likely provides access to an automated plagiarism checker you could use.
Automated plagiarism checkers are imperfect.
Some people think that commercial plagiarism checkers are unethical.

If you haven't already done so, talk to your dissertation committee about their understanding of self-plagiarism. What exactly are they concerned you might do? What are their standards, and are these standards reflective of common standards in your discipline?
Once you know how your committee understands self-plagiarism, talk to the people who administer the learning management system (LMS) at your campus. Many LMSs include access to commercial plagiarism checkers, and many of these services allow teachers or students to upload selected papers to the plagiarism checker's database. (The idea is that the plagiarism checkers allow teachers to check student work against unpublished papers that other students--like roommates or sorority sisters--have submitted in response to the same assignment in a different section of the course). If you put your publications into the plagiarism checker's database, you should be able to use the plagiarism checker to identify potential self-plagiarism.
HOWEVER, automated plagiarism checkers are imperfect. Whichever one you use, it will probably flag some stuff that isn't really plagiarism, and it might miss some stuff that is. The automated checker should supplement your own judgment, not replace it.
Finally, some people think that commercial plagiarism checkers are unethical because they collect papers and make money off of them without paying the authors. The courts have ruled that it's fair use, but you should at least know that the issue exists.

I don't know it will work for you or Not but you can compare your current thesis with any other previous thesis one by one by using plagiarism comparison tools. There are lot of tools available on internet here is an example
Plagiarism comparison
You have to compare your current thesis one by one with older one. This is very effective tool..

Use Mendeley while doing your edit and make use of its robust functionalities which will prevent most plagiarism as it helps in annotations.

Is there an example of using Mendeley to detect self-plagiarism?

Please see their official website for tutorials, they have some good examples on how to gather papers and how it will handle annotations

So I guess you're talking more generally about how to take notes on articles to avoid self-plariarism rather than how to determine whether an existing document plagiarises.


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Academic careerism: How can there be biased research or dishonest inquiry in theoretical hard sciences?
From Wikipedia: (emphasis added)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_careerism

Academic careerism is the tendency of academics (professors specifically and intellectuals generally) to pursue their own enrichment and self-advancement at the expense of honest inquiry, unbiased research and dissemination of truth to their students and society. Such careerism has been criticized by thinkers from Socrates in ancient Athens to Russell Jacoby in the present.

Question: Since this article doesn't make any distinction between hard vs soft sciences, what does 'advancement at the expense of honest inquiry, unbiased research and dissemination of truth' look like in extremely theoretical hard sciences like theoretical/pure maths, pure physics or pure computer science, etc?
As far as I know, theoretical hard sciences don't have 'bias' the way soft/social sciences do. I can't imagine someone will focus on algebraic topology over complex geometry for some Israel vs Palestine political agenda or something. Maybe in some of the applied hard sciences even like applied physics or engineering ok maybe there can be some agenda, but theoretical?
cf1
How do you know that their answers are correct?
cf2
Ben Shapiro - 2024May03 - Time To DEFUND The Universities (emphasis added)

parents it's time to stop sending our kids to these universities it really really is unless they're in the physics department or the math department or the hard Sciences you should not be sending your kids to these universities you should find them an internship somewhere get them a job get them an apprenticeship give them the money to go into business

Someone gave Deutsche Physik as an example. Is this pure physics? How about in pure maths - is it possible to destroy the world / be evil?

I think that this is, in principle, a legitimate question (and I upvoted). I think the question would benefit, though, from tidying it up a bit - for instance by removing the two links at the end which do not seem to add much to the question (in particular the Shapiro quote seems mainly like a trigger for political debate) and by phrasing the post a bit more seriously (e.g., by avoiding "Lol").

@JochenGlueck  It IS weird Wikipedia doesn't say issues of bias don't really exist in theoretical hard sciences right? I mean unless they DO...

Sorry, I don't understand your response to my comment. In particular, I did not refer to the link to Wikipedia in my comment.

You are setting up a false dichotomy by setting self-advancement against honest inquiry.

There was indeed a Deutsche Mathematik counterpart to Deutsche Physik and people like Bieberbach expressed very biased views about mathematical results such as the Cauchy integral theorem; see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Bieberbach#Politics and https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hitlers-math

There's no need to show an edit history in the actual question body ("Edit 1", "Edit", etc.) If someone wants to review, they can go to the edit link. Clean this up so that you just show your question in its intended state. And why are you "lol"-ing at your own content?

I'm going to attempt to answer this question as if it is asked in good faith, although quoting people like Ben Shapiro suggests a definite agenda here.
Here are a few ways that academic careerism can impact hard sciences:

When refereeing papers, asking that people cite specific papers one or one's friends or colleagues are authors of.
When serving on grant committees, giving grants to research programs that build on one's own ideas or thematically connected ideas rather than the best grants.
When refereeing papers insisting that they give more credence to hypotheses one supports and downplay the likelihood of hypotheses one personally finds unlikely.

