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Should I email the university admin to explain that one of my references is out of office until Monday?
I emailed my undergrad supervisor back in July asking them to write a reference letter, which they agreed to.
I had an email from the uni I am applying to yesterday stating they were yet to receive the reference letter. I then emailed the supervisor to reminded them about the reference letter and the deadline for the application on the 10th of September but they are out of the office until Monday, the 24th of August.
Should I email the uni admissions to explain the situation and say that I have re-emailed the supervisor or wait till Monday and see what happens (during my undergrad my supervisor usually need not respond to emails but I don't have anyone else I could ask at this short notice)?
Any advice would be appreciated

Since you have until September 10, it's probably better to email the supervisor on Monday and ask that he or she confirm that the letter has been written.

The deadline is still three weeks away, and your letter-writer is back in the office in two business days. Emailing to let them know about a two-day delay would just be noise. In fact, I'd be somewhat surprised if anyone even saw your email response. They're just being polite and helpful. I never got any reminders from my applied-to schools!
Follow up with your letter-writer on Monday, but you shouldn't need to contact the schools you're applying to unless your letter-writer has some sort of personal emergency that means they won't be able to submit on time.

I would advise letting them know of the situation. You lose nothing by this and it might save you if you indicate that you are attending to the situation.
But on the 24th, you should also follow up with the advisor to make sure that all will be put right.

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Good grades vs published research
I'm in the penultimate year of my undergraduate education and about 20% of the year's grade is a research project. It is essentially an exercise since not everybody is expected to produce much in a way of scientific contribution at this stage. It is however possible to do insightful, publishable research, which would be my first time.
Doing publishable research would take a lot of time. Because there is a finite amount of hours in a day and week etc., I see three options:

Distribute my time evenly, and get good exam and project grades.
Prioritize exams (I expect my score to be about 80-90%) over the project.
Try and do reasonably well on exams (score about 70%), but put everything I've got into the project.

I think I am knowledgeable in the area and I'll  be able to contribute and create publishable research and write a paper if I prioritise it.
If I would like to go and do a PhD and then become a professor, I think a publication is worth more than ridiculously high grades. Assuming I won't drop below 70%average upon graduation; should I marginalise the exams?

Where do you intend to study? Country? But strategizing in this way feels like a fool's game to me.

It's not necessary to ask questions wrapped in hypotheticals - edited for readability

I don't mean to be rude - but how do you know you can do publishable research? Did a professor tell you? I ask because if it's your first time, you may be wrong about the amount of work and resources needed (I certainly was). Class projects aren't usually do 50% more and publish it.

You shouldn't marginalize anything, and I don't think strategizing about this sort of thing is likely to be beneficial.
When you apply to graduate school, your application will be judged against other students who have both excellent grades and excellent research projects.
Once you've done the best you can, yes, it's possible you'll have imperfect grades and you can hope other parts of your application make up for that. You could also find that the time you've poured into a research project results in just a mediocre paper with no triumphant result at all - such is the nature of research.
Try to build the best all-around application you can, and don't put too much stress on how exactly you can game the system.

Pouring everything you've got; days and nights, hundreds, maybe a thousand+ hours in a single one year is hardly what I would call "gaming the system".

@Peter Agreed, I wouldn't call that gaming the system either, nor do I. If you're not excited to work on a research project, why go to grad school where that's the primary thing you'll be doing? A PhD takes far more than a thousand hours in a year.

@BryanKrause a PhD should take ~2 thousands hours in a year. Good to see the transparent declaration it is not enough.

Having been in this exact situation myself, I will argue that the long-term positive effects of publications are worth significantly more than grades. When writing my masters thesis, I choose a controversial subject which resulted in a poor grade, however, the thesis turned into a paper which has helped me land interviews for both PhD and industrial positions.
It should be noted that this is from a  Northeren European context. Many people here are quite sceptical as to the value of grades.
Next to this, I invite you to consider what you enjoy the most - conducting reserach or acing exams. It is virtually impossible to plan anything in detail when it comes to career or professional achievements. One rarely regrets having done something out of passion.

