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What's the point of conferences on a CV?
I've seen many academic CVs list the conferences the individual participated in, and I can't help but wonder how is this information useful? I can understand citing journal articles because this gives information as to the type of research the individual is doing, but I have no clue as to why listing conferences adds anything.

There exists an academic society such that its conferences select papers for presentation (peer-review). In fact, I myself have a paper selected by one such society and I went to one of their conferences to present my paper.

Why do you think all these researchers turned up at a conference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jpg

@Chu I'm not sure what you're getting at but notice this question is about putting conferences on one's CV and not conference's in general. The few conferences presentations I've made were based on the papers that got accepted in journals. Thus, I never saw the need to mention conferences since I could cite the published paper.

Some conferences are by invitation only, and being invited is evidence that you are regarded as an expert in the relevant field. Some conferences are open to everyone to attend but all talks are invited and being a speaker is considered prestigious. Really, without further information about what field you are thinking of, it's hard to answer.

I typically have seen conferences appear in CVs in three ways:

Peer-reviewed conference publications, which in some fields (e.g., computer science) can be as important as journal articles
Talks given at conferences, whether based on peer reviewed papers, non-reviewed abstracts, or invitations, which give evidence that the person has experience with scientific speaking.
Service to the community, whether as an organizer, a reviewer, or a student volunteer.

Beyond that, just saying "I paid $600 to register for this conference and all I got was this lousy tote bag" seems rather pointless.

Under point 2 I would even include posters if they're a thing in your field.  But regardless of that a non-peer-reviewed conference talk demonstrates an important skill as well as being (in some fields) an early way of presenting small but interesting results.  There's also, for the smaller conferences, the possibility that it will jog someone's memory of a previous encounter. Of course just attending with nothing to do other than sit there proves nothing except your ability to get stuff paid for that's of limited benefit.

Going to a conference without a publication, poster or talk still shows (at least in theory) that you know people in that research field, who you might be able to tap into for advice, collaboration or when looking for new students, all of which could benefit a potential employer. It also shows interest in that research area, although I imagine most potential employers will look at your publications to gauge that.

If nothing else it shows that the individual is engaged in it's particular field.
Edit: In Europe, CVs are typically shorter (about 2 pages) compared to the US, which can include anything that shows engagement, professional development, achievements, positions, etc.
I personally have 2 CVs. A comprehensive CV, which is typical for academic applications, that includes any and everything I've done related to my professional career, including workshops, conference presentations, etc. The second CV is more concise (2 pages), and is more like a resume - which is what is often wanted by industry.


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List unpublished masters thesis in preprints section on CV?
After I've defended my masters thesis, if I haven't published it anywhere, should I list it in the preprints section on my CV?

Well, that begs the question: do you have a preprint?

@Kimball yep, I had to publish papers before even starting my thesis, so I alredy have publications and preprints on my CV.

I think that, if a thesis is put on a preprint repository even before you defend for your degree, it is actually not unpublished anymore. It is published and available to your academic community.

I meant a preprint of your thesis.  (I interpreted your statement as meaning you haven't had it submitted and approved by your committee, but maybe you mean something else?)

@Kimball your first interpretation was correct. At my university there's only a certain time frame before they accept them for review, and it hasn't come yet. So, I only have the unsubmitted manscript on my hard drive and on my google drive for public viewing (if they have the link).

@EnthusiasticStudent It's not on any preprint repository just my google drive, so the person reading my resume may read it.

I'm not sure which question you're asking: "Does it belong in the preprints section?" or "Does it even belong on my CV yet?" I could potentially see two different answers. At any rate, you could always say "To be submitted XX/YY/ZZZZ" or something to that effect, especially if it's done and just waiting to be submitted.

@pjs36 I'm asking of it's to be put on the preprints section

Can you please clarify the state of your thesis?  I'm quite confused.

@jakebeal finish but unsubmitted, and will remain that way for a couple months

Unsubmitted to what?

@jakebeal my university for review, for wherever theses go to get reviewed.

I, honesty, didn't think this question would be this difficult to answer :/

PhD? Masters? Undergraduate? Do you have a committee?

@jakebeal Master's.. I have 3 external examiners which they need to be sent to.

Yes.  Once your masters thesis in a state where you are ready to share it, I recommend that you upload it to the arXiv or some other public preprint server.  At that point, it makes good sense to list your thesis on your CV.  Some people use a specific section called "Theses and Dissertations", but if you have only one, it may make sense just to list among your preprints.

This question addresses how to list a thesis on your CV, but generally is speaking about dissertations that have already been completed.  The basic conclusion is to list theses in their own separate section.
For your situation, with a nearly complete dissertation, it would be appropriate to list it the same way, but for its date list the future date when it is anticipated to be finalized.  This would look something like:

Master's Dissertation: thesis title, September 2016 (anticipated).

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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I feel that my professor didn't notice a mistake I made on an assignment. Should I have informed the professor of my mistake?
This morning, I took my third math quiz of the semester. On the last question, I had solved the presented problem but had not written out the answer according to the directions before time was called, so I simply circled the answer that I did have.
Later this afternoon, I got a notice on my phone that my grade on the quiz had been posted. As it turns out, I got 100% exactly. So, I sent a message to the professor pointing out my mistake.
Should I have done that?

So you did solve the problem correctly, but didn't write it down in the exact prescribed way? Counts as full credit (perhaps with a remainder of the correct format) in my book.

You did the right thing.

Small update: The mistake only costed 0.5 points. He rounded up my score.

@moonman239 And the mystery is answered: you were both right!

Whenever I've taught, I would find no problem an action like yours.  You might have pointed out a mistake (in which case it's honest and respectable to point it out), and you might have benefited from partial credit (in which case, it's easy for the professor to tell you or to ignore the correction).
I personally would have also found it a delightful breath of fresh air and a break from the students grubbing and grinding for a few extra points, and would feel warm and fuzzy feelings toward such a student.  Anybody who teaches ends up with a distorted view of the student population because most of their time is spend dealing with the most problematic and annoying students, while the vast majority of the student body who are having no problems are entirely invisible to them.  A reminder of the honesty and integrity of the mostly silent many may thus be quite appreciated.

@user37208 If I got a lot of them, I would probably feel the same.  My own experience has been that they are fairly sparse, and that there is a non-trivial subpopulation of students who are just want clarity about their grades, for good or for ill.

@user37208 you are exactly right, your comment sounds rather like the dictionary definition of the word cynical: "believing that people are motivated by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity."

@user37208 Even if it may be hard to believe for you, some people are conscientious. Some people are honest. And this "some" can span a wide range of proportions, depending on context and community. My experience is generally good, with rare exceptions. There are students that try to "tell me how to do my job", but I wouldn't consider a student that points out that I overlooked a mistake as belonging to that class. If a diner waiter forgets to include an item in the bill and you as a matter of fairness/honesty point it out to them, are you telling them how to do the job? That doesn't compute.

@user37208 even if the student were telling you how to do your job, so what?  They're a student.  Help them learn why it doesn't matter to you whether they showed their work, so long as they understand the material.  Ask them if they have any questions about the material.  This is an opportunity for teaching.

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


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Cite paper under review on a paper that is going to double-blind review?
I wrote a paper to a journal, which is still under review. Now I need to cite it in another paper that is double-blinded. Is this a problem?

No, it is a different case. The first paper is not double-blinded

http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/194495/256777

But I believe the answer is the same.

Typically, there are two ways to cite yourself in a double-blind paper:

Cite the paper as though it were written by somebody else
Blank the information in the citation (e.g., "Blinded paper currently in review")

You should use the first whenever possible, since it is more informative and allows the reviewer to consult the reference.  The second case is used when it cannot apply and maintain blinding, like citing the conference version of a paper in an extended version for a journal.  Your case is another good example: the paper is under review and so cannot be read by the reviewers in any case, so blanking the citation is fine.  The article formatting guidelines may even give you a specific preferred method for doing so.