All of these can happen in even the most pure fields.

1- My agenda is Wikipedia doesn't say issues of bias don't really exist in theoretical hard sciences. I mean ... unless they do? 2- So please give examples of what you're citing. 3- I mean, what political agenda is a pure mathematician advancing if they cite a paper from Al Jazeera that explains a variation of cauchy's differentiation formula? 4- if i were al jazeera, then why would i waste time or money on a pure mathematician? 5- when does anyone look at a PURE MATHS paper and say 'oh cites al jazeera not credible' ?

@BCLC Please reread the examples I gave. They all address issues of careerism. You are taking the notion of careerism and insisting that it only come with a certain, specific political gloss. The quote you gave at the start does not make that assumption at all.

@BCLC If you do want to ask about politically specific issues, then please say so. There are certainly a lot of examples. You ask about "algebraic topology over complex geometry for some Israel vs Palestine political agenda or something. Lol." But even there there are examples. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik as a classic case.

JoshuaZ 6 - ok thanks good example so why not include that in your answer? 7 - wait is that really pure physics? there's a part there 'Effect on the German nuclear program' 8 - any in pure maths? because if none then well......... https://i.sstatic.net/9QhlEjcK.png

9 - explain please how 'When refereeing papers insisting that they give more credence to hypotheses one supports and downplay the likelihood of hypotheses one personally finds unlikely.' can happen in PURE MATHS.

10 - 'When refereeing papers, asking that people cite specific papers one or one's friends or colleagues are authors of.' - i don't understand this in pure maths. how do i cite an alternative paper - like 2 people have the same proof for a thing? so what if i do? how is that corrupt? it's the same output ultimately you're just favouring your friends.

11 - 'When serving on grant committees, giving grants to research programs that build on one's own ideas or thematically connected ideas rather than the best grants.' - please give a pure maths example please. only thing i can think: if no one in our department is researching eg 'probabilistic group theory', then how's the best grant going to be this niche thing? i understand this in soft sciences because if you want to advance a political agenda, then there's bias towards 'agreement'. i don't imagine bias if you think riemann hypothesis is true and then someone else thinks it's false.

@BCLC: Please note that it will not help you to get further useful answers (or to get your question re-opened in the first place) if you reply to an answer by an argumentative list of demands.

@BCLC " explain please how 'When refereeing papers insisting that they give more credence to hypotheses one supports and downplay the likelihood of hypotheses one personally finds unlikely.' can happen in PURE MATHS"
Sure.  I'm in pure math. In my niche there is a specific conjecture that people are deeply uncertain about. I've gone back and forth about whether I believe it, but a few other people have strong, pretty set opinions about it.  Phrasing about how likely it is to be true in a paper would be an obvious impact there.

@BCLC: Regarding requests for clarification: 10) You seem to assume that people only cite papers whose results they use, but this is not the case. In most papers a considerable number of citations are simply there to provide sufficient context. There's a lot of choice regarding which papers one cites for context - and referees can  exert a lot of influence here if they want to.

@BCLC Regarding "When refereeing papers, asking that people cite specific papers one or one's friends or colleagues are authors of.' - i don't understand this in pure maths."
Let's take a specific example here: there are around 50-100 papers about different restrictions about what an odd perfect number must satisfy. Any introduction in a paper on the topic is unlikely to be able to cite all of them. So a referee could insist one add a specific additional paper. And for other topics (like say RH) there are literally 1000s of papers so the same situation but even more so.

@BCLC Sure; let's pick another example: geometric complexity theory. There are some people who think it is an extremely promising approach to understanding computational  complexity, and others consider it to be a complete pie in the sky. So someone could let their own biases there influence grants. Or they could even think two approaches to something are both equally promising, but support grants for studying the one their friends do more of.

@BCLC: Regarding 11): One of my research topics is order structures in functional analysis. Now say a grant agency sends me a grant proposal to review where somebody wants to analyse a certain aspect of, say, PDE theory by using order structures in functional analysis and the proposal cites some of my papers. Let's assume that the proposal does not appear to be thought through very well: if the proposal gets funded, I believe the PI will produce two or three insignificant and somewhat obscure papers without interesting new insights. [...]

[...] So I should recommend to reject to proposal. But if I were a careerist who cared more about his career than about advancing mathematics I could still recommend to fund the proposal - as I know that the papers that come out of the grant will probably cite some of my papers.

One problem is, of course, that it's not at all clear where the line is between supporting a line of research because one genuinely believes that it leads to mathematical adcances and supporting a line of research mainly because it's helpful to one's own career. It's very blurry and one can almost always claim (to others and also to oneself) that one was doing the first thing when one was actually doing the second.