At least some graduate programs require a certain undergraduate GPA as a requirement for admission, and it's likely to be above 70% (although there might be exceptions made in special cases). Regardless of whether a high GPA is more or less impressive than published work, it'd be good to identify those requirements and stay above them.
Also, don't assume that the two sides are fully independent. A reasonably broad background education can be useful when doing research. It provides you with a better set of tools with which to approach your problem (or at least lets you know that such tools are likely to exist). (As an extreme example of someone reinventing the wheel due to an insufficiently broad background education, consider this paper from 1994, that reinvents the trapezoid rule from basic calculus (popularized by Newton in the 17th century, but possibly also in use in Babylon circa 50 BC).

I agree, but the exams are designed so that you could train a monkey to take them. Good exam grades have nothing to do with knowledge, you're meant not to fail by making them absurdly easy and irrelevant.

@Peter A lot depends on the specific exam, but it's been my experience that while passing such exams isn't especially strong evidence that you have a good background education, if you do have that background, you can ace exams like that without putting in any additional effort. (Assuming the content of the exam isn't completely irrelevant trivia. You know better than I do whether that's the case here.)

Not true. being even very knowledgeable maybe be a hindrance. Supose an exam question is ambiguous and open to interpretation. You know it because you have some understanding of the theory. The professor who wrote the question doesn't seem to have the same insight and doesn't know that the question is vague. You therefore spent 30 min to provide the answer to the question asked rather than spending 5 min to do what is expected of you. And you'll know what is expected by watching and rewarching recorded lectures, rereading lecture notes. A COMPLETE waste of time that doesn't develop you.

A specific example: an exam question asked something about radioactivity of Uranium-238. It has a half life of some 4.5 billion years. I've always known that. It's about the same age as the age of the Earth. Common knowledge. However, the professor didn't know that and made a mistake by using this number but calling it mean lifetime. If confused me because I interpreted it as half-life. My mistake, but the lack of ignorance in this case led me astray. Exam-studying can make you ignorant!

It is completely negligent to listen to advice telling you to focus on a research project to the detriment of your other studies.
The project is just one small part of your overall grades, intended as an introduction to research through a self-study project (likely the first and only non-structured aspect in one's entire degree) led by a supervisor.
It is likely the one and only aspect of your entire degree where the end result is uncertain and potentially completely open-ended.
If it was intended as an avenue for students to spend all their time on to the detriment of their other studies it would obviously be completely inappropriate - of course it's not intended to be that way.
If at the first opportunity for some flexibility one then decides to dedicate all their energy to X to the exclusion of all their other responsibilities, especially when the outcome is likely the most unpredictable it would ever be for someone attempting to do research (at the very beginning of their first opportunity to do X), it simply sets a bad precedent for the future and indicates an inability to manage basic responsibilities.

I think it's a reasonable question to ask about how to prioritize your time and I don't think it's "gaming the system" to think about this carefully.
At your level, I would not sacrifice good grades, because grades are an important metric that grad schools use, because you actually need to learn the material in undergrad well to do good research later, and because your plan to compensate for mediocre grades by having solid research is very risky since it depends on your research succeeding in a fixed timeframe, which no one can guarantee. Even more than succeeding, you are banking on this research being sufficiently interesting and impactful, that grad school committees are so impressed that they overlook your senior grades. Maybe you could justify lower grades if you were sure you could get a high impact publication out of your research, but I doubt you can be sure of this. I would set the minimum bar for yourself at getting good grades, and completing the senior project at the level that is done by most students. If you can make the senior project even better without sacrificing your grades, then by all means, do it.

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Is it taboo to change departments within a university?
I have observed that all ideation and discussion about changing departments (or faculties) within public universities are extremely sensitive and complicated, due to unwritten gentlemen's agreements and unspoken territorial borders.
However, legally, when one is on the payroll of a public university, from exactly the same source of funding, one would expect some rational procedures for repositioning staff between departments. But, these things are typically very hard to discuss and agree upon in practice without tantrums and eerie discussions. Why is that? Is this subject effectively an academic taboo?
In practice, I  know such procedures technically exist and sometimes people change departments. But still, no one is willing to talk about how such a process can be started, and at whose initiative.