When it comes to double-blind review, it's up to everyone in the process to respect the blinding. Internet searches and unblind an article very quickly, so everyone who reviews blinded articles knows their not supposed to do it. As long as you follow the blinding instructions, it should be OK.

But since my preprint is not available on internet the revisors can think that I am the author of both?

I see, I had this the wrong way around. In this case, I would recommend talking to the editor of the blinded article. My suggestion would be to cite the other paper as in review and take the names off of the citation as well.

I am not in a double-blind field, but this strikes me as peculiar. As a reviewer, I think that one of my tasks should be performing a literature search and finding if the contribution is genuinely novel.

@FedericoPoloni, you should go read the literature on double-blind reviewing (start here, maybe). I only occasionally have to do it, and it's tedious. However, there are fields where the bias towards young authors, female authors, and other types of non-entrenched authors was so high, that something needed to be done. Also, there's no prohibition on checking citations and literature, just on intentional discovery of the authors of the article. It's a fine line, but making folks aware of their duty to be impartial is the goal.

It can fire both ways. We got a paper rejected because our blinding was so thorough that the reviewers thought (in the blinded paper) we were some random people repeating work done by us in one of our own cited papers. Of course, it wasn't, and had lots of new stuff but the reviewers thought we were fellow travellers, jumping on the bandwagon of our earlier work and rejected the paper. Strange situation.


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When is it appropriate to add references to own papers on Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia rules about citing yourself state:

Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is relevant, conforms to the content policies, ... and is not excessive.

While the Wikipedia rules allows self citation, is it ethical to self cite?
Short example: there are two good papers on the same topic, A and B. Is it ethical for the authors of paper A to include a reference to A and not B in the "References" section at the end of the article even if it is not cited in the article. On Wikipedia, it is pretty common for things to be just listed at the end and not mentioned in the article itself.
My questions are:

At what point is it appropriate to edit references to my own papers/preprints into Wikipedia?  (Maybe even add a paragraph claiming the same breakthrough I claim in my own paper.)
What should one do when noticing that otherwise unknown and very new preprints pop up as (uncited) references in Wikipedia articles?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about wikipedia rules and etiquette.

What @EnergyNumbers says.  It would be better to ask this question on Wikipedia somewhere.

@EnergyNumbers This question is definitely not about Wikipedia rules and also not about Wikipedia etiquette. It is about whether it is ethical to do such a thing, given the consequences for the popularity of the paper. I have read questions on this site before, and it appears to me that lots of questions have the same spirit and ask about what is considered ethical in different settings in academia. I do not care at all if doing this is against any rules on Wikipedia.  What I am asking about is if academics consider it ethical to use such means to advance their papers and get more citations.

^ Yes and no. Knowing Wikipedia's rules definitely helps. Self-generated contents should not be listed as reference (exceptions do apply, see the link). Yet, arXiv is kind of an odd duck, I guess it depends on how we view arXiv as a source.

@Penguin_Knight Thanks for that link, it's definitely relevant.  But the point is that it's clearly possible to do this and get away with it, even if the rules discourage or disallow it.  It is often not possible to identify who made a certain edit on Wikipedia.

This is covered by Wikipedia's conflict of interest policies and is off-topic, here.

@DavidRicherby Care to explain why it is off topic?  Did you read the question at all?  I explicitly stated more than once that I am not asking about Wikipedia's rules or policies.

I think Wikipedia rules are very relevant to this question (see my answer below), but I also agree that it is fully in scope here. Voting to keep open (and also disagreeing with the downvotes - this is an important question!).

If it's against Wikipedia's rules, how could it possibly be ethical? Breaking an unjust law might be ethical, but breaking a rule on a site you're not forced to participate in is just... anti-social.

I think this question really has two parts, the ethical question and the practical question.
First of, the ethical question. Let me say that I am surprised that you see the issue whether it is ethical to self-plug your work on Wikipedia as an entirely different issue than whether this is allowed by Wikipedia policy. Wikipedia is a private web site run on private donations, and is entitled to define how they want to do things around their piece of the web (much like we do here at Stack Exchange, to the chagrin of plenty a new user). I think it is impossible to argue that it is ethical (for academics or anybody else) to (mis-)use their service in a way that violates their own rules for your personal gain. Hence, to answer your updated question:

It's a question about what is considered ethical in academia

This is not, precisely due to the reason that you say you are not interested in: it is not allowed by Wikipedia. It cannot be ethical to use their service, but don't consider their rules.
Second, your question also has a bit of a practical part. You claim that it should be really easy to self-plug your work on Wikipedia, and that it will be hard to trace and prevent. (You also seem to imply that this impact on the ethical question, which I think it has not - whether something can be done is pretty much irrelevant to whether it is ethical to do it)
I have a bit of a case study for this. A large European research project I was involved with some time ago once got asked by its reviewers to add their own papers and other outcomes to relevant articles "to increase visibility". After some internal discussion, the project obliged and started with some really defendable and arguably independently useful edits (taking very stubby articles and improving them with peer-reviewed content from our own papers, and adding references). All of those changes were rolled back within minutes, with the explanation that the edits looked too much like self-advertisement. We tried again, even more conservatively, and the same thing happened again. It turned out that the self-policing in Wikipedia works much better than anybody in the project anticipated. We gave up on the issue quickly.
The morale here is just that Wikipedia is aware that people could try to do this (and I am sure many do), and are very vigilant. I am sure you are able to edit in your links given enough energy, but it may be much harder than you imply it is.

On the practical side, my guess is you'd have more luck adding paper A as a reference to support existing claims in the article that lack citation, than you'd have adding in a paragraph saying "paper A this that and the other". It's some time since I contributed to Wikipedia, so I may be out of date. Of course even if not detected it would still be self-promotion. I'd go further and say it's unwise just to edit articles in an area you work in. You're so knowledgable that you won't be able to help writing something that Wikipedia considers original, even if you're trying just to review.

... I mean, I'm sure there are some good Wikipedians who've trained themselves in the necessary discipline to do that, but an audience that's wondering whether to plug its own papers on Wikipedia is not those people and so is not the exception to my rule :-)

Never.
Let someone else do it.

Never is a big word. There are some kinds of papers (like survey papers) that could be very well added to it. For the general case, I agree that someone else (e.g. a peer) adding it is some kind of review (wrt relevance), which is good in this case, but we should not forget that wikipedia is peer reviewed also to edit and remove (it's non-monotonic). In some niches, adding it by yourself can accelerate everything a lot, without dramatic consequences due to wiki's non-monotonic nature.

Nope. Never. Adding a citation to tour own work, even if that work is a survey paper, is a straightforward conflict of interest. "Acceleration" is not a balancing virtue. (I will admit that Wikipedia's official conflict-of-interest policy is somewhat more flexible than mine.)

I think this is a ridiculous recommendation. What if you want to help write the article on a new species of bird and one of your papers is the only one describing its wingspan? If would be ludicrous not to cite your paper.

I totally agree. If your contribution is important enough someone else will add it.

I tend to agree. A possible solution could be to propose your paper in the associated discussion page (and mention your conflict of interest) - this way someone else editing the page will have all the information and can decide if it is relevant or not.

@JeffE would you consider OK if Alex copies a (fragment) of a survey paper she wrote (including citations) after the paper has been accepted? What if some of the citations refer to some of her previous papers? I think the conflict of interest is not so bad in this case, specially if it provides some interest. I  personally have contributed to Wikipedia, but not much, due to lack of interest. For the relevance of non-monotonicity, I refer to the Cunningham's Law.

The three columns of wikipedia are Verifiability, No Original Research, and Neutral Point of View. In my opinion (and this is established in a large part of the wikipedia community, imho), you should avoid adding your own citations, since it is hard to have a neutral point of view wether your citation is really that important.
What you can do instead (and what I have seen), is that you suggest adding your citation (or some paragraph about your work) at the talk page of the article. Have patience and see how other react to your suggestion.
If on the other hand you see questionable sources, you might remove it. But again if you feel unsure if this is appropriate use the talk page of the article.

Neutral Point of View applies to the article itself not which reference you choose to support it.

