text:
How much feedback to provide for unsalvageable manuscript during peer review
When reviewing a manuscript as a peer reviewer and providing written feedback on a manuscript that is clearly a Reject, how does one decide how much feedback to provide? By "clear Reject," I mean poorly written, lack of novelty, experiments not satisfactory, issues with references, etc. Should the time be taken to provide comprehensive feedback for all aspects of the paper (i.e., what I'd typically do for a major revision) or do I just note the major components that led to the rejection recommendation? In other words, how much time should I spend providing feedback for a paper that is not reasonably salvageable?

@AnonymousPhysicist not exactly, but it is certainly useful. Based on your answer, would your recommendation be to be as comprehensive in your feedback for a really poor manuscript as you would any other?

I wrote there "Identify the main weaknesses of the paper. If the paper needs revision, then all weaknesses which need correction should be listed."  It sounds like this paper does not need revision, so only "main" weaknesses are sufficient.  If the entire manuscript lacks novelty and it is not useful as a replication study, then that should be sufficient feedback.

That makes sense. I misinterpreted "revision" in your linked answer as being whether it needed revision at all. In this case, "identify the main weaknesses" answers my question.

I think the answer might vary. Assuming you have time to spend on it, the more the details the better is for the authors. Once I got a paper that was so surprisingly poor that indeed my report was laconic. But there was literally nothing to do....

You don't need to provide a large amount of feedback to the author, but you need to provide enough of a description of the inherent problems for the editor to reconcile between disagreement in referee reports, if that comes up.  The manuscript is a "Clear Reject" for you.  I suspect that is not the status that the authors believe it to be, and possibly other referees will not see things the same way.

For a manuscript that's so clearly a reject for all the reasons you state, I would not spend much time at all on feedback to the author. Of course you list those reasons for the editor.
If you are feeling generous with your time you could point out one instance of each of the kinds of flaws.


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How do project supervisors address the "freeloading" problem in group projects?
I am currently leading a three person team to tackle an undergrad engineering project that involves several parts. I am responsible for data analysis using sophisticated computer algorithms, another is responsible for creating a software graphical display and another is involved in the programming of a piece of hardware.
The problem is that both of those other students are freeloading on my efforts and neither has contributed much since the project started in May of this year (that's 6 months of doing next to nothing).
In the lasts couple of months, every two weeks we would have a team meeting with our project supervisor. The team meeting involves a submission of progress since last meeting. Here's what would happen: one or two days before the meeting, a person will do something that is tangential to what he is assigned to do. For example, it could be setting up a piece of software, or trying someone else's code. Nothing is ever successful and in every single progress report I would see them putting down "investigating alternatives" or "still under research". What? You have been researching for more than half a year.
The most irritating issue for me is that they are both freeloading on my efforts. Because data analysis requires a huge amount of experiments and organization of the data, every once a while I would get them to spend less than 30 minutes with me (amidst whining and complaining and playing with cellphone) on organizing about 4 TB worth of data, while I spend the next week incessantly work on the data analysis, organization of the data, and preparing for presentation at project meetings. You've guessed it, this is exactly what they would put down on the progress report - "helped team member X to perform data organization". In addition, when they are stuck on their parts, I am often forced to take over just to meet the deadline. To be honest, I have single handedly spear-headed every single aspect of project (even though I have never done GUI or hardware programming!) because things are never delivered and there are no immediate, effective checks to keep them from not delivering their work.
MOST irritating aspect: they have put my work onto their LinkedIn profile!
The top excuse that they give is that they are busy with other courses. Since this project is over a long period of time and graded based on overall success, they do not think it is as important as their other half semester courses. They keep on telling me how they are so busy with their courses and everything is due on the next day and midterms is next week they never think that I have the exact same workload (if not more). I also don't have any financial power or control over their grades as we do not have any official reporting system put in place to get them working. Also it is impossible to kick them off of the team without shutting the project down.
I want to signal to my project supervisor that they are not performing AT ALL. This will definitely come as a surprise to him since every meeting there are enormous progress (all from my end) and the project has been an overall success. I am also kind of upset that my team members are going to chip in on a potentially big prize at the end of this year.
From your experience, what is commonly done for a supervisor to spot freeloaders in a group project and how are penalties handed down? How can I work with my supervisor now (who maybe completely unaware of the situation) to effectively put these people back to work?

This seems like a rant disguised as a question. If you want to know to make your teammates be less awful, ask that. If you want to know how to complain to your instructor about your teammates, ask that. Your title suggests you are asking a pedagogical question about policy for instructors of project-centric courses (and the answer is, by the way: Typically, they don't). This is not the case. I'd consider re-writing the question to make subtext less incongruent.

Also, your language is loaded with bias. You "spend the next week working incessantly"? Really? This rhetoric doesn't help, and I think it would be better to objectively lay out the facts and get to the question.