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Presentation Rules (e.g. 7x7 in Undergrad Communications Courses): are they supported by evidence?
I taught a Business Communications course that brashly asserted that good presentations follow the 7x7 rule (max 7 lines of text per slide, max 7 words per line). I also "learned" this in my undergraduate communications courses at a fairly decent state university (and in some MBA prerequisite work).
I see docs online at Columbia (and, other, sources - this one linked to by MIT...)that hold forth in the same manner.
I did find this bit of research that may give some credence to the above doctrine, although it failed to reject the null hypothesis, that there is no difference in number of lines per slide, in favor of the idea that retention was better for 5 lines per slide versus 10. (But it's still something, some kind of evidence, right?)
So if the evidence is spare and specious, why are we reciting it like it's the gospel truth?
In industry (and to a lesser extent in graduate level education) we sometimes see vast amounts of information contained in single slides, and it is unclear what is the specific downside of this, particularly when well-warranted (i.e. the visible whole paints an important picture that would otherwise not be seen viewed at finer granularity, slide by slide).
A lot of information is packed into those slides, but I print them off one or two to a page. Decks don't get much bigger than a dozen or so pages, and the information I'm particularly interested in may be packed into one or two slides. And the audience is fairly sophisticated, whereas the accepted introductory wisdom might be targeted to more average audiences.
So the question is, are these heuristics worth sticking to? Or are they artificial constructs designed to give criteria for ranking the ability of neophytes to follow instructions?
Or are they a little of both?

All axiomatic principles with respect to presentations should be taken with a heavy dose of salt, not just a pinch.
The important issue at hand is that you need to communicate your information to an audience effectively. Putting too much text on a slide makes audiences read the slide, and possibly tune out your elucidations and elaborations of the material on the slide. Similarly, putting too many graphs on the same slide causes the same problem—there's too much to focus on, so you get "lost" in the course of the talk, which again is entirely unhelpful.
Principles such as the "7 x 7" guideline are an attempt to balance between having too much and too little information on a slide. They're useful as rough guidelines, but need not be treated as strict rules to follow.

Agreed. As one saying goes, "Different strokes for different folks." Tailor your presentation for the audience. That said, newbies do need general rules to follow.

Note: I have never heard of the 7X7 rule.
Increasingly, I find that in my area (HCI/usable privacy), there are few actual words on each slides. Rather, points are made with images, visualizations, animations, videos and sound clips.
I have never heard any of my advisers, fellow colleagues and other academic acquaintances in the greater areas of computing and information science ever mention this rule. Rather, the objective has always been to get your point across in the minimum number of slides as possible.

Style guidelines have some merits in balancing between too much (typically) and too little content per slide. If you find yourself consistently having way more content per slide, you can probably improve. These kinds of things are also very domain-specific, so your mileage may vary.
That said...
We routinely use slides that violate this "rule". Clearly a wall of text won't help your audience in any way, but  restricting yourself to such formats for no particular reason won't magically make presentations better either.
I prefer slides with some more content over going back and forth between slides (while it may make sense for the presenter, it is terribly confusing to watch). Sometimes you simply need to include a fair amount of information on a single slide to be able to associate different bits and pieces.
Additionally, I despise what I like to call Blitz-slides, which contain so little content that they only last 5-10 seconds before moving on. I'm starting to see this often, particularly by non-scientists (though I may be biased). Less isn't always more. For me, a good slide contains enough material to let the audience ponder about the matter, whatever it may be, to kindle their interest in what the presenter has to say.
The best validation is to present slides for someone who hasn't helped in making them as a test prior to the actual presentation (far better than style concerns such as X words with maximally Y characters on Z lines).

+1 for test presenting slides to someone who hasn't helped make them.
Works best when this person is able to articulate where and what caused them to lose your flow, as well as being willing to tell you so with brutal honesty.


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What research explains political attitudes of academics?
According to the Times of Higher Education, there are more liberals* than conservatives in the social sciences. The ratio of Democrats to Republicans in economics is 5:1, in law it is 9:1, in psychology 17:1, in journalism 20:1, and in history a whopping 33:1.
From my experience, this trend extends outside the social sciences, i.e. to the humanities and the natural sciences, although it may be strongest in the former. I don't have data handy to back this up.
Is there any serious empirical research into why professionals in academia are more likely to vote democratic than the average of the population? If so, what are the main explanations? (Candidates could be self-selection, socialization, or confounding variables like income and education.)

Moderator’s notice: As per this meta discussion, all answers to this question must provide external references. Please avoid any discussion about politics (rule of thumb: it should not be possible to deduce your political opinion from your writing). Answers and comments not adhering to this will be deleted without warning.

In order to avoid that this question is closed as opinion-based, I suggest to request specifically answers that are based on existing empirical studies rather than individual conjecture. Otherwise, we will just get a lot of answers advocating a particular world-view in a competitive spirit.

I'm missing any indication about STEM field political views in the study. My observation in Europe (mostly Germany) is that social sciences and humanities tend to much further left (European meaning of term) than STEM fields. In European political terminology, I mean left as opposed to liberal or conservative.