@JackAidley: If your reference is relevant or not might also be depend from your point of view (as well as having an paragraph about your work in the lemma).

If you think that an article of yours would be a useful reference, you can mention it on the Talk page for the relevant article or an associated Wikiproject, and suggest to other editors that they consider adding it to the main article.

it should be peer-reviewed, otherwise wikipedia would be working nearly as a primary source (anyone could write something on a blog and use it as a reference, laughable).
once it's peer-reviewed, the references should be reasonable, they should support what is written in wikipedia and what is written should have a general interest in the article itself. Maybe many people would see my paper on topology if I put it in the Pope's article, but that's basically vandalism.
every paper has a set of references and describes the state of the art in some area, some of those references may be self-references. That is mostly the type of content that should be provided in wikipedia.

it has never occurred to me that there's a high potential of the same
  kind of abuse by academics.

If well used, this should be helpful for both academics and wikipedia.

"anyone could write something on a blog and use it as a reference, laughable" - Though we shouldn't forget that probably the vast majority of references on and outside of Wikipedia (everything that is not directly related to research results) is just that, texts that someone has written without a thorough review process related to the correctness of the contents.

"probably the vast majority" [citation needed]

While a thorough analysis would be interesting, as an illustration of the impression I had: Using the random article feature from Wikipedia, I have looked into five articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Article 1 does not have any references, the external resources indicated are two sports websites with presumeably ...

... somewhat thoroughly written information on sportspersons, though no indication of a verifiable review process of the contents of said sites is provided. Article 2 provides references to various books on history. It might be reasonable to hope that the contents of those books was somehow reviewed for correctness. Article 3 deals with a biological topic and thus references biological scientific resources. Article 4 points out a variety of websites where the show in question is described by its producers, a YouTube video, an interview and an ad, a personal blog and someone's photo site. ...

... Article 5 provides some links to sports sites and fan sites with descriptions of the described player. Various of the linked websites are described as "community efforts", which implies a basic level of content control, possibly on the same level of reliability as Wikipedia itself. And that said, 5 of the 16 concrete linked pages were not reachable any more and thus could not be verified.

To sum up, "the vast majority" is about 40% according to this reduced sample and it is exactly the part of wikipedia that deals with sports. Am I right?

Looks more like 60% to me, and exactly the part of Wikipedia that deals with topics such as sports or tv shows that are not in the focus of some branch of research. Also, I take it that you know the respective references of the two articles on research-related topics better than me, so when counting them as peer-reviewed sources, you rely on something sounder than my vague estimation "might be reasonable to hope" for those references to be peer-reviewed.

s/better than me/better than I do/

To be honest, I never cared about that part of wikipedia, and I'm not any concerned about people that could search for knowledge on economy (very concerning nowadays), physics or philosophy (to name a few) and decides to search for sports. So, to be fair, it could be that the vast majority of wikipedia is just nonsense, I care about the part that is in the focus of some branch of research (and I guess this is the same for some people here in academia.SE). I guess we can agree that the research-related part is not perfect but can be helpful for introductory purposes, specially due to references

Indeed. I also admit the "vast majority" may have been biased based upon my personal experience. I use Wikipedia on a daily basis for retrieving information on a variety of topics, such as, but not limited to, technology news and reference, entertainment, tourism, more or less recent events, many of which typically rely on lots of either commercially or non-commercially published and comparably opinionated material that is usually not subject of any defined review process save for spell-checking. I do generally avoid Wikipedia when it comes to research-related topics because I feel WP is ...

... often too superficial in that respect or focuses too much on single points rather than providing a broad overview. Hence, for lack of a proper study, I would like to revise my statement to: "anyone could write something on a blog and use it as a reference, laughable" -> It should be noted that some Wikipedia articles do use references like that.

A few thoughts:
* having expertise in the subject of a Wikipedia article is (or at least should) be welcome;
* that expertise may well be exercised through detailed reviews of the article on its talk page;
* references not cited in the article text have a lower probability to stay for long;
* references supporting statements made in the article are most needed;
* if one of your papers qualifies for supporting such a statement, suggest the edit on the talk page first, and if nobody objects within a week or so, feel free to do it;
* apart from supporting statements in the Wikipedia article, images or other media from your research article might be useful as an illustration in one or several Wikipedia articles (including in other languages); this only works with openly licensed stuff (see overview of such uses; link loads slowly);
* there are ways to write an entire paper such that it can be published as a Wikipedia article (details);
* there are ways to follow added or removed citations systematically (example: DOIs)

You should cite your own work if it truly adds to the quality of the Wikipedia article. It's true that it's in one's self-interest to get the publicity you described from having one's work cited on Wikipedia, but it can also be constructive. After all, who is going to know the subject better than the person who wrote a peer-reviewed journal article on it?
If it really is shameless and unethical self-promotion, people will see it and know, and so will the Wikipedia admins, who will revert it with prejudice.
Even though Wikipedia has rules against original research, once research is peer-reviewed and accepted by the scientific community, it doesn't really matter who adds it to Wikipedia. An example of a scholar writing about his own work can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wheel_theory

"who is going to know the subject better than the person who wrote a peer-reviewed journal article on it" - kind of the point of Wikipedia is that it doesn't need or want the person who knows the subject best to write the article on it. There's nothing inherently wrong with disputing that view (especially since articles written by experts are much better than, say, Wikipedia stubs), but Wikipedia will push back on you if it notices action on that basis. Wikipedia just isn't the right venue for those expert articles :-)


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Someone referenced my work in a journal paper using my first name only, do I contact them or the journal it was published in?
Someone referenced my work in a journal paper but they did not cite it the right way.
They only included my first name, my supervisor's first name, the name of the paper and the date.  They did not include our last names or the journal that the paper was published in.
Do I contact the authors or the journal to correct this? Or can it not be fixed?
Currently, the citation is not included in my Google Scholar page because they didn't write my last name nor my supervisor's last name.

I meant they only included our first names, title of the paper and the date. What they didn't include is our last names and the journal it was published in.

and I was actually looking for new papers in my area of research and I came across this one, and while reading it i found out that they referenced my work (the wrong way though..)

@Roboticist That was my first thought too. My second thought was that a citation in a journal with such low editorial standards probably isn't worth much anyway.

@Roboticist: Not sure how weird this really is. Keeping first names, last names, middle names, halves of last names etc. apart is not easy since every country seems to have their own conventions. Some Romanians write their last name first. Chinese appear to do the same. Spaniards occasionally have huge tree-like surnames, only some parts of which are normally used. I've seen at least one Frenchman abbreviating half of his surname by an initial. And that's just from my personal experience. (I think there is a detailed explanation of Spanish names somewhere on academia.se.)

I wouldn't even worry about it, some other paper is "poorly citing" yours but that's really their problem, and the journal editor's, not yours per se.  Be happy they cite it :)

@Roboticist: Not weird at all IMHO. In some fields, publishers expect to get the camera-ready version down to the pixel from authors and will not do any editing or proofreading. I have never received any suggestions on spelling or other such textual issues by any publisher, only (and rarely so) requests to adapt large-scale things like paragraph formatting to the official guidelines. The described issue sounds conspicuously like a misinterpretation of Bibtex's syntax.

If the google scholar page matters to you in particular you can manually add it to you google scholar profiles: http://www.technocrazed.com/manually-add-your-publicationarticle-to-google-scholar-step-by-step-guide

@Roboticist They may have mistaken it for a mononym, like Plato, Voltaire or Boudica.

@darijgrinberg : those Romanians were probably Hungarians (there is a region in Romania with a significant Hungarian population) as they are unique among Europeans who write their names according to the oriental name ordering

I would recommend approaching this problem through the following layers of triage:

First, is it a serious journal, or a predatory trash publication?  If it's not a serious journal, just ignore it and move on. It won't really count as a citation anyway, and there's basically nothing you can do to get a meaningful response from the people running it.
Second, if it's a real journal, is it in the final form or a "just accepted" pre-print?  Some journals give early access to "just accepted" manuscripts before any copyediting occurs, typically with a big warning label saying "Not yet final, things may change."  If this is the case, then you may be able to count on the production staff catching the problem and getting it fixed before the final form; if you don't want to count on the error being caught, it is reasonable to (politely) contact the authors.
If neither of these is true, and the paper is in its final form in a real journal you can write to the editorial staff to request a correction.