Sounds like every group project I ever had in college. If they don't do their part, your grade will still end up being bad, just the same as theirs. You can go whine but I've seen others do that and the professor would just say, figure out how to work as a team. IOW, they don't care. So it usually just boils down to 1 person (2 when you are lucky) does the meat of the project and then hopefully you can get the others to at least help get the paperwork parts done. That's not how it should be but it allows you to get a good grade and actually replicates the real world work environment also.

I actually faced a similar situation. I tried to organize meetings, to get people involved but in the end, they didn't even show up at the final demonstration. I wrote in the report in a very objective manner the work each member of the project did (which was : "A did not provide anything or participated to meetings."). Got a 18/20 for the thing, they got 0/20. I couldn't force people to do what I wanted: I could only report facts (with proof). Worked for me. Not sure it would 100% of the time though.

Advice for next time: You should tell the advisor sooner than 6mo into the project.  As soon as something starts going south, you need to let the people in charge know, rather than sweep it under the rug.

You might consider asking yourself what role you had in establishing this situation.  Do your teammates want to not contribute, or do they feel locked out of the project?  Have you made all the important decisions and ignored hints that they weren't happy with the way the project was going?  Do they feel any ownership of part of the project?

Consider that out of the three of you, you are by far getting the most out of this project.  Your teammates will leave the class without gaining any knowledge of GUI programming or hardware design, while you get to develop skill in all three areas.  In one of my classes, my teammate and I fight over who gets to do most of the work, because both of us want the chance to practice our skills.

@ScottSeidman That's a good point. I have seen that happen in group projects. On the other hand, I've seen people just not hold up their end a lot more often.

@Dunk I don't know that I would say it replicates the real-world environment all that well. I'm sure it does at some places, but I think most places would fire an engineer who isn't doing much work. It's really not that hard to tell in a normal business scenario if the manager is actually doing his job.

@reirab:While it may not be the norm, it is certainly prevalent. There are quite a few reasons for it. #1 - Manager doesn't want to put a person on overhead so they put them on whatever project that has an opening. #2 - Office politics. #3 - While developers seem to have little difficulty in identifying the competent versus incompetents, management typically doesn't possess that ability. #4 Some developers are REALLY GOOD, so it makes the average one appear to not be of much value. #5 Project leads know how to work around the less talented so their deficiencies aren't as obvious as you claim.

@Dunk #3 is a large part of why I think all people managing engineers should actually be engineers. To the maximum extent possible, I specifically avoid places where the management did not have engineering experience/degrees when looking for jobs.

@reirab:By avoiding places where management did not have engineering degrees you are missing out on some of the best managers. Being an engineer and being a manager are 2 entirely different skill sets. Being a great manager won't make you a great engineer just as much as being a great engineer won't make you even a mediocre manager. IME, the managers who recognized that they are "managers" tend to be pretty good, whereas the "engineer" managers tend to be quite the opposite. Of course there have been exceptions in both directions.

@Dunk Being an engineer doesn't make you a good manager, but not being an engineer makes you a very poor manager of engineering projects, as a general rule. I'm sure there are exceptions, but, in general, people who don't understand technology making important decisions that rely on technical knowledge make bad decisions. The very issue you yourself mentioned is one of those bad decisions: hiring/keeping the wrong engineers.

@reirab:Good managers don't need to understand the "technical" issues if they have reliable engineers that they trust. That leaves them free to actually be a manager and also work the business and political issues at the company. Most "engineer-type" managers I work with think that they are still engineers despite not having any "engineering" experience to speak of for a number of years. Thus, they tend to make decisions that would have been great 5 years ago but are obsolete now.

@reirab please take extended conversations to chat.

I get the impression that "group projects" introduce under graduates to the "real world" of working in industry. Besides the engineering aspect of the project things like note taking at meetings is looked at, how the project is split between the various members. Ideally the marking scheme should be biased toward the contributions of each person, so that if you have the paper work showing "who does what" and you can show that you have achieved your component of the project you will get good marks.

From your experience, what is commonly done for a supervisor to spot freeloaders in a group project and how are penalties handed down? How can I work with my supervisor now (who maybe completely unaware of the situation) to effectively put these people back to work?

As somebody who taught many courses with a similar structure to what you described: the common approach for supervisors to handle this situation is to do nothing (at least not on their own initiative). You are likely not aware of it, but you are in the middle of learning something that will presumably be more valuable to you than the hard technical skills of the project. You are learning how to handle team work that isn't going smoothly.
There is a good chance your supervisor is already aware that things are not working out in your project (your team mates have been reporting that things are "under research" for half a year while you have been delivering results - any half-decent supervisor knows what that means). He does not step in because one of the main learning outcomes of such a project is that he expects you to learn how to handle such issues.
So far, you are not handling it well. You are clearly very annoyed by the situation, but you do not mention any clear steps to resolve the issue. You cover their asses by taking over their work, and have as far as I can tell not formally escalated the problem. Instead, you are hoping that the "higher-ups" will figure it out on their own, and step in without you having to take responsibility. This is exactly how you should also not handle this situation in the real world.
And, I should add, do not hope that this situation will not come up when you work in industry. Replace "we don't have time for this because of other courses" with "we don't have time for this because of other projects", and you will have the exact same problem in the real world. Only in industry, the stakes for failing will be higher. As usual, university gives you a comparatively low-risk environment to train working on the same kinds of problems that you will also routinely face later on.
To end this with a practical remark: stop focusing so much on what they do, and what your supervisor should do. Start thinking of your environment as a context that you can't (directly) change, at least not without effort. Your task is to figure out what you can do to work in the environment you are given. This may include taking more responsibility for managing the group, or getting into a big, potentially productive fight with your team. This may also include formally escalating the problem.