@BenSandeen: The study gives rather detailed results which (not surprisingly) have a huge variance between universities. I'm not familiar enough with the academic landscape in the US to judge whether their selection of universities was representative or biased - but with what I know from Europe, their selection of fields probably distorts findings. And they are looking at registered voters (for economics, that's little more than 1/3 of the professors). Voters for one side may be more probable to register (possible bias). The study does not discuss any of these possible sources of bias.

I've edited the question to make it less opinion-based and to incorporate some of the comments. I'm voting to reopen the question, which I consider highly relevant to academia.

Meta discussion on this question.

I edited it to remove the controversial description of "liberalism" and its relationship to European political views, and instead kept it focused on the American political spectrum.

I am the OP and while I no longer recognize the question as it's been modified so much none of my original text still exists, I appreciate the effort that has gone into editing it and am happy to leave it be :)

This has appeared in the review queue with requests to close as "primarily opinion-based". Possibly those votes took place before the edits happened, but I'm voting to leave open because as it currently stands, this question is asking for studies based evidence.

What is the asterisk supposed to refer to now? There's no note.

I really do not think we are going to get to any causal relationship here. One thing you might want to consider is the link between IQ and politics.
People with higher IQ (generally) tend to be more liberal:
https://theconversation.com/do-smart-people-tend-to-be-more-liberal-yes-but-it-doesnt-mean-all-conservatives-are-stupid-57713
Childhood IQ in Britain, for a 1970s cohort, predicts voting for more liberal parties (Greens and Lib Dems):
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/8896159/childhood_intelligence_predicts_voter.pdf
This answer is only meant as a starting point. You would need to consider all of the evidence from across the world (perhaps the reverse is true, in general, for example. And perhaps other variables come into play).

But I also said I don't think we are going to get any causal relationship. It's merely a suggestion of an area to investigate. A starting point, as I said.

Maybe you should be commenting this, rather than answering then

I can totally deduce your political opinion from your writing!

@KamilSJaron - no you can't. But the reason you think you can is because the cited research suggests that high-IQ is associated with particular voting choices (in a particular political context, i.e., the UK). Nothing I can do about that, it's what the question was asking for.

One of the biggest predictors of political ideology in the US right now is a personality trait called "openness to experience" which is define roughly as "breadth, depth, originality and complexity of thought, coming up with novel ways to do things."  This is very close to describing exactly what academics do.  A 1 point increase in openness to experience (between -2 and 2) is associated with a 9 point increase in likeliness to vote for Clinton over Trump.  See this summary of the relevant research.

I also do not think we are going to get to any causal relationship here. One other factor that have crossed my mind to explain this link is attitude towards immigration. I am not from USA, but I got this impression that democrats were more for-immigration than republicans.
I found some backups for the impression tn the study "Race, Religion, and Immigration in 2016" they showed that immigration was one of the strongest factors that motivated voters of 2012 republican candidate in the presidential election to vote again for 2016 republican candidate (Figure 2). In the Figure 3 they also show that immigration is considered as way more serious problem among republican supporters, in comparison to voters of democrats.
Then I wanted to figure what is the proportion of immigrants among academics. It's harder than I expected, but this article from 2011 says that there were 115,000 "international scholars" working at colleges and universities in the United States. If the calculations from this blogpost are correct, there are ~7.5% of immigrants among academics. The frequency of migration in academia is so high that leaves very little space to fight against it.
In conclusion, I think that academics will be always in favor of migration.  Note that this factor does not require an assumption about intelligence of academics.

Not only are academics more likely to have colleagues who are immigrants, we've typically done a lot more international travel, and often to have worked internationally.

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, the authors are trying to test whether

"conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty."

They find that

"greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern."

(Both quoted from the abstract.)
This suggests that a skill that is highly valued in academia is less prevalent among conservatives. It is unlikely (though not impossible) that identifying as conservative changes cognitive functioning and thus there is even a tentatively causal relationship.
There is also evidence published in Science that individual differences in inequity aversion have correlates in the activity of different brain regions. Given the experimental setup (subjects engage in a moral dilemma during the measurement), causality between brain activity and behavior is unclear here.
Both studies are embedded in a large literature (do check out both cited papers and citing papers!) that to my understanding establishes a link between certain cognitive functions and political and moral beliefs. If these cognitive functions are useful in academia, this may explain the political attitudes of academics.