"count on the production staff catching the problem and getting it fixed"  I am skeptical.

In the second case, it won't be caught.  By the time it's put up online, it's usually at the stage where it's already gone through copy editing even if it's still not "final".

@Joel AnonymousPhysicist This contradicts my experience with "just accepted"---in the journals where I have experienced this, the version that goes online is literally the one accepted, just as soon as the editor moves it to accepted status.  You are likely thinking of "early access" or "online first." which are after copy-editing.

In my experience it's often the same as the proofs I get after copy editing - meaning it won't get caught.

Strongly agree with the claim it won't get caught in copy-editing. Just had an article where based on DOI, the copy editors at T&F switched correct citations to first names for Chinese authors.

"count on the production staff catching the problem" doesn't seem like a great strategy anyway - you'd lose nothing by sending off a quick email to draw their attention to it.

Seeing that other people's experiences differ from mine, I've adjusted to say that if you don't want to count on the production staff, you can contact the authors at that stage.

In addition to the issues with Google Scholar, your article may not be properly cited in other databases, such as ISI Knowledge (Thomson) or Scopus (Elsevier). You may want to contact the publishers of those indices as well; both of them should have a form that allows you to correct misattributions such as this. (Note that this process can take some time: it can often be 6-8 weeks before the article makes it into print, and usually you're not notified when the changes are made.)

I would contact the author first. It would give you a chance to discuss their article and yours, as well as give them the opportunity to do the right thing. If that doesn't work then I would consider contacting the publisher.

I suggest,check for the format of the published Journal or other papers in that Journal. If format of the paper is as such only FIRST authors and no JOURNAL name, nothing much can be done.
Manually, you can add this paper to your GOOGLE SCHOLAR profile, under the PROFILE NAME click on "Add" button and "Add article manually" on left side. Hope, this helps you.

He wants to add a citation, not an article.

When you add an article, it is readily available to CITE.


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Can I cite in a caption?
I am using an image from a users’ manual of a piece of software, and I was wondering if I can put a citation in the caption of the image. For example:

Figure 1.3 Illustration of WonderSoft’s interface. Image taken from WonderSoft’s users’ manual (Bitsmith et al., 1821).

Mention the page, too.

The general rule of thumb is, if you reference someone else, you cite them. Fortunately, there aren't many special rules about where citations are or are not allowed - they go anywhere they're appropriate.

@Klaster It's not at all necessary to include the page number. I would include it only if it was anyhow relevant or interesting. But I wouldn't ever feel obliged to do so.

Citations are also common in the captions of tables (especially tables of things like material parameters).

@yo' If taking an illustration directly out of a paper or manual, I'd definitely include the page, too. I guess it depends on the journal you submit to or your university's policy, after all.

Unless your journal, advisor or institution insist against this (which we cannot know), yes, you can.
I have done this myself in publications and nobody complained.

And why should they? If the picture is taken from somewhere, providing the reference in the caption is clearly the most appropriate place!

While you haven't mentioned the context of the citation, AFAIK, reproducing someone's graphical artifacts usually requires not only proper citation, but, first and foremost, permission from the copyright holder (author or, likely, publisher) to reproduce the artifact with or without modifications.
What it practically means is that you will need to add the following (or similar) phrase to a caption: "Copyright ... Reproduced with permission" (alternatively, if the artifact has been modified, instead of "reproduced", use word "adapted"). If a permission has not yet been received, but the request has been submitted, you should add "[pending]" after the word "permission" (this is sufficient most likely only for working papers or submissions like a revision of a thesis/dissertation). Please take a look at my relevant answer for full citation example and other details.

I am using an image from this manual (page 53) http://s3.amazonaws.com/osculator/doc/OSCulator+2.12+Manual.pdf

Yes, reproducing an image requires permission of the copyright holder. However, the wording and placement of a copyright notice, if any, depends entirely on the agreement you make with the copyright holder.

@EmilJeřábek: I think you're wrong. The placement and wording of copyright and permission notices are governed by a publication style guide, chosen to be used for a particular paper, not an agreement with copyright holder.

@user16128: As you see in the legal notices section, the guide's content is copyrighted by Wildora. So, in my opinion, you should contact them to request permission to use the image (or any part of content, for that matter) from that guide.

@AleksandrBlekh: That doesn’t make sense. You ask the copyright holder for permission, they tell you what they want in return. It’s perfectly possible they will be happy with just a “thank you” in the Acknowledgements section. On the other hand, if they insist on a formal copyright notice, they will not accept if you write it as “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and claim that that’s your publication style guide.

@EmilJeřábek: You are free to disagree with me. However, if you really want to know what is right (not what makes sense to you), consider posting your own answer and see whether it will be upvoted or downvoted (hint: my answer seems be right, based on that criterion).


text:
How are fellowships typically funded?
Recently a friend of mine who was a professor died and I am hoping to help create a post-doctoral fellowship at the university to carry on the work of his small laboratory in conjunction with others who knew him. I am hoping to understand better the typical way that fellowships are endowed.
According to my initial calculations, it would seem we need about $4 million to endow the fellowship, so that assuming a 4% return on bonds in the foundation, every year we could disburse 2.5% ($70,000 stipend to the fellow, $25,000 upkeep fee to the university, and $5,000 for lab expenses) and retain 1.5% to build the capital of the endowment to account for inflation.
Is this a typical setup for an endowed fellowship in the current academic environment?

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/103525/donating-money-to-scientific-research-after-my-death

Also, the university will surely have its own policies on how much capital is needed, stipend amounts, amount demanded for "overhead", how much interest can be drawn per year, and so on.  They might demand that the endowment also pay tuition for the student. I'd think your first conversation should be with them.

@NateEldredge This is for a post-doctoral fellow, I will update the question.

Even for a postdoc -- where in the country are you that would pay a postdoc $70K?

@phimac although high, depending upon the the field, it may be appropriate. For example, Sandia National Lab's Truman postdoctoral fellowship pays $111,200 per year.

@phimac The employer's costs for an employee are more than just salary. They will include things like health insurance, pension contributions, other benefits, employer's tax contributions (in some countries), etc.

Approach the Gifts department at the university in question. I would note that many endowments do better than a 4% return, so you may be able to fund multiple positions for $4 million.

My answer assumes the US university system, based on your stated location
Endowed funds (for positions or otherwise) are quite common at universities, so every University has an "Endowments Office" or "Office of Giving" or the like, which will most happily sit down with you to work out these sorts of details.
You will definitely need to sit down with that office to determine the details, however, because it will likely be different for every university. Factors influencing these details will likely include: public vs. private, overhead rates and structure, how the university manages its endowments, state and local tax laws, etc.
In short: get the university's experts involved.  The sorts of sums that you are considering will certainly get their attention.


text:
How can I get better at Learning Things?
I am currently a Software Engineering apprentice, doing a related degree as the academic side.
I have noticed that despite how passionate I am about software, things never 'click' with me when I first read about them or when someone explains them to me. This can be both academic and practical.
It sometimes takes me so long to get a grasp of a simple theory concept because I overthink and get muddled in my head, I am not that good at math and situations requiring intense thinking (as an example of basic situations that perplex me). And I've noticed my practical knowledge at work isn't up to standard, I'm not as 'good' as I should be for this for how far into my job I am (almost a year).
It's becoming increasingly embarrassing having to watch 4 different videos on basic topics so I can understand, or worse getting someone at work to keep varying their explanation so I understand. I find myself mapping technical concepts out on paper a lot which works but it shouldn't be required of me for basic things and I can't go about my life having to set aside pen and paper every time someone explains something to me.
I believe with effort I can achieve anything and am not phased by people who say you are 'born an engineer'. Instead I guess I should to better my skill of learning.
I am seeking an answer as to how one can get better at learning, techniques, methodologies, books etc.