+1 since as a suggestion to the student this is reasonable enough. But for instructors that practice peer instruction and utilize group projects like this there are ways that they could be more proactive about it. But, like you said, it could very well be a conscious decision not to, for example, include in biweekly meetings requests for confidential progress reports that allow students to express concerns and things like that.

@WillieWong Yes, as an instructor, I avoid doing that like the plague. Students need to learn to self-organise in teams. Something that most of my students, or maybe most people in general, truly suck at.

On the other hand, it does not hurt to have established channels to which the students can voice their concerns. Instructors are in a position of power and it is more effective to open up the line of communications from your side than to rely entirely on students to come to you if there are problems. It could be as simple as having the progress reports be given in 1-on-1 meetings rather than meetings involving the whole team. In other words, yes, I agree 100% that students should be trained in team-work. But when their grades depend on it some failsafe should be built-in to the process.

@WillieWong I agree. However, having a permanent, easy "fail-guard" sort of defies the original purpose of requiring self-organization. I guess the difference is that grades really aren't considered important around here, so if somebody's grade drops but he learns a valuable lesson in the process, that is acceptable to most teachers. Cultural differences, I guess.

Again, I actually agree with you. It is a delicate issue how to provide the fail-guard without letting the students rely on it too much. I can see, for example, that having 1-on-1 meetings maybe counterproductive since you would be introducing an external motivator to the equation (though to be fair, same thing happens in the work place). Another thing one can do, of course, is to make teamwork one of the learning objectives; simply reminding the students that they are being trained to work in teams can help the students themselves be more assertive about the issues.

In a group project based Masters level class I took the final consisted of 1. A group project that brought together all of the work we did for homework and 2. A survey where each person described what each person contributed to the team and how their specific knowledge improved the group's work.

Do you also teach your students how to handle group dynamics? I agree that these are important skills to learn, but it seems to me that just taking a hands-off approach and expecting the students to figure it out on their own is a bit like tossing them into the deep end of the pool and seeing if they'll learn to swim before they drown. Especially so if they've previously learned counterproductive or situational "rules" (like, say "formal escalation just gets you labeled as a snitch") that they need to un-learn (or learn to only apply on a case-by-case basis) before they can progress.

@WillieWong the students can always send a private email to the supervisor or drop by the office, if they consider the situation is bad enough. The lesson there is that you have to actually think about doing it.

The point of the group exercise is to learn to work in a team. If the instructor simply wanted to to test your coding ability, a solo exercise would achieve this far more effectively. This is a hard skill to master.

What a crappy "answer". You don't answer anything except to say "figure it out yourself". "Students need to learn to self-organize...most of my students...truly suck at" - It sounds like they have crappy teachers.