The topic is discussed at length in article [1], which was coauthored by 29 established scholars from Oxford, MIT, Technion, Brown, Columbia, Vanderbilt, etc., including two Nobel Prize winners. From that 26-page long treatise, I would single out three points.
(a)  In the past, the hiring process of faculty at major American universities was based on merit. An applicant was supposed to provide (along with the CV & publication list) two documents: Research Statement and Teaching Statement.  Over the past years, the situation changed, in that applicants now have to submit also a political document named DEI Statement which, on many occasions, outweighs the research and teaching statements. For academic jobs in the Life Sciences at UC Berkeley, for instance, each DEI statement is ranked on three criteria: knowledge of DEI, track record of DEI work, plans to implement DEI initiatives if hired). This is done using a point system (15 points total). If the statement doesn’t accrue enough points, the application is rejected and is not considered again. This is why in recent faculty searches in the life sciences at UC Berkeley, three quarters of the candidates were eliminated solely on the basis on their DEI statements. [2], [3], [4].
(b)  DEI statements are often expected to embrace CSJ; statements that express support for the ideals of liberal social justice, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a colourblind society, are rejected. As UC Berkeley’s sample rubric for evaluating diversity statements states, candidates who intend to treat “all students the same regardless of their background” will be given the lowest score. [5]
(c)  Some universities have begun to incorporate DEI statements in tenure and promotion. This policy is being introduced, for example, by the University of Indiana [6] and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. [7]
For more details on this process and its possible consequences, see the afore-cited paper [1].
[1] D. Abbot et al. In Defense of Merit in Science. Journal of Controversial Ideas 2023, 3(1), 1-26. doi: 10.35995/jci03010001
[2] J. Coyne. When Commitment to Diversity Outweighs Teaching and Research in a Biology Job. (2021)
[3] J. Coyne. Life Science Jobs at Berkeley Give Precedence to Candidates' Diversity and Inclusion Statements (2019)
[4] J. Coyne. A Thread about University DEI Statements (2023)
[5]  Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, UC Berkeley.
[6]  C. Flaherty, The DEI Pathway to Promotion. Inside Higher Education (2021),
[7] C. Flaherty, Where DEI Work Is Faculty Work. Inside Higher Education (2022),

Diversity statements are certainly one of the mechanisms through which the current ideological skew is preserved, but this does not really explain how this ideological skew, which predates the current rise of diversity statements, arose. (Of course, I don't think that there's any deep mystery in this: it's hardly surprising that in Western societies, where the dominant form of inequality and discrimination is educational in nature and has been for quite a while, highly educated cosmopolitans would be drawn to a worldview which both distracts from and justifies their position of power.)

@AdamPřenosil The ideological skew certainly predates the modern policies. In the past, however, ideological discrimination in the hiring process in academia generally didn't exist -- or, at least, wasn't official.

David French is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonpartisan group that monitors free speech on campus. In a 2005 interview with ABC News [1], French argued that "the universities have been so captured by the left point of view, that you're going to get more political and intellectual diversity at your average suburban mega-church than you are at an elite university." The cause, he believed, was the systematic suppression and censorship of conservatives.
That same year, Rothman, Nevitte and Lichter published a paper [2] using data based on a telephone survey in 1999 of approximately 4000 faculty, administrators, and students. The purpose of this study was to test if professional advancement is influenced by ideological orientation. What they found out, was that conservatives and Republicans taught at lower quality schools, compared with liberals and Democrats. This suggested, they argued, "that conservative complaints of the presence and effects
of liberal homogeneity in academia deserve to be taken seriously".
A 2014 study by Iyengar and Westwood [3] underscored how powerful political bias can be. In an experiment, Democrats and Republicans were asked to choose a scholarship winner from among fictitious finalists, with the experiment tweaked so that applicants sometimes included the president of the Democratic or Republican club. Four-fifths of Democrats and Republicans alike chose a student of their own party to win a scholarship, and discrimination against people of the other party was much greater than discrimination based on race.
For a 2016 study [4], Shields and Dunn surveyed 153 conservative professors. “As two conservative professors,” they wrote in The Washington Post, “we agree that right-wing faculty members and ideas are not always treated fairly on college campuses. But we also know that right-wing hand-wringing about higher education is overblown.” Nevertheless, about one-third of the professors professors admit to using "coping strategies that gays and lesbians have used in the military and other inhospitable work environments", ie they "closeted" themselves by passing as liberals. Some also said they were badly mistreated on account of their politics.
In a 2017 speech before the Stanford Board of Trustees [5], former Provost John Etchemendy argued that he "watched a growing intolerance", "a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for". "It manifests itself", he argued "in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands".
In 2009, world–renowned political scientist Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University for his criticisms of Israel's human rights violations against the Palestinian people [6]. In 2014, co-discoverer or DNA James Watson was forced to sell his Nobel prize after losing most of his income for stating that people of African descent are less intelligent than white people [7]. In 2017, graduate student Lindsay Shepherd was hauled before a three-person panel at Wilfrid Laurier University, which interrogated her for more than 40 minutes for showing a first-year communications class a video snippet from TV Ontario of Jordan Peterson debating another professor on the use of gender pronouns [8]. In 2018, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Amy Wax was removed from teaching mandatory first-year courses for saying in an interview that she didn't think she'd ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class [9].
These are some of many examples where academics / scholars have been reprimanded for making statements deemed too "politically incorrect" by their employers. While such cases are obviously but annectodal evidence at best, they do suggest Etchemendy may have had a point when he said he watched a growing intolerance "that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for". They do suggest it may indeed be safer for conservative professors to pass as liberals. They do suggest that French may have had a point when he argued there was systematic suppression and censorship of conservatives. And they do suggest that Rothman, Nevitte and Lichter may have been right to conclude that that conservative complaints of the presence and effects of liberal homogeneity in academia deserve to be taken seriously.