This could be country/culture dependent. In tbe US it’s not at all a taboo. Related/similar question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/212108/40589

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In many, probably most, universities, who is a member of the faculty is a department matter. Departments do the hiring, not the university as a whole and departments have budgets and specific needs. HR in the US, at least, is there to assure fairness and compliance with laws and regulations in the hiring process.
I don't think it is a taboo or a matter of "territory", but in order to switch you have to follow the other department's hiring procedures, including applications, and such, to assure that you are a good fit. They also probably need to have advertised a position (at least in the US) and to have accepted other applications. And, expect competition for any open slot. The faculty of the "new" department will need to have a say in whether you are accepted, as usual.
It is more like finding a new job than anything else, with the special difficulty that it is probably not possible to keep the current department from learning of this. Moreover, a person on tenure-track seen as dissatisfied with their position, probably has less chance of promotion. It isn't just a matter of moving your office.
The one "territorial" issue I see would be trying to decrease the budget of the current department and move it to the new. There will be objections to that, I'd expect. If the budget is reduced, then that department won't be able to hire a replacement.
You can, however, collaborate with members of other departments.
To get started, you can ask the head of the other department whether they plan to fill any positions in the near future and informally inquire whether you'd be likely to fit. The formal process, however, will probably need to be adhered to.
Note the US perspective here.

In addition, from the 'new' department's perspective, it's much better to leave you on the payroll of some other department but nevertheless 'encourage' you to contribute to activities in the new department.

@avid, maybe, unless they need your skills in the classroom or for advising doctoral students. Then it is probably better to be inside than out. But things vary.

This is well said. Salaries of faculty do not transfer with them. No department wants to give up the money. A new department wants to decide who to hire with their money. Hence, transfers are never happy without upper management approving the budgets.

I totally agree to the "it's more like finding a new job than anything else" -- I switched departments within my current Uni, and to do that, I had to wait for an open position to be advertised, fill out all the application forms, and go through the same interview process as everybody else.

As a preamble, do you think this is particularly unique to universities? I've known people who have moved between teams/departments in non-academic jobs, both due to directives from higher up and due to personal requests. And a non-trivial fraction of the time that's led to some level of awkwardness/recrimination.
In any employer, moving between departments may carry both practical impacts (if the budget for your salary goes with you so your local management loses out, if a replacement needs to be found and how soon) and social implications ("You guys suck, I'm off to the cool table"). It's not surprising this is something of a touchy subject, no matter where you're starting from.
In academia this is exacerbated by there being fewer obvious options for most academics between departments than there are for e.g. admin or legal staff due to the very different skills involved, so it's an even less-trodden path. But I don't think there's any additional taboo beyond the general social aspects you'd find in most employers.

In my observation (as a mathematician in a US research university), faculty members' primary loyalties are to their departments, not to the university as a whole.
My department is the group of people whom I see regularly, with whom I regularly collaborate on service assignments, with whom regular faculty meetings are held. We have internal disagreements from time to time, but with my department I feel a sense of common cause.
In contrast, my university as a whole is large and unwieldy, and I don't think all that highly of much of its leadership. Our budget model encourages competition between departments and colleges, and rewards the winners, which means I tend to see other departments as rivals. Overall, I don't get "warm fuzzy" feelings from thinking about the university as a whole.
So, if a colleague left our department for another department at the same university? I might be happy for them, if it was a good move, but I would definitely think of it a a loss for us. The point being, by "us" I instinctively am thinking of my home department first.

I think that there should be mention of the fact that, traditionally, departments (i.e., Department of Mathematics, sometimes called "Faculty of ..." outside of the U.S.) have more independence from one another than departments of a company. Faculty simply aren't organized the same way employees of a software company (for example) might be.
The department someone is trying to leave doesn't want to lose their faculty line they may have fought for (that was meant to be a 20+ year position), nor do they want to be seen as a stepping-stone to a better (?) department in the university. The receiving department doesn't want to cause friction with the sending department.
Regarding funding, even faculty in the same department may have very different funding (e.g., NSF vs. NIH) and so that part of your question doesn't always hold.

"There is no "director of personnel" at the dean level" No. We have a college level Associate Dean for Academic Personnel and a university level Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Personnel.

very insightful answer! Thanks!