I teach a design course.  We have a number of checks in place to discourage this from happening.
Perhaps the biggest is we give a little practice team experience before assigning real teams.  We ask each team member to evaluate their peers on the team.  Students are then surprised to find out that their grades for the team portion of the overall grade are adjusted by up to a full letter based on these evaluations. We then let them know that this is how the rest of the year will be graded.  This gets the grade-motivated students participating.
The rest comes down to making sure that each player has some buy in on the project. Our course is customer driven, with students applying to work on specific teams.  Once the real teams are formed, I give a mini lecture on project management skills, based on a book by Heerkens (Project Management, from the Briefcase Series -- especially the section on "Accidental Managers"), and we discuss as a class why people participate more or less on teams.  I point out that our starting assumption is that since everyone applied to participate on the team they ended up on, that everyone wants to make the customer happy.  We also discuss that different people are motivated by different things.  I ask the students to think about if they would be disappointed if they got less than an A in the class.  After they think a bit, I ask them to consider whether their teammates feel the same way.  I point out that some students have real obstacles that a team as a whole can help deal with -- like the student that lives off-campus and can't make 11PM meetings, or even a student that might be supporting a family the team doesn't know about, and has an entirely different priority set.
Once the projects get kicking, I ask for lists of weekly action items  and who is to carry them out.  If a TA (I have a fleet of TAs) notices that someone isn't taking action items, or not delivering on them, we'll intervene to see how we can get the student some more buy-in on the project, often by making sure there's an aspect of the overall project they can call their own.
Is this 100% effective?? Obviously not, but I feel I have some grip on such issues.
In this particular case, one must consider the possibility that the original asker might be part of a poisonous team dynamic that I see over and over and over (usually in the practice team experience, and then I teach about it in my project management lecture so it comes up less often on the real projects).  This is where one team member becomes the self-appointed leader without really understanding what that role means.  When this happens, you can end up with one person who assumes leading means doing more work, and sometimes can make other team members not want to work with that person.  So, without trying to analyze the team, the person who believes that the others aren't doing their fair share might want to reflect on the situation and ask himself if he's done anything to help create this situation.  A leader works hard to make sure he's getting the most that can be gotten from every team member, and the teammates are eager to work with him or her.
To offer simple advice for this case -- you seem to have periodic meetings and progress reports.  That's a start.  I recommend Gantt Charting the whole project, so you can start showing which parts of the project are moving along and which are not.  This way, your teammates see it staring them in the face.  Make it clear which tasks you are willing to work on and which parts you are not. When it becomes clear that there are gaping areas, figure out which teammates are going to handle what's left.  Help them break up the big tasks into bite sized subtasks, with each tasks assigned to a responsible person.  While you're doing this, you might consider asking your teammates if you're doing anything that is pushing them away from the project.  If there is, figure out how you can make that stop happening.  Apologize, if its called for, and let them know you don't want to dwell on it, but want to move on.
Every meeting should end with a list of ACTION ITEMS, along with the party responsible for each, and a target date of completion.
This way, assuming your teammates want to help (unless you've really alienated them!!) but simply are overwhelmed and don't know how they can best take a bite out of their project, you're actually helping them through the process (i.e., actually leading).  Also, you'll have a record of who's supposed to do what, and it will be clear to everybody where progress is happening and where it's not.
Lastly, when you really sit down and start Gantt Charting, you might figure out that the plan is overly ambitious for the remaining time.  If this is the case, no use tilting at windmills.  Reestablish a new scope of the project that's actually achievable given the time and resources (human or otherwise), and talk this over with your teammates and supervisor.
In the long run, depersonalize it and stop working on blame.  Your team is at point A, you need to be at point B.  Figure out how to best get there with the resources you have.
Good luck.

+1 for actually teaching your students project management skills.

...in fact, the real reason I wish I could upvote your answer several times is because it's the only answer so far to actually offer practical advice on how an instructor should deal with this issue constructively, and how they can help the students learn the actual lessons about effective teamwork that they should be learning. If I ever end up supervising a group project myself, I'll be sure to follow your advice -- which will have to involve me first learning about project management myself, since I never had anyone give my such a "mini lecture" back when I was an undergrad.

Thanks, @IlmariKaronen,  Check out that Heerkens book.  I'm adding an interesting section to my answer which may have some relevance to the OP.

@ScottSeidman Thanks for the recommendation of the book. I will go read it now.

Thank you for your time, if I were to do a follow up to this question it would have been how to pick your teams in an academic setting. Do you pick the people who you've known for a long time or pick the people who excels at what they do (even though you've never worked with them). I went with the former. I learned my lesson.

We assign teams by an application process.  By chance, some close friends end up on the same team.  Sometimes they don't  stay friends.

Yeah, I was about to say: it is a classic mistake to go into business with friends and family. I know so many people who aren't speaking with their sibling/parent/child/best friend because of some failed investment that left both of them believing the other was at fault. If you are someone who attaches great importance to your grade (equates it to future financial success), it's even easier to get yourself into a situation where you come to hate people you thought were your friends.

Working on a technical project with a team is very different from the kinds of activities you're used to doing with your friends. When you're playing football in the backyard, the group naturally adjusts the "rules" in order to maximize fun. In technology, though, incompetent team members can easily do more harm than good, except in this case, no one on the team has enough experience to even recognize what is incompetence, miscommunication, poor planning, etc., and without the kind of structure Scott talks about, it will destroy the team's relationship. No question.

+1, in particular for "depersonalize it and stop working on blame". often easier said than done, though.

The issue you are referring to is called "social loafing" and is a very common problem in teamwork. To fix this, us need to do a number of things but the most important is to shine a spotlight on everyone. When people are anonymous, they tend to do things the would not otherwise do (or tend to avoid things they would otherwise not avoid).
So, ideally, when forming the team, you would set out the ground rules for what is required to join the team and what are the rules for continues membership. However, this does not seem to work in your current situation (and the nature of your work might have made this unrealistic at the start).
The next thing to do is to ensure that everyone is responsible to everyone else in the team. That is, the members do not simply answer to the supervisor but they also answer to everyone else. In this case, they answer to you (and you answer to them). If they are not fulfilling the requirements for continued membership, then they get warned or removed from the team. However, again, this seems difficult in your situation.
If you do have the option of solving the problem through team design, then you need to resort to coaching/leadership. That is, you need to find a way to motivate them. Of course, nobody can you tell you what it takes because we do not know them. You need to find out what really motivates them and then you should work with that to try to get them inspired enough to actually get their jobs done. Of course, leadership ability does not happen overnight but it can be developed. The first thing you should do is to take a stand. That is, tell them that enough is enough and it is unreasonable and unfair that you are doing the lion's share of the work while they are trying to take an equal share of the credit.
The last recommendation I would make is to bring up to your supervisor what is actually going on. I assume he/she is bright enough to be able to monitor what's really going on. After all, yours is not the first team of students to encounter the issue of social loafing.
If you have no penalties (your supervisor should have these tools available) then your only option is leadership/coaching. Best to use both, if you can.