If there were some magic bullet that worked for everyone, or even a large class of people, we wouldn't need to have schools.  Even in schools, there are many students who are genuinely trying very hard whom we don't manage to teach.

Also, you might want to visit a psychologist to see if you have a learning disability.  For certain types of learning disabilities, there are specific strategies that help.

In my experience, you can be lucky or not regarding "how high your learning stat is". For me it is easy, but I have friends who are really trying hard and still face difficult times. A few failed. Most succeeded. And I respect them so much for their fights, because this takes so much disciple from them I couldn't imagine having myself. So I guess, since you are motivated, you will fight on and grow. Discipline is important. There are books with tips I guess. But I can't offer you real advice, so comment instead of answer.

'Passion' is useless unless it motivates you to acquire knowledge; ideally, it should drive you to do things above and beyond what is required of you.
Knowledge is cumulative. Technical communication takes place in increasingly complex abstractions. Unless you have the library of primitive abstractions to draw upon, grasping the more complex abstractions is difficult. The only way to gain those simple abstractions is to spend a lot of time thinking about them.
Drawing things is actually an excellent practice; It has helped me learn for years.

I feel the same way as you, and I am currently a Postdoc... your doubts about yourself can actually be a very strong point if you convert them into a motivation to keep studying.
It is perfectly normal to need something repeated several times until you get it, and using pen and paper is actually a pretty good way to proceed. Just go on like you are, do not surrender and with time you will amass a sweet amount of knowledge.
And more importantly: do not compare yourself to others, many people (especially in engineering) tend to hide their shortcomings and act smug as if they are infallible. Your baseline should only be your objectives: are you doing your job correctly? Are you having good results in your exams?

From Neurosciences researched, the first important thing to know is that repetition is important. Not necessarily the stupid repetition of just dumping knowledge; but the repetition of the topics you want to understand under slightly changing conditions, so you need to recapitualte, apply and think.
I know this is not a general recipe; however, from my own university courses in adult education I visited I know this is a good strategy.


text:
My master's thesis is extremely similar to an article that had already been published. Is that okay?
My thesis is related to hispanic literature and culture. After doing a fair bit of research I formed my thesis and now as I am in the process of writing my literature review, I am realizing that my thesis is very similar to an article that I have read. The papers differ in that their theory is only applied to the events that happened in one country and I am applying a very similar theory to about 10 different countries throughout Latin America. I cite their work throughout my paper and plan on including it in my literature review. Is this allowed? Or is my thesis no longer valid/ acceptable because someone else had the same ideas applied on a much smaller scale? I do not intend to publish my work in a journal or other publication, I just need the paper to graduate.

The only people that can answer this definitively are the people responsible for approving your master's thesis - ask your advisor. On face, though, extending a work in one country to apply across 10 sounds substantially different.

I had this same question when I began writing my concept paper for my dissertation. I was alarmed when I found similar articles related to my dissertation topic and I almost changed topics in a panic. My advisors told me that finding related research was to be expected, but that I had to prove that my research would add value that was missing or limited within the findings of the prior studies. To provide proof, I created a matrix of all of the related material from my literature review to show how the others sources were similar or different to each other and how my research would fill the gaps.
I think it is very important to show that you are aware of the related research and that you have a clear understanding of what you are adding. One place to get a clue of this is to look at the Recommendations for Future Research that will be in the closing of the related research.
Good luck with your thesis.


text:
Reviewing a paper written by an editor of the journal - am I really anonymous?
I was recently asked to review a paper for a (reputable) journal in mathematics.
This journal follows a single-blinded peer review process (which is quite standard in math). Reviewers are not revealed to the authors, but the reviewers know who the authors are.
However, in this situation, the author of the paper is also an editor at that particular journal. Can they access the identities of their paper's reviewers? What measures do journals use to avoid revealing this information to their co-editor?

Related: How do editors publish in their own journals?, Should an Editor in Chief publish in their own journal?

The good thing about mathematics is that the proofs are either valid or invalid, and no author wishes to publish an invalid proof, so it doesn't matter if you point out any flaws in their proofs. So at least in the aspect of correctness, reviewers don't have to worry about lack of anonymity. It would be best if you can be more explicit about what exactly you are concerned about that requires anonymity.

@user21820 You guessed correctly, I believe I have found a mistake in their proof.

Then I really don't see any problem at all. I do not know a single professional mathematician who would not want to be told as soon as possible of any apparent mistake. In fact, because of that I don't really think the two questions in your post are actually relevant to your situation (even though they would make a good question for other kinds of peer-reviews).

For the record: I have served as a managing editor on 2 editorial boards for many years (currently, just one board) and as a regular editor, on one more board. I encountered the situation you described in both capacities (my papers were submitted to "my journal") and I refereed editors' papers for other journals.
It is normally expected that the editor handling a paper keeps the author of the paper (another editor) out of the loop, regarding the identities of the referees; this is done, for instance, by using non-editorial email to contact referees, receive referee reports, through software used for the submission/evaluation process at the journal, etc. Any reputable journal will try it best to follow this. Of course, there is always a chance that something will go wrong...
Personally, the way I write my referee reports is so that I never say anything anonymously as a referee that I would not be willing/able to say openly to the author. This way I never have to worry if an author discovers or guesses correctly that I was a referee (this also has happened to me few times).
How much are you willing to trust the system to do the right thing, is your call...

Usually yes
Editors who are also authors are expected to recuse from the review process of their own papers. Once they recuse, they can no longer see the identities of the reviewers (usually, editors can only see the identities of the reviewers for the paper they are handling; if they are not handling their own paper, they are as blind as other authors). This goes for the editor-in-chief as well.
However, it's only "usually" because it's really easy for someone who's unfamiliar with the editorial management system (or simply not paying attention) to screw up. For example, if the current editor-in-chief resigns and another editor is promoted to editor-in-chief, it's entirely possible they will be able to see who reviewed their previous papers. It shouldn't happen, of course, but someone needs to notice before it happens, and there's no guarantee they will.

In addition to the other answers, I would like to point out that there is a major difference in this case between an associate editor and a chief editor in a typical journal workflow.

Associate editors generally have no access to each others' work queues. Thus, if the author is an associate editor, the chief editors should send it to a different associate editor, and confidentiality is then maintained just like it is for any non-editor author.
Chief editors generally have access to all of the work queues. Thus, confidentiality will depend on appropriate recusal, as pointed out in the answer by @Allure.

One thinks the chief editor user role should not give access to the reviewer selection, but only be able to distribute incoming manuscripts to the associate editors. So unless he assigns himself to the manuscript, the editor-in-chief ought to be completely oblivous as to who did the reviews. Standard GxP procedure to split tasks along user roles instead of users.

@Karl The chief editor often serves as an auditor on the whole process, so they have access to all of the information.

That is the user role "auditor", which should not be activated for standard chief-editing work. And the system should allow to exclude certain users from using the auditor rule for specific cases. At least that's how processes are designed to be compliant in regulated environments. I'm sure publishing software solutions are not as well structured today. ;) And I know this sounds like a lot of hassle. It is, if the processes are not very well adjusted to the task and specific journal.

@Karl Yeah, that's a heck of a lot more structured than the average journal, where the editing duties are generally carried out by volunteer experts.