[1] Pierce, Fort (2005) "Conservatives Censored on College Campuses?"
[2] Rothman, Stanley; Lichter, S. Robert; Nevitte, Neil (2005). "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty"
[3]: Iyengar, Shanto; Westwood, Sean (2014). "Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization"
[4] Jon A. Shields; Joshua M. Dunn Sr. (2016). "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University"
[5]: Etchemendy, John (2017) "The threat from within"
[6]: Klein, David (2009) "Why Is Norman Finkelstein Not Allowed to Teach?"
[7] Perry, Keith (2014) "James Watson selling Nobel prize 'because no-one wants to admit I exist"
[8]: Walkom, Thomas (2017) "The problematic case of the Wilfrid Laurier TA who dared to air a debate on grammar"
[9]: Diaz, Andrea (2018) "Law prof ousted from first-year classes after saying black students never graduated top of their class"

Your post doesn't really include much of anything about why, only a rehashing of conservative complaints about being a minority.  The only possibly relevant citation of empirical research is the Iyengar study, but that finds equal bias in both directions.

@jakebeal : What about the study by Rothman, Stanley & Lichter? And what about the study by Shields & Dunn? Why do you consider these studies irrelevant? And what about the overal tendency towards suppression and censorship of conservative thought as described by French, Etchemendy and numerous other sources? How is this not relevant in light of the aforementioned studies?

They all explore potential differences and consequences, but offer no evidence regarding causation.

@jakebeal : When one-third of the professors surveyed in Shields and Dunn admit to using "coping strategies that gays and lesbians have used in the military and other inhospitable work environments" to avoid discriminating and some even state having been "mistreated on account of their politics", this clearly confirms that systematic suppression and censorship is a causal factor worth considering, as is the fact that that conservatives and Republicans taught at lower quality schools, as demonstrated by Rothman, Nevitte and Lichter.

@jakebeal (continued) : Anyway, do note that the modetor's note below the question "states that we "may use comments ONLY to suggest improvements" and that "moderators will remove debates, arguments or opinions without notice". So unless you have any suggestions for improvements, please suggest them. Otherwise, I'm afraid we have to end this interaction due to being in bread of that request.

My apologies for being too indirect: I would suggest that in order to improve the post, you remove all of the material that is simply claiming that conservatives are mistreated in academia. Your other sources allege systematic suppression without any empirical evidence of why one might expect to always find a group of powerful suppression-minded liberals even in generally conservative regions and institutions.

@jakebeal : I don't see how LESS sources to back of the fact that conservatives are systematicly suppressed and censorshiped would be an improvement of my answer. If anything, my answer would benefit from MORE sources to support this. —  No one is arguing that there is ALWAYS a group of powerful suppression-minded liberals, even in generally conservative regions and institutions. That's a pretty silly strawmen, really, and you should know better than to suggest something like that.

@jakebeal : (continued) The fact is simply that most conservatives believes that colleges should expose students to all types of viewpoints even if they are offensive or biased against certain groups, whereas Liberals generally prefer the suppression and censorship of viewpoints they deem offensive or biased. As a demonstration, see eg. this survey by Hamilton university's studenty paper.

@jakebeal : (continued) As a consequence, we see that colleges with a predominantly Liberal establishment (which appear to be the majority) are actively involved in the suppression and censorship of viewpoints deemed offensive or biased by this Liberal establishment. And this prevents many conservatives from rising in the academic food chain, unless they hide their conservative views, at least until ther obtain tenure.

@jakebeal : (continued) Either way, as I said, I don't see how your suggestions are going to improve my answer and I honestly can't imagine you convincing me otherwise. So, let's please respect the moderation's wishes not to engage in debates, arguments or the expression of opinions any further.