These are all reasonable suggestions if they're possible, but there's no indication in the question that they are (which, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't). If groups are preassigned and immutable, and if (as the OP, justifiably or not, seems to fear) the instructor doesn't respond positively to complaints, then your only remaining concrete leverage (short of blackmail or threats of physical harm, which, even if otherwise feasible, tend to be illegal) on your teammates is threatening to stop working. If they're lazy enough to rather fail than work, even that won't help.

It doesn't have to be social loafing, or more accurately, the person toting the whole load may have been the CAUSE of the situation.  I see it happen quite often.

Taking a stand will simply shut down any hope of establishing a team.

@ScottSeidman I disagree that taking a stand will shut down any hopes of establishing a team. Do you have any evidence to support this statement?

No evidence, just a feeling that comes from managing dozens of undergrad teams through a team-based project oriented course over about a decade.  Frankly, the description offered doesn't leave me much hope for the team to start.  "Making a stand" implies you have something to back up your authority, and the OP has no authority.  Working with them to point out that if they could grab a part of the project, the outcome will be better, and they will have something that they can be proud of at the end is a better route (so long as you work with them to show their part is achievable).

Its a classic case of the "accidental manager" described by Heerkens, where you have responsibility for a project, but no authority over the people working on it with you.

And I probably should have said "... is likely to shut down" instead of "... will shut down"

Fire your team. Tell your supervisor that you're going it alone. The other team members are free to take what you've contributed so far and finish it up, which they probably will have trouble doing. I had a programming partner who basically dropped out of school to do drugs and so I submitted the final project with only my name. He complained to the instructor but I responded with how he abandoned the project to party and do drugs. The instructor let him take what I had given him to that point and try to complete it. He could not.
"Leadership" can't solve most problems like this. Next time choose your partners more carefully. No amount of inspiring leadership will make incompetent team members competent. The key to leadership is choosing the right team. If everyone on the team is good then the other problems take care of themselves.
In the private sector, it is the supervisor's job to find dead weight and either put them somewhere that they can be productive or get rid of them. Dead weight is incredibly corrosive to any team and once a few people start getting away with it spreads like a cancer to everyone around them. "If so-and-so can get away with hardly doing anything, then I will too!" If the whole company is like that, and I've seen it happen, then the solution is to find a better job.
xLeitix mentioned this is like the real world with competing project priorities. If it's a matter of resources available due to project priorities, then the supervisors will have to work out as a company which people need to be working on which projects. If your supervisor tells you someone can't help you with the current project, then you tell him or her it will take longer since you'll be doing it all alone. And if company politics don't allow you to work on the other guy's technology stack, then the project will simply have to be on hold until that changes.

This is unlikely to succeed, as the OP has no experience in either GUI design or hardware. You are suddenly triplicating the workload and the required expertise, and there are six months less left (so half the time?).

@Davidmh: If the OP is already doing all the work anyway, dropping the useless team members won't make things any worse. The real issue with this suggestion is that the OP might not be able to do that, if the teams were assigned by the instructor rather than self-organized.

I was with a similar group in uni. Instead of seeing it as a hindrance, I embraced it. Their lack of input and interest meant that I had full autonomy and control over the project. Yea you have to work harder personally, but what you produce will be top quality, and lets face it, if they did contribute, it would probably be so half-assed it would drag your grade down anyway.
I embraced it so much that I elected the same lazy f**ks for all of my group projects. I enjoyed having full control. I was never disappointed with any of my grades, that's for sure.

So, you've had a number of team experiences, but haven't used them to learn how to function on or with a team.  You'll be very valuable on projects that can be achieved by one person.

I have plenty of successful team experiences in a commercial environment; work != uni. At work, everyone has the mindset to achieve the same goal, and everyone gets paid for their contributions. At uni not everyone shares the same mindset, not everyone wants / chooses to be there, or is even cut out for it - you are not working with professionals here. Sometimes you need to work with what you're given, and take control of the situation for your own benefit; your final grade.

@ScottSeidman - team project in college are literally worthless for learning anything except how to deal with lazy, hangover idiots.

Group dynamics are the responsibility of the group
The short answer to "How do project supervisors address the “freeloading” problem in group projects" is that they don't. It's generally the responsibility of the group to allocate the tasks and the share of effort. If they are unable to do it in a way that's satisfactory to everyone (such as your example) then the solution is to change groups - if everyone really is freeloading off of you in the manner described, then you obviously are capable to do the project on your own. Due to the problem of sunk effort, it's preferable to identify such cases early and split up before too much work is done - giving this advice is something that the supervisors should be doing.
Other than that, the only long term effect is to avoid doing common work with those people in future. For such cases, it helps if such projects are organized not a single event but rather multiple smaller projects with possibly different groups - where functioning groups can stick together for multiple projects, and conflicting groups can re-form in a possibly better configuration.