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


text:
My PhD advisor is proposing an unfashionable topic
I am second year PhD student in pure mathematics in Europe. My PhD advisor is a well-known and respected professor who has done and still does great maths.
During the first year and a half, I have been working in a quite hot topic (say some Annals papers in the last years) which I have liked and where I have been able to produce some (not very interesting) results.
My advisor produced some theorems in this topic previously, but he is not an expert on it. Recently, he recommended that we move on since he doesn't know of any further interesting and approachable problems in this area. Nonetheless, he seems to have a good (or at least not bad) opinion of me.
The problem is that the new topic he is proposing is not very fashionable. Many years ago this was a very thriving topic where he produced top results. In fact, he probably is the leading expert on this. But in the last years there have been few articles on the topic, where few is an understatement.
Also, this new problem is very far from the original one.
Moreover, the PhD student that worked on this has left the graduate program (which of course might only be a coincidence).
What options do I have? I am scared I won't be able to find good postdocs if I devote too much time to this. Also, he is not forcing me to work on this. But I guess that if I refuse his problem, then I should come up with some problem to study, something which I find very hard to do.
EDIT: Thanks everyone for your answers! I will meet again with my advisor and ask him further questions about the problem he is proposing: whether its feasible, why no one has tried to solve it before (maybe its too hard, requires very new techniques, almost nobody has the necessary tools, is too technical, ...), whether he thinks it is interesting for the (mathematical) community, ...
But right now I think I might give it a try at least. I'll keep reading the literature on my current problem though.
Other comments:

I am not planning to change advisor as I am very happy with him both as a person and as a mathematician.
When I am talking about this hot topic in mathematics, it is not that hot. What I mean is that it has some activity and some (very) good results have appeared in the last years. Almost all these results come from a small set of authors though (which does not include my advisor).
By "forgotten" topic I mean a topic with few papers in ArXiv and few citations. Nonetheless, many of the techniques used to study this topic are alive and relevant in neighbouring fields.

Pursuing the latest hot topic might not be a good approach either. Topics go in and out of fashion, and things tend to run in cycles. Having time to explore a currently out-of-the-way area could prove quite fruitful.

Thanks Jon! I completely agree with most of your message. Nonetheless, the latest hot topic is one which I have worked on for some time now. Also, studying out-of-the-way areas might prove very fruitful once one has tenure but I'm not sure about whether it would be good right now. Competition is fierce, and assuming I can solve problems, what good are they if few mathematicians work on that?

I might be very mistaken though. I trust my advisor in general, but I feel this new topic has very little following.

A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship in research in a particular field.  Perhaps the supervisor has chosen this topic because it will offer better opportunities for training in the range of skills you need.  Don't expect your PhD to be the place where you make a reputation as a researcher, that will hopefully happen later when you have gained a good foundation of research skills and found the topic that suits you.

Did you discuss these concerns with your advisor?  He is probably in a better position than you to say how "marketable" such problems are for postdocs.

If you produce some interesting results, you might be the one to bring it back into the fields interest.

I would worry less about fashion and more about doing stuff that you are passionate about and willing to put many hours into, if you do the latter you will increase your chance of making a good contribution.

Working on hot topics is a good way to get scooped. Getting scooped often means starting over. Your goal is a degree, not the best paper that has ever been produced in mathematics, nor is it beating others to the punch.

You said your advisor knows the topic. And possible he also has a gut feeling about what may be possible, so he can suggest you a topic that will be hot, when you publish the new idea. If you publish on current hype topics, someone may publish something similar to your idea before your paper is out or soon someone can prove that your paper cannot produce ideal results. In a (now) calmer topic you are the one who provides new insights and you stand out. And while others obviously don't have many ideas, your advisor can help you as an expert who already worked with that ideas.

I advise my students to chase ideas as opposed to follow the crowd or some big names.  For the latter two, that means you are a follower.   I rather be the spark that starts a revolution in an area.

I do think that you are entitled to raise these concerns with your advisor and get straight answers from him. And don't put up with any gaslighting about "the PhD is an apprenticeship" or "you can do whatever you want in your postdoc" or "the job market is a crapshoot anyway."

I think you mistake how fashion works in mathematics.
Topics become fashionable when people produce interesting results (especially when those results are related to other areas) and become unfashionable as time passes without progress.
So, if you prove something interesting and applicable (to other mathematics, not necessarily to something outside mathematics), then you will suddenly make that area fashionable.  (And interesting is more important than applicable.)
The best spot for a mathematician is to be a leader of fashion, not a follower.  The most common way to become a well-known mathematician is to create a new (or revive a formerly) fashionable area that other people than follow; doing something big in an already fashionable area with lots of competition is actually much more rare (because if lots of people are working on a problem and can't solve it, chances are the problem is very hard).

Thanks for you answer Alexander! Of course it would be great to be the leader of a topic. But I think it is too optimistic to try this during your PhD studies while you have time and knowledge constraints. Also I'd like to make sure I get a job (in academia) later.

@Mathindecise: The job market is terrible.  There is nothing you can do that will make sure you get a job in academia.  Your best bet might be to gamble on being exceptional.

@StarBucK: If you work in a field where many papers are published and do something not very original, it will also be the case that nobody cares.

@StarBucK: I think you overestimate the chances of getting a postdoc with mediocre results in an active field.  Also, eventually, one does need to get a permanent job, and mediocre results are of no use there at all.

@StarBucK I'm precisely scared of what you mention ("This answer assumes from the start that you will do something original in an area where not many papers are being published. Of course it is great if you do this but in the case you are struggling you will end up with knowledge in a field that nobody cares.") I hope the job market situation is not as dire as Alexander Woo describes it, although it doesn't look too good...

The OP's advisor is suggesting work in an area that is currently regarded as passé. This is not the same as just being "not fashionable," since passé areas are passé for a reason. If the advisor can't trace out a plausible career trajectory that starts from this area, then he's doing the OP a disservice. It's one thing to recognize that the job market is lousy and another to disadvantage your student at the outset because it's a convenient way for you to get them through the program.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!
You say in comments that “He [advisor] is saying now that he doesn't see how to continue it [your initial work in the fashionable topic]. But, to be honest, I don't know how to continue with it either.”  Based on that, your advisor’s suggestion to work on other topics is probably good: you don’t want to spend too much of your time on something where you’re not very confident of progress (especially since in a fashionable field, the problems remaining open are likely to be hard).
At the same time, your concern about putting all your work into an unfashionable field is reasonable.  I suspect it’s a bit overstated — if your advisor can see good problems to work on, I doubt the field can be as dead as you paint it, and (good) hiring committees will respect substantial work in an unpopular field better than weak work in the month’s hot topic.  But working on this doesn’t mean abandoning everything else!
So generally I’d advise: Make sure to spend a good portion of your time on problems where you have good confidence of progress — and the less-fashionable problems your advisor is suggesting sound like the best of the options you mention here.  But spend some time reading + thinking about other topics too — breadth of interests is always good, and especially with any dissatisfaction about your primary topic. And these side interests can well include continuing to think about your initial more-fashionable topic.

I think you should work on something that your advisor is very familiar with. How are you going to ask questions about the things you don't understand? Your advisor wouldn't be able to help you and you would have to talk with outside researchers. That's certainly something you should do, but then what would be the point of working with that advisor?
If you want to work on a particular subject, then I think your advisor should be a leading expert on that subject. I suggest looking for other potential advisors who work on the topics you are interested in.

Thanks for the answer @cgb5436! I also think it would be great to work in something my advisor is very familiar with. Also I am not thinking of changing advisors. Nonetheless I think he is also an expert in more "modern" topics. I'd like to steer my work out of dead topics, which seem to (almost) only interest him.

I don't know how it works in math, but in physics, being unfashionable can be a career ending move. Something that you do must set you apart from your colleagues who will graduate at the same time with you and will search for jobs at the same time with you.
The pro's for being unfashionable in your case are that you can use your adviser as a resource, you have a lower chance to be scooped if you're working on something, and there is a small chance you can start something new that becomes fashionable, as others above mentioned.
But, there are many downsides. If you don't go with the herd, you will get few citations, you are less likely to be hired by fashionable professors, if you stay in academia, you get less chances to meet like minded people for future collaborations, and so on. If you get to stay in academia, you'll also be a lot less likely to get grants, because those, by tradition, mostly go to the people working on hot topics.
There are also some problems with keeping up with fashion. One is that you can never be as fashionable as the people who started the fashion. In physics, the guy who starts a subfield typically gets a few thousand citations for their seminal contribution. The rest of the people get one or two orders of magnitude less visibility.
Another issue is that every time you dive into a new field, there is a very steep learning curve. If your adviser is a specialist, you can learn things faster, if not, you need to search for collaborators and stick with them.
If you are already independent enough to do well in a more fashionable field even without your adviser, you can go for it. If it was me, I would choose a field that was fashionable, and where some my adviser's experience was relevant. That way you can get both worlds: you can stay fashionable and have a chance to combine what you know from the new field with your adviser's experience for creating something new.
I think you should voice your concerns to your adviser and try to propose something that you could do together.