I agree with the first comment by @jakebeal at the start. The question that was asked was: "Is there any serious empirical research into why professionals in academia are more likely to vote democratic than the average of the population? If so, what are the main explanations? " What you offer is a descriptive account, claiming that conservative opinions/voices are being silenced or discouraged, but in the large mass of text it's hard to see an answer to those questions. Some of your comments might serve better as an answer, since they make analytical claims, not just descriptive accounts

@JohnSlegers I see that you have been reproached for not providing enough empirical support to your claims of discrimination of conservatives in academia. Please feel free to borrow evidence and references from my answer , if you wish.


text:
Standing/sitting practices of an instructor
A question on this site deals with health aspects related to the posture while delivering a lecture.
My question is about the statistics regarding the same practice and its effect on students.
In general, the success of a lecture may depends on several factors like lecture notes, interactivity etc. Is standing/sitting (of an instructor) in classroom one among them? Does it effect teaching success in any way? Are there any stats related to it?
I know about some institutes having an explicit rule that an instructor should not sit while delivering a lecture and they provide neither chairs nor tables. Is this rule implemented in the institutes of many countries?
Note that sitting or standing by an instructor in this question refers to the instructor who either sits or stands throughout the lecture or at least 90% of the lecture.

This is by no means a complete answer, so a comment. But, consider actors who want to be dramatic and hold the audience. How often do you see an actor performing while seated? Unless the staging requires it (a king on a throne for example) they are on their feet.

"I know about some institutes having an explicit rule that an instructor should not sit while delivering a lecture" - may I ask for examples, out of curiosity? This just sound ridiculous.

Lot of private colleges in India @sleepy It is common here.

I get it if you replace "sit" with "sleep".

Does it effect teaching success in any way?

Effective teaching engages with students.  If there are many students, you cannot engage with all of them effectively from one place.  For example, I walk to the part of the room where students are not paying attention; then they start paying attention.  I do not recommend either standing still or sitting still; sitting in a moving wheelchair would work fine, though.  That's not quite what you asked for, but it works.

Is this rule implemented in the institutes of many countries?

I've never heard of it.  I think this rule would be illegal in countries that protect workers with disabilities.

I didn't answer the part about statistics.


text:
Interpretation and compliance with IEEE guidelines regarding the use of AI-generated text in research papers
I am in the process of submitting a research paper to an IEEE journal. While going through the submission guidelines, I came across the following instruction:

The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper
submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the
paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI
system used to generate the text. source

For the creation of my research paper, I typically write an initial draft that includes all the necessary citations. Then, I employ the assistance of an AI tool (specifically GPT) to rephrase or elaborate on my initial text. This AI does not autonomously generate any text; instead, it helps to enhance and polish the original draft, improving its readability and grammatical accuracy.
My confusion lies in the interpretation of the aforementioned guideline. Given that all of the text in my paper has been "enhanced" or "refined" by AI, even though it doesn't originate any content, does it need to be cited as per the guideline? How should I proceed with acknowledging the use of AI in my paper under these circumstances?
I would appreciate any insights or suggestions on how to comply correctly with the IEEE's policy regarding AI-generated text.

To sum up: The use of AI in my paper was purely to improve grammar and readability of my original work, which is free of plagiarism. Additionally, the similarity index of my paper is low, further confirming there's no plagiarism issue. I'm merely looking for guidance on how to properly cite this AI usage, as per the IEEE guidelines.

This seems like a question best suited to ask the editors, as they are the ones who should make a decision in cases where their guideline is unclear.

The "to sum up" bit should be in the question, not a comment.

I would like to clarify that my reference to plagiarism was made to emphasize that the AI tool I used, specifically GPT, is not drawing or replicating text from external sources. Rather, it serves to enhance and rephrase the original content I provide to it, improving readability and grammatical accuracy. My intent was to draw a distinction between the use of AI for content generation (which could potentially be misconstrued as plagiarism) and its use as a tool to refine and improve already original content, which is the manner in which I utilized it in my work.

You just said: "GPT, is not drawing or replicating text from external sources", this is not true, GPT was trained on large amounts of text, and it is known for drawing and replicating parts of its training set, which is plagiarism in an academic context.

@Dr.Snoopy To clarify, when I mentioned that GPT is not drawing or replicating text from external sources, I was referring to its usage as a tool in my research paper. I ensure proper citation and independent verification of information to avoid plagiarism. By using GPT to enhance grammar and readability, I maintain the originality and integrity of my work. To comply with IEEE guidelines, I will disclose the use of AI-generated text and provide a citation in the acknowledgments section.

You actually do not know that, this is exactly the problem with using GPT and other models, you do not know what is in the training set, so you have no idea if its taking sentences from other works or not. Even if you just use it to 'enhance grammar and readability". What if your paper gets flagged for plagiarism and the IEEE tools actually find that your sentences are similar to some published work, which you are not aware? This is why I tell my students, do not use generative AI to write papers or reports, because the risk is just too high.