It's the responsibility of the group, yes, but undergrads don't necessarily have the experience they need to create and perpetuate great dynamics without training and coaching.

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What is known about the journal Notes on Number Theory and Discrete Mathematics?
I don't know whether this is the appropriate place to ask my question but since there is no harm in asking, let me ask. My nephew, who is an undergraduate student, has sent a paper to the journal Notes on Number Theory and Discrete Mathematics about one month ago. Since it has been 1 month, he has tried to know the status of the paper by mailing the required person twice, but due to some unknown reason the person seems silent.
Does anyone know anything about the journal except the information that has been given to its website? What should my nephew do now?

One month is very little time for a journal to review a paper. Your nephew should wait a few more months.

Any information about the requested journal?

I have never heard of this journal, but from the website it seems legitimate based on its publication history (extending back to 1995) and its institution of origin.
What your nephew should do now is just settle in and wait, and don't bother emailing the editors. As a commenter said, one month is not nearly enough time for a journal to process and review an article. It's usually more like 3-4 months and could possibly go longer than that. And the editors of these journals probably get so many emails from authors requesting status updates that usually those emails are simply ignored -- or if you have a nice editor there'll be an automated reply that says, in so many words, "Please stop emailing me."

The frequent emailing could even backfire. Recently I submitted an article to a journal, with a student co-author, and was told they'd get back with me in 9-12 weeks. Six months passed and I had heard nothing. I emailed the editor and asked to make sure she had everything she needed (= polite way of bugging her for an update). The editor said she would check with the reviewer. One day later I received the review -- a three-line rejection letter that indicated clearly that the reviewer had not even read the article. To me, there is a strong likelihood that the article was rejected directly because the reviewer was annoyed at being bugged. This is clear malpractice, but what are you going to do about it? Welcome to our wonderful academic publishing culture.
So, tell your nephew to move on to his next project and let this simmer on the back burner until the end of the summer.

"This is clear malpractice, but what are you going to do about it?". This should not have been allowed by the editor. Escalate to the editor-in-chief. If that doesn't work, broadcast the specifics of your case as far and as wide and as publicly in your community as possible so that (a) people will be reluctant to submit to that journal and receive the same treatment, (b) the journal will have to issue a formal response and/or think twice next time about treating the authors they rely on so apathetically. (Shrugging your shoulders is not a constructive option.)

I did contact the editor about it, to ask for more clarification, and got no response. At this point I just don't really care. We've submitted it to another journal and we'll hope for the best.

The fact that your nephew hasn't heard anything yet is a good thing. There are really only two reasons a mathematics journal would get back to you within a month:

the paper clearly isn't good enough for the journal (typically a "desk reject" where the editor makes that decision without a full review); or
it is a "predatory journal" which doesn't actually do proper peer review (and likely will charge you to publish your article).

So probably this journal is legitimate, and the editor thinks your nephew's paper might be worth publishing, and has sent it out to reviewers. This stage can easily take six months to a year (maybe towards the lower end of that for a journal with "notes" in the name).
I couldn't find a ranking for this journal, and MathSciNet no longer indexes it. Both of these are bad signs in terms of quality, but it looks like a real journal.

It can easily take 6 months for a review to come back. However, a acknoledgement of receipt should be given. Remember to allow enough time to pass between your emails and don't mail too frequent, it normally takes a few months. It could backfire and make you seem rude if you are too pushy. But 1-2 emails asking if the paper is received seems ok, if you don't get that, perhaps give them a call.

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

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


text:
Is taking a method explanation from books and papers considered plagiarism?
I have been reading a few Q/A about plagiarism, but I still have a doubt about the use of books and papers to explain the method I am applying in my thesis.
I mixed up the infos I found in a book and in a paper to explain the method (because some parts where better explained in the book and some others in the paper), of course I cited them at the beginning and I put them in the bibliography. Is this considered plagiarism since I am not using "my words" to explain it?
EDIT to be clearer: I am not doing copying and paste: I am following the same flow of ideas to present the method, some parts where omitted in the paper, therefore I had to rely on the book to take care of every aspect
And at the beginning I wrote:"the method is fully explained here [1][2] and it is here reported for completeness

Yes, of course it is plagiarism.

Well, but if I learned about that mathematical method reading the theory on that book and that paper (which were not the inventor of the method) how could explain it differently?

Explain it in your own words. Here is a very simple way to do it: Read about it, preferably from various sources. Understand it. Then put the sources away, and think how it would be easiest to explain to the reader. And then start writing (without looking at the original sources). — In general, if you can't explain it in your own words, you haven't really understood it yet. :)

The short answer is "you have to be careful"; as with everything, style matters, and there might be style restrictions about how you cite that your discipline imposes.
For maximum protection, one thing to keep in mind is that, because you've interleaved text from two different sources, it's a bad idea to copy those things verbatim since each part would need to be directly quoted and cited, and that interrupts the flow. Instead, paraphrase or reword the blending. You'll still need to cite, but how you do it would depend on the size of the text.
Absent any other direction, I'd recommend the following.