@user71659 Okay, fair enough. My institutions don't. But edited to get my main point across.


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How do I ascertain the funding organization of my grant?
I am a graduate student and I applied for a computing grant from here. The grant type I applied for (Explore), allowed graduate students to be PIs, provided the advisor is the co-PI. I would like to add this to my CV. I checked this website and it told me to use the following format -

Current Research (chronological order; most recent one first)
Grant # (PI Name)
Name of Funding Organization (no acronyms)
Amount Awarded
Period of Grant Award
Title of Project
Role on Project (if not the PI)

This looks pretty straightforward except the 'Name of Funding Organization'. As per the website, it seems like a NSF grant due to the following information -

ACCESS is an advanced computing and data resource program supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure awards #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603 and #2138296.

I am a little wary of adding NSF. Aren't NSF awards only awarded to professors? Perhpas this is one of NSF's side projects?

Also, I was wondering  about the Grant #. The format tells me to put the PI's name in that section, which feels a little weird. I was assuming that all grants have a specific id.

I can’t understand why you are leery of adding NSF here. They fund that program.

I understand that getting NSF grants is quite challenging. Whereas the grant I got was relatively easy and did not require me to have a PhD. I just don't want to write something wrong in my CV.

Full, regular NAF grants are challenging, yes. I’d say “NSF ACCESS grant for computer time” but someone closer to the field can speak up…

Research administrator here.  The line you quoted suggests that the award would be made to an institution as a subcontract.  So ACCESS already has NSF funding and flows it down to an institution to be used for the named graduate student, with a co-PI being someone at the institution who normally has PI rights.  The question is which institution will receive the award.  This has to be indicated in your application somewhere.  Have you reached out to your local research administrator?  This funding will have to be received by your institution, and they have the right to review this application before you submit.  They should help you put it together.  This sort of work relies a lot on local policies and preferences, so reach out to your local research administrator to get proper guidance.  If you don't know who this is, ask your PI.
As an aside, the NSF GRFP is the only fellowship I have ever seen that doesn't need to run through a research administration team beforehand, even though it's still received by the institution and not the individual.  That's because they have an ongoing relationship with institutions on how to administer those fellowships.  When in doubt about how to proceed, reach out to a research administrator as soon as possible so that they have time to help you.


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Is there any risk of having my research scooped after posting my manuscript on bioRxiv?
I want to post my manuscript to bioRxiv before submitting to formal journals. I have several concerns:

Can I claim I am the first for the discovery by posting my findings on bioRxiv?
Similarly, is this a feasible way to prevent others from publishing earlier than me on the same topic?
Are there any risks of having my research scooped after posting my manuscript on bioRxiv?

I'm fairly sure that we have the same question for the arXiv somewhere, but since the publication norms in biology can be very different from those in the mathematical sciences, this should not count as a duplicate.

I personally know of a number of instances in which this (scooping based on bioRxiv publications) happened.

In fields that use arXiv, publication in arXiv does establish a definitive date-stamp on the work (and an accompanying archival DOI) that is generally understood and respected by practitioners in the field. Nobody could reasonable "scoop" a work published there without being called on it by their peers.
bioRxiv is intended to provide the same for biology-related fields and technically does so. The culture of those fields, however, is often not yet as accepting of the idea of pre-publication and incrementally evolving works. Hence, for example, the much greater concern with the ideas of "priority" and "scoop" to begin with.  A few journals still even consider sharing a pre-print in bioRxiv to be a sort of "self-scoop" that prevents you from submitting for peer review in that journal!
Still, the only way to change this culture is to embrace more open and sharing practices. I would advise checking whether others in your sub-field use bioRxiv, checking the publication policy of your target journal in SHERPA/RoMEO, and checking if your co-authors are amenable to pre-print sharing. If you see others in your subfield sharing, and if there is no veto from the journal or co-authors, then go ahead!