I do not think that the meaning of this request to cite the AI-text generator only refers to instances when the AI "created" the text.
In your comment you mention plagiarism, in a way from which I gather that you kind of equate using AI tools for text generation as bordering on plagiarism. Any respectable scientific publication should be free of plagiarized passages anyway. So if you equate using AI to generate text as bordering on plagiarism, then the only meaning of that request to cite AI use should be the one you mentioned: using it to improve texts grammatically that you have written yourself. A short note like "To improve readability and quality of language, all parts of this paper have been grammatically revised using XXX system." would be the best way to do it.
It sounds like you feel at least a bit uncomfortable to admit that you used AI - because otherwise you would not ask if this definition means that you have to indicate the AI use. If you are not willing to freely admit that you used AI on your paper (unless absolutely necessary), and consider AI use in any more extensive form than you used yourself as (bordering on) plagiarism, maybe you should evaluate if the gain that comes from using AI is really woth it.

The guidelines are pretty clear. If there is any AI generated text in the manuscript then it needs to be disclosed. It doesn't matter for what reason.
Incidentally, plagiarism isn't just copied text.


text:
Is it common to allow professional compulsory activities over personal activities?
Professional compulsory activities I am referring here falls into the following two classes:

The activities that need to be done very quickly.

Activities given by supervisor to participate in a voluntary activity.

I frequently encounter the professional compulsory activities. Former are more frequent than later.
Examples for first one includes: Evaluating copies of students within a day, preparing teaching material for students of a course took by my supervisor within a day, preparing grade sheets within half day etc.,
Examples for second one includes: Attending to an outstation workshop for a few days, attending webinars at non-lab timings etc.,
The issue involved in allowing them is break in my personal time table and sacrifice in my personal activities etc., I am not at all comfortable with them as I want to spend time according to my own preferences in non-lab hours.
Those professional compulsory activities always break my productive cycle of work and forces me to spend time.
Is this a common phenomenon in academia or am I entertaining those activities instead of saying a strong NO?
Note: The announcement for first class of activities are not in my hands. Superior authorities announces deadlines by personal calling, mailing etc.,

Where are you based? This sounds a lot like work culture in particular countries. It depends on the context. Saying No will be much more difficult in Japan than Australia for example.

India, but interested to know global view. @TomKelly and actually, it is difficult here also...... The effects may propagate....

It's certainly extremely common.  Is it desirable?  Maybe not.  Only you can decide how to prioritize things in your own life.

This is a US specific answer, perhaps, but yes, some of the things you describe are done, but it requires some perspective. For example, if you are working as a TA in a course there may be requirements on the timing of getting grading done so that feedback can be given to the students in a timely way. These may be university requirements, actually, but could be made by an individual. But I would expect to be told of these requirements early on so that I could schedule my other activities, work and life, around them.
The second kind are also done, if less frequently, but I'd expect to have some notice and I'd expect them to be rare. While you describe them as "voluntary", others would call them "professional". They take time and effort, but can pay you dividends as well. A professor may treat them as part of your professional training.
But imposing chaos on your life is bad. You need advance notice and the opportunity to schedule.
I'll note also, that professors have such requirements thrust on them as well, especially until they earn tenure. And even afterwards, the educational mission of the university has to be kept moving forward.

I’ll give an answer based on my experiences of academic research in Australia and New Zealand compared with Japan and other East Asian countries. What is expected and what is considered “voluntary” varies considerably and I think these represent different extremes with working in North America or Europe being somewhere in the middle. Of course, individual departments or even laboratories have different working cultures.
In Australia and New Zealand you can freely say no to these things if they’re at short-notice and affect your personal life. Especially if you have a long commute or young family it is understandable to maintain regular working hours. You will be expected to attend conferences, teach undergraduates, write grants, and review papers. However you will usually be given ample time to manage your workload around these responsibilities. Any opportunity to entertain visiting guests or attend seminars is entirely voluntary. Of course this can be great for networking or professional skills but is your choice not to attend.
In East Asia (I think Japan and South Korea) are the extreme here, things are very different. It can be very difficult to say “no” to these things. The working hours are generally much longer and often overtime is considered the only resort to meet deadlines. Due to hierarchical culture, subordinates may not be given much notice. This is unfortunately something that does occur frequently in working environments in this part of the world. This extends beyond research activities and includes participating in events hosted by your institution, hosting visiting speakers, and attending things like the Christmas or New Year parties. In Japanese workplaces, not attending these “social” gatherings after working hours can be considered very disrespectful. These are not “rare” in Asian countries, some labs do this kind of gathering several times per week.
Either way you must consider your situation and what’s appropriate. When applying for a new position I think it’s important to discuss these concerns ahead of time and agree of expectations. If possible talk to other members of the lab to find out what it is like. It varies considerably but does occur to some extend in many research positions. I think this kind of workload only increases in more senior positions with more responsibilities, which is why some is delegated to you.
What you can do is expect that some tasks like this may come up from time to time in the future. You need to decide whether it’s best for you and your working relationships to be assertive and set limits or to allow time for it. Managing your time and workload to be productive is incredibly important in an academic career. Regardless of how common it is, you need to learn to cope with the stress that this causes. I too try to plan ahead and try to maintain balance with my personal life so I understand this can be frustrating.