If you have a paragraph of now-blended text, at the end of that paragraph make your citations for the two different sources.
If you have, say, half a page or more of now-blended text, then introduce it in the beginning of that text as "The following approach comes from [1] and [2]:". (Replace [1] and [2] with whatever the citations are supposed to look like.)

In any case, always make clear what didn't come out of your head.

Yes, I did make it clear. I wrote: "the method is fully explained in here  [1][2] and it is here reported for completeness"

Okay, then you should be fine.

This is simply wrong. You can't just take text from various sources, blend them together with some edits, and add citations. This is plagiarism (even worse, it looks like you tried to hide the fact that you are plagiarising).

I have no idea what you're talking about. The citations directly inform the reader that the text and/or idea did not come from the author, which is the exact opposite intention from what you describe. In order for something to be plagiarism, the author must represent another's work as his/her own. The use of citations and suitable introductory words makes it clear such a representation is not the case.

@Ken The citations inform the reader that the material comes from another source.  If the words come from another source, they need to both have a citation and be in a quotation or block quotation.

@jakebeal Right, which is why I recommended to reword/paraphrase to avoid an awkward quote/citation stream in my answer.

@Ken: Near the end of your answer you still recommend that "If you have a paragraph of now-blended text, at the end of that paragraph make your citations for the two different sources". This is wrong. Just adding citations is not sufficient in this case. Adding quotation marks is not sufficient, either. The only solution is to just delete the whole paragraph and either rewrite it in your own words or put a verbatim quotation there.

@JukkaSuomela Right, but when I said "now-blended", I mean the text that has been combined as well as reworded and/or paraphrased. I'm sorry if that was unclear.

@Ken: If you mean to say that the OP should rewrite the whole thing in their own words, then I absolutely agree. Please edit your answer so that your meaning is clear.

If you are using somebody else's words, you need to make this fact clear and explicit via quotation/block quotation; to do otherwise is clearly plagiarism, even if you are splicing together multiple different sources into some sort of Frankenparagraph.
If you are making a complex remix of two sources, proper quotation may feel very choppy and incoherent, however, so you are probably better off paraphrasing into your own words instead.

Well, I am not copying blindly...just following the same flow to explain the concept, and since it is mainly made of equations it is hard to find my own version

D'oh, you snuck this in while I was writing! Mods: feel free to delete my answer if it is felt it overlaps too much.

@Rhei Equations are not subject to copyright. The text explaining them is both subject to copyright and vital for understanding the equations, so that is the important part to focus on.

@Ken Don't worry about it: the whole point of the SE Q&A model is it's OK to have multiple answers, and that the voting of others will help bubble whichever is best to the top.

@jakebeal Plagiarism and copyright are completely orthogonal issues.

@JeffE You're absolutely right - I wrote sloppily and used the wrong words.


text:
Is it customary for a student to reply to professor's email within 24 hours?
I got an email from professor M asking me if I will have time for a tea with her on Friday, and then I came up with this question:
Even if it is an important email from your professor (e.g. select your thesis or advisor), when you need some time to think before you make the final decision, how fast should a student reply to the a professor's email before the student is considered a lazy student, or a student who tries to slack off in studies?
If I write the reply to my professor's email after 3 days, will she get angry or even unfriend me?

There isn't really anything special about academia in this regard.  If someone sends you an email that needs a response, it is always courteous to respond as quickly as you are able.  It doesn't matter if it's to a professor or a student or a friend.
Anyone might get annoyed with you if you take a long time to respond to an email to which they need a quick response - not just professors!  But there's no magic number - you can't say that 71 hours is fine but 73 hours is excessive.  Some messages are urgent and need a quick response, others are not.  If someone is expecting a quick response but you need more time to make a decision, you can certainly contact them to let them know you are considering it, and ask when they need your answer.
As a general note: several of your recent questions seem to be written from the assumption that academia has its own special unwritten laws for everything, and if you can only find out what they are and obey them, everything will be fine.  For better or for worse, that's not generally the case - there are no such objective standards.  The key to successful interactions, in academia or any other job, is "act like a decent and professional human being".

+1 for "act like a decent and professional human being".

While I agree with you about there being no special rules for academia, it does have a bit of a reputation for having some irrational professors. Professors have a lot of power over the lives of their students, and some of them aren't afraid of being dictatorial after a certain point (often the granting of tenure). I think these kinds of questions are in response to this reputation. Everyone wants to stay on the good side of tenured profs. Fortunately your advice is a good way to do that.

@BillBarth - Would recommend you watch Bad Bosses, Office Space, or some episodes of The Office. Faculty don't have nearly the power of office supervisors.

@RoboKaren, agreed, but I think students fear they have this kind of power.

But those kind of professors seem to be unlikely to invite you to tea on Friday. If I got that invite the right thing to do is say yes and go and have a good time - an opportunity to get to know a professor better seems hard to pass up.

@RoboKaren - Yes, in extremely unrealistic TV shows, they don't.