I think math works very differently from physics in this regard, and in fact this is one of the principal differences between how the two fields work.

Upvoted because this agrees well with my experience in physics.  But as @AlexanderWoo says, maybe not so true in math.  Still, this answer will be useful to any physicists reading this in the future

From my dealings with professors in STEM, I'd say go with your gut and delve into your own preferred topic. If you feel strongly about a given area, you will arrive at your core idea through your own attempts. However, I know nothing about time constraints and resource issues that you may be facing or whether it is a do-or-die scenario. If you need a good postdoc, just take your time and avoid being cornered by the prof. It appears to me he just doesn't have the interest to help you set off and cover ground in your preferred area, but if you can cover enough ground privately and present some volume, he will tag along. The other alternative is to pick your area of interest and only start by discussing issues of scope with him. Let him contribute to scoping down or up while you abstract your core interest - but slowly lead him to bring up these interests.
Side Note: I always looked at the postdoc as a solo project that would shape my career identity and how I view the world of biostats. So if I felt blockaded by the supervisor in any way, I would just do more private reading and ambush him with a whole new perspective that puts me back in control.

Thanks for your answer! Well, he was the one that proposed my initial topic, I knew nothing about it before. He is saying now that he doesn't see how to continue it. But, to be honest, I don't know how to continue with it either. Moreover, I think it is extremely difficult to do things alone in pure math.

My perspective is from applied sciences and may not reflect the experiences in pure math. There is a lot of flexibility in biostats, many green areas, and nice gray areas where I could easily fall back. An interdisciplinary field has those advantages. Such fields emerge from the increased convergence of needs or widening of more urgent knowledge gaps requiring solutions within the 6-year range or so. So, I hardy encountered non-fashionable topics and the curriculum content of courses seemed to change frequently to match the evolving technologies.

My loose view of a pure math postdoc (possibly erroneous by far) would be that your "peep tube" should lead you to some proofs or unique object properties at the end or otherwise draw you towards known dilemmas if the premise doesn't collapse. Maybe you're stuck because mathematical dilemmas are lurking around the corner, which is great, and you may consider poking at the closest well-known dilemmas. Don't mind me, as I have absolutely no idea of your pure math experiences.

Recently, he recommended that we move on since he doesn't know of any further interesting and approachable problems in this area.
Do you know of any further interesting and approachable problems in this area? Or at least do you have an inkling? If you are creative / original / independent-minded (whichever term you prefer) enough to be able to come up with a (possibly quite rough) proposal on how to continue on this topic, by all means put this to your adviser. The two of you may be able to hammer out a way to continue on this. However, if the adviser does not see your ideas feasibly ending in a good thesis, you could be well-advised to follow his lead on what to do next.
On the other hand, if you have no ideas of your own on how to proceed in the "hot" area, a switch is probably for the best.
(BTW I feel that this is the sort of conundrum that student and supervisor should be able to work out between them, so it seems curious that it appears on this forum. Students sometimes think of their supervisors as semi-deities, and sometimes supervisors regard themselves as such. This does not always make for open lines of communication.)

You are receiving some very wise advice.
Mine is along the lines of other people's suggestions. Follow your advisor's opinion and, at the same time, read what you like to build up expertise on a different topic. Base on this additional expertise, you could be able to write a study you'd like.
You do not need a Copernican revolution. Read recent literature, say, last 10 years (very arbitrary time horizon which might vary from field to field), and put a heavier weight on the last 5 years (another arbitrary horizon).
Then, try to twist, just a little bit, some of the recent ideas for a study of yours. E.g. in economics, studies of discrimination focus on ethnicity/race and gender, while studies on discrimination based on disability or gender identity are much limited in numbers; this literature is being developed only in the last few years. These studies focus on discrimination in the labour and housing market, while there are only a few studies on discrimination based on disability or gender identity in the service market. A researcher who investigates a related topic is surely going to contribute in a meaningful and novel way, while facing limited risks.
It is hard to find a balance between ambition and risk. Much luck with it! Please get back to this post in later stages of your PhD and tell the readers how it went, it will be a useful experience for other students in your situation (I was in a similar one and I have acted accordingly to my suggestions in my answer)

I was in your position as a math Ph.D. student.  I frankly took the route of doing my own problem (with my advisor telling me he doesn't have intuition about the problem but would be able to check my work and offer what advice he could.) This turned out great for me and I'm now tenured.  But obviously there was luck involved in that I happened to stumble on just the right difficulty of a problem!
You could convey your concerns about your advisor's problem and see what he says. Ask for another problem!  If he doesn't have another problem for you, and you don't want to do your own thing, then realistically you should look for another advisor.  If you want a research career then I wouldn't play games with obscure topics (unless you're a genius who will raise eyebrows no matter what problem you do!)  My advisor IS that caliber of a mathematician.  I'm not...
Just my two cents.

Thanks for the answer Joshua! It seems like you did a great job during your PhD, but I'm not sure that the strategy you followed is good for most PhD students! Working on a problem with minimal guidance sounds like a daunting task.

A pragmatic perspective may involve asking yourself how badly/soon you want/need the PhD?
You earn the chance to defend a dissertation when your advisor is willing to vouch for you with their colleagues on your committee.  Your defense is bolstered when the same advisor can highlight to your committee evidence of an advance/contribution: your coauthored publications and your growing reputation in the advisor's niche research community.  Following your advisors research arch may offer the best chance at securing these conditions in the shortest amount of time.
If your advisor is senior, has a track record of getting people through, and your personalities are somewhat compatible, I would trust them and get it done.  You can earn your first Nobel as a postdoc.

He'd be gunning for a Fields Medal, not a Nobel Prize!

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text:
Another company patented my research project during my master studies, what should I do?
I started working as a part time researcher in a company during my master degree as part of my graduate studies. I published a paper 2.5-3 years ago based on the data and my work at school.
Last month, I noticed that a competing company patented the idea that was presented in my paper in 2019 with minor twisting.
Can anyone patent my idea from my published research paper? I integrated a new idea an AI system 3 years ago. When I discussed this with the company that I work with, they said that:

Firstly they claim that they are surprised that it is patentable. They said even we did the work, they might get the patent on that particular aspect because we did not publish anything or we did not apply so whoever applies first gets the patent.
We do not know if it is stolen or came up with it independently. We will talk about it in the next little while. We need to spend some time on, we do not see any urgency for taking action. We can not supply information to the patent examiner that will invalidate their patent. We need to be careful of how we do that because we can go through a bunch of work and provide them with some information. If the patent examiner still gives them a patent, we have done some work to makes them strengthen their position. We want to be careful of how we approach it.

I am not happy about this and got very disappointed on how they did not protect my work and my research. Do you think does it worth to do further research in this company? Or should I focus my academic aspects of work outside of this company? For example asking for help from my university? I just graduated 5 months ago and working at the same place.
My supervisor also claims that he did not know it would be a patent. He says that he would like to follow company's approach.
But my view is that the company is not taking the right action as they only care about the sale and profits rather than research. Please advise! What is the best action for me?
I am not looking for a legal advice, what I would like to know" if I should keep doing research here or I move on?"

I don't work in a field where we generate patents, but I'm confused how someone patented something that you already published on? I'm afraid I'm having trouble understanding the quote, is it translated? Was the patent in a different country than you're in?

We published a paper, they patented the same idea. They twisted it a bit but  the idea  is the same and the patent office referenced our paper as similarity during the examination period.

In the US you probably have no recourse. But you'd need to talk to a patent attorney to know. You need to file a patent early to get any protection. Since it is a legal question, I'll vote to close.

I guess that clarification doesn't mean anything to me. I think there's (maybe?) an on-topic question here along the lines of "My company failed to protect my patent, what should I do?" I'm not going to VtC given my unfamiliarity with patents, though.