@Davor Do you mean the your supervisor do have a great amount of power?

This is more business etiquette than anything else, but you should try to respond to your superiors within 1 business day  -- even if it is something such as "Thank you for the invitation, I need to check with my schedule/partner to see if this is a possibility. I'll write back later in the week to let you know."
Responding quickly is clearly best practice, but there's a great deal of latitude depending on your relationships with your advisor (casual vs. formal); your advisor's own expectations of you (lateral vs. hierarchical); the criticality of the request; department culture; and so forth.

In fact, when I teach a course, I make clear (in the syllabus or the first meeting) that it is the students' duty to check their mail (or any other communication channel used) at least daily. While I do not expect them to react immediatly on non-urgent matters, I think that it is reasonable to expect that if you, for instance, send a mail on monday morning wether one should meet at tuesday afternoon, the student will respond before tuesday afternoon. (And be it only a short note saying, no, I have no time).

@damian What if the Student checked their e-mail monday morning before you wrote and tuesday evening after the suggested meeting time?  That'd still satisfy some definition of daily. In this case I'd recommend that the inviter call the invitee on tuesday late morning if they haven't had a response by then.

In computer science as in life there is a principle known as "best effort." Just try to satisfy that requirement rather than worrying about hypotheticals about getting hit by a bus or having your fiber optic cable cut before you respond.

An addendum to other answers: prompt response is always good... even if you don't immediately know the answer to a question, it is helpful to all parties to send a quick email saying exactly that. In the case at hand, perhaps "Thanks for the invitation, I'll check the details of my schedule and get back to you as soon as I can. Sincerely, ..."
I would think that the same could apply for research or educational issues: in effect acknowledge the communique, and indicate as best you can how soon the other party could expect a definitive response.

I beg to disagree. This approach has two drawbacks. It needlessly wastes the attention of the addressee with two emails where one would be sufficient (aka mail a final answer as it becomes available*). Secondly, a prompt** response sends the subtle signal that addresser has got nothing better to do but check emails when he actually "should" be in the lab, "do science" and whatnot ;) (* if that is to be expected within a reasonable time frame, ** highly dependent on your interpretation of "prompt")

@Ghanima, that general line of argument might have made sense in the past, but now everyone can check email all the time... and, seemingly does, or, at least, it is presumed so. (Or text msgs, or ...) So, in_that_context...

@Ghanima if someone invites you for a tea, and you can't give them answer the same day, it is polite to acknowledge the invitation and to let them know when you will have an answer.

@afaust, that's what I call interpretation of "prompt". To me prompt always sounds like "nowish" that is within minutes or so. The same day is something that I'd call quite reasonable.

@paulgarrett, not everybody sees permanent access to fast messaging services as a blessing ;) that might include faculty members as well. After all the answers to the question are highly subjective and depending on the character of Professor M (which the OP knows but we do not). And again, in my opinion there's a big difference between "prompt" and "within 3 days".

@paulgarrett: It's not about being able to check one's mail all the time. My e-mail client is permanently on, and I get notified about incoming mail by a popup. The point is, if I always reacted immediately on such popups, that would mean I am not focusing on anything I do and readily interrupt whatever I am doing all the time. That is neither a behavioural pattern I want to adopt when I am doing something important, nor is it the impression I would want to convey to a superior.

@O.R.Mapper, I'm a little confused: what point does it make if one pointedly ignores email sent from one's supervisor, while being aware of its arrival, for example? Might have bearing on the work one is doing? All I can infer is that there's a tacit "pointlessness" of messages assumed in other peoples' discussion of this question, and this is mysterious to me. I try to avoid sending pointless emails to my students...

@paulgarrett: I was assuming a context where not every activity is subject to the direct control of the supervisor. While there are certainly some activities that require the input of the supervisor (e.g. writing a grant that they are directly involved in), there are also many other things that I may be doing that will not be addressed in any mail by my supervisor, because he or she either asked me to do it on my own without the necessity that he or she get informed about the activity/task (paper writing with colleagues), or simply because they don't even know about the activity ...

... (conducting a user study; supervising a student; ...).

I can only use my personal experience as a guide.
I check my own email at least twice per day. I'm married, so any social engagements or other appointments have to be run by my wife. Getting that settled with my wife will take at most several hours. Most of the time it only takes minutes.
Getting back in touch with someone, in most cases, should take less than 24 hours. There are rare instances when it could take more than 24 hours and then an explanation for the delay would be polite regardless of whom is making the invite.

I appreciate your answer but are you sure that people will never regard a short prompt response that explaining the delay is not a sign of sloppiness? Would two emails needlessly waste the attention of the addressee with two emails where one would be sufficient

At the time of letters a reply took time and was generally granted.
At the time of emails and smartphones with 24h-internet-access one can assume that the email, if not instantly, is read at least the next morning. So a reply, if no further work on the answer is required, is awaited on the spot - 24 h seems a good time-frame. Not only in academic field but in everyday life, also.
Unless You are on holiday abroad, where internet-access is expensive.