See: https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/patents/first-to-file-rule/ or search online for "Patent First To File"

This seems like a legal question between your employer and a competitor of theirs. If you or they want to challenge a patent, you'll need legal advice on how to proceed. I don't think Academia.SE can help you with that; there doesn't seem to be anything you need to do from an academic perspective.

sorry but I am not looking for a legal advice, what I would like to know" if I should keep doing research here or I move on?"

Why is not patenting something a cause to move on? Patents cost money (to prepare, file, and maintain) and few actually cover their costs. Should the other company sue, there is your previous art to invalidate perhaps some portions of it.

Note that patent generally doesn't apply to "ideas". It applies to "useful devices". Idea needs to be realized in a "device" to be patentable. More generally "ideas" have no ownership rights. Different sorts of realization result in different sorts of IP rights.

@Buffy, we implemented the idea in some of our sites in the company. They are practical tools.

Other answers correctly point out what you, yourself, should do to invalidate the patent (nothing).
Your question also asks (paraphrased) "should I quit over the company’s (lack of) action?". Only you can answer that; I will try to help your decision-making by explaining why, at this point in time, the company’s decision to do nothing seems entirely reasonable.
The following is written by someone whose entire legal education is a boring 20h training in patent law, and who does not know the specifics of your case. If you rely on this for legal action, you deserve whatever happens to you.
The procedure for patents in most Western jurisdictions (US/EU) is as follows: once you file an application, the patent office will examine it, and make their own search for prior art. After some delay (18 months in Europe), the patent application as well as the prior art search report are published (visible to everybody). After some more delay, during which competitors may object, the patent is granted (maybe partially, if some claims were invalidated by prior art etc.). For more details, Wikipedia has an article about patent prosecution.
(Notice also that stuff you published yourself can be part of prior art and invalidate a patent that is filed later. If you wanted a patent for yourself, the time to act was before you published an article, not now.)
A competitor may attempt to invalidate a patent after it has been granted. It is not uncommon to gather prior art evidence as soon as a competitor’s patent is granted, so that the legal department has a better idea of the risk of litigation, but wait until an infringement procedure is launched to actually do anything with it. Some legal proceedings require you to put up objections as soon as you are aware you can make them, but patent application is not one of them.
From what you say, I assume the patent was just published, and is not granted yet; that you published your paper before the filing date of the patent application (18 months back in time); and that you want your company to object to the patent while at the patent office stage.
Objections at the patent office are (much) cheaper than litigation at court. However, no litigation whatsoever is yet cheaper than objections at the patent office. If your company does try to sell stuff that falls within the patent claims, and the competitor tries to enforce the patent (via a lawsuit), the opening move from your company’s patent attorney will likely be to write a letter saying "here’s the prior art, are you sure you wanna do this?" (paraphrased). If your publication is crystal-clear prior art, such a letter may be enough. That letter may still be somewhat expensive (because the lawyer will have to interview you and check records before writing it), but it will still be orders of magnitude cheaper than actual litigation.

There are a few points to consider here.

Prior art does not necessarily invalidate a patent. It may invalidate some claims, but other elements of the patent may still stand.
Your thesis may or may not constitute prior art. This is particularly true if your thesis was published at the same time as the patent.
Litigating a specific patent doesn't necessarily do anyone any benefit, and will possibly involve non-trivial costs.
Your point about "care about sale and profits rather than research" somewhat contradicts your entire post; if they cared only about research, then they almost definitely wouldn't care about the patent.

All that said, the answer to the question, "what should I do?" is likely "nothing". Unless you specifically want to pursue an idea that revolves around having patent rights to this idea—which is really something that only a patent attorney can address—you should probably just move on.

There are estimates that in the software realm, five out of six patents are not actually enforceable because there is prior art that mean that the patent should not have been granted in the first place. (I will assume that your artificial intelligence work falls in the "software realm" of patents.) Indeed, it is exceedingly rare that companies have successfully used software patents to force a competitor to stop making a product, or to force them to pay royalties for a patent the suing company owns. The usual strategy is simply to intimidate a competitor by threatening to sue over a whole portfolio that may contain thousands or tens of thousands of software patents; that will cost competitors years of money and uncertainty, but the validity of the patents will never actually be put to the test. It is commonly believed that if companies ever tried to really use their patents, most of these patents would probably be invalidated because the sued party could show that there is ample prior art.
For you, this really just means that you could spend a lot of money trying to challenge the granting of the patent, or try to get it invalidated retroactively. Or you could say "who cares; they can't do anything with the patent anyway". The latter option costs you nothing, and it doesn't even cost you any opportunities: You can continue to use your work as if there was no patent, because the only entity that could sue you would be the company owning the patent, and they will retract any threat of a law suite once you show them that you produced prior art that would invalidate their patent if they tried to enforce it. That is also the reason why the company you worked for doesn't care: They, too, know that that patent is easily invalidated, but it's not worth anyone's effort to do so.
In other words: Move on with your life. It's not worth anyone's effort to deal with it.
(I will add that you can not patent the work yourself either because you published on it. You cannot patent something you have already published. You would have had to patent it first, but that train has left the station.)

I'm mostly responding to your comment that you are interested in the future, not the past.
First, I think the company's response was pretty accurate if they didn't think it was patentable and you didn't convince them otherwise. The advice about the difficulty of a challenge and the likely outcome seems accurate.
I don't know what sort of "patent sharing" agreement you have with the company. If it is ad-hoc, then you have a problem. But many companies will bear the expense of a patent and the possible expense of a challenge, contracting to pass some of the financial benefits to the people who did the work. If you did the work on "company time" it is unlikely that you can patent things on your own. So, in the end, you need to convince management that the cost/risk is worth bearing.
But, make sure you have a written agreement in advance and that the company has, in the past, behaved properly in such situations.
If you move on, and continue to do the same kind of research elsewhere, then you will have exactly the same issues. You and the company need to agree on the risk-value equation since the financial risk is mostly theirs.
And, patenting as an independent researcher can be very expensive, not just for the initial filing, but for the legal cost involved if you get challenged.
But, in the end, I think, everything flowed from their initial reluctance about the patentability of the "device" and the financial risks and rewards. If you had solved that, this wouldn't have been as likely to happen, unless the other company was doing parallel research (or industrial espionage).

What is the best action for me?

I know this can be frustrating, but most likely, nothing can be done realistically, except from being extra careful for the future inventions. The intellectual property one creates as a part-time researcher in a company is typically owned by the company. Therefore, it's up to the company to decide what to do with it. If someone patents your paper, then it can be invalidated (mirror) if one can prove the following, but your company seems uninterested to spend time and money it:

Another approach to invalidating a patent is to prove that the invention was in public use or on sale in the U.S. more than a year prior to the date of the application. If one can prove that the invention was known or used by others in the U.S. or patented or described in a publication in any country before the invention thereof by the applicant, the patent is invalid. In order to obtain a patent, the invention must be useful, novel and unobvious.

You could try yourself but it'll likely be time-consuming. The quote above is for the US, each country has their own patent system/rules.
Note that publishing patentable work is referred to as a defensive publication:

A defensive publication, or defensive disclosure, is an intellectual property strategy used to prevent another party from obtaining a patent on a product, apparatus or method for instance.

You can’t patent a “paper”, actually.  Devices are patentable.

@Buffy thanks, "patent a paper" was a shortcut to say patent the content (eg, a novel algorithm) of the paper, assuming it's patentable.

Further, no one can "patent the content of your paper". They can patent their own work, and this work could overlap with what's in your paper, but they aren't patenting your paper or your content, they're patenting theirs.

@BryanKrause Thanks, yes that's what I meant. OP's pb is that the content is very similar.

Sorry this happened. But, you’re the one and only who really knows the project.
I would start looking for how to modify it in a way that it would be even better and patent it in a hurry, before the others do it.
The improvements must be significant to be valid. You have now the advantage of being able to see the results of the first device that was produced  and, you can look for it’s flaws.