(1) I discussed this question recently with few colleagues from biomedical field, and, as far as I can see, major part of the field do not accept a non-reviewed experimental findings as a proof of discovery. This is mostly for two reasons: first, there is no single preprint server in biology. There are BioRxiv, F1000, PeerJ, ASAPbio, Arxiv q-bio, and probably more. And all these papers are not indexed in the main paper bases, like PubMed or WoS. So to keep up with the "pre-publications" one will need to check every single pre-print server. And this is too much. Second problem is the fear that if the field will start to acknowledge the priority based on the claim, without checking the rigor of experimental design, it may promote the sloppy data handling, because researchers will rush to put their flag everywhere. And we are talking about the very populated field, where many sub-fields have a clinical relevance or otherwise related to highly sensitive problems of human/animal health and well-being.
(2) Probably no, but this is the risk that one takes in research when he/she is going to conference, submitting grant application, and etc. The question is whether this risk provides some benefits in return.
(3) I still think that biomedical field, in general, would benefit from fast communications of the research finding behind the closed doors (i.e. without making scientific statements to the public). Even from the personal perspective, it is a way to faster position yourself as a researcher among other colleagues.

Regarding (1) All of these pre-print servers are indexed in Google Scholar. You don't have to check each one by hand.

I always find the attitude in (1) strange. As if people were playing competitive sports with formal rules instead of doing research.

In my personal experience "there are too many preprint servers" is way less of a problem than "there are too many journals" for keeping up with publications.

Putting immature article before peer review is not proof of discovery.
If yes, we can easily scoop other's findings by posting quick, short and sloppy article in Preprint server (after knowing their data for example in some research conference) .
Also, the benefit of Preprint server is that researcher can publish there data quickly before long peer review and publication process.
However, in reality, most of the author post their articles in preprint sever when they noticed that some other group were also working on the same topics and wanted to insist their priority. This is quite ugly and selfish motivation.
All paper needs to go through peer review when the paper needs to be polished.
Even though that is time-consuming, this process is equally required for all academic paper.
Therefore, posting article in preprint server after knowing some competition is dirty scooping.

"If yes, we can easily scoop other's findings by posting quick, short and sloppy article in Preprint server "
Physics and math have been using preprint  servers for over a decade now and don't have this problem. That suggests that this concern is deeply overblown.

"All paper needs to go through peer review when the paper needs to be polished. Even though that is time-consuming, this process is equally required for all academic paper. "
No one is arguing that papers shouldn't go through review. There's a logical leap going from putting  a preprint up to avoiding peer review.

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Under what option should i upload a revised main document when using manuscriptcentral?
[please edit this question or propose a better title, English is not my native language]
Recently my paper was accepted with major revisions in a journal using  mc.manuscriptcentral in its submission process.
I revised my paper and edited the main document, and now i want to upload it now, but there is still Authors bio in that document, so under what should i upload it, the website proposes the following choice ?

Looks like it should be 'main document - with author details'?

Don't worry about it, when you get it wrong someone will tell you what you are supposed to do.

It should probably be "Main document". The reason it says "- with author details" is probably because, as you said, your article has already been accepted. So, the label "Main document - with author details" probably means that you should now add your author information; you should no longer hide it as you were probably required to do in the double-blind peer review stage.
I'm not absolutely certain, but based on the details you provided, that seems to be the most likely option.


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In my thesis, do all sources I've cited need to be mentioned in the Literature Review?
I'm writing a Masters Thesis and am just not sure if every source I've cited in my thesis, I need to disuss in the Literature Review?

Welcome to Academia SE! It is not clear to me when you say "every source I've cited in my thesis": do you mean that you listed some sources in the bibliography first, and then are asking if you need to discuss them in the lit review? Or are you asking if there is a source that you have mentioned and cited elsewhere in the thesis, if it needs to be discussed again in the lit review? These are two different scenarios. Please edit your question to clarify which you mean.

While you have to cite every source that you reference properly, you defenitely don't have to discuss every source in the literature review. Some sources you cite might only be needed for little things like an equation, a standard used for testing, or a confirmation of an hypothesis you make, market projections, single statistical results, etc. Other sources might be slightly off-topic but still relevant for a small part of the thesis.
Limit the sources discussed in the literature review to those that fit there.


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Top authors in a field
I'd like to write down a list of the top authors in my field in order to keep up to date with literature. Can anybody suggest any systematic approach to build such a list?

Is this about top authors or researchers?

Can you please elaborate on the difference?

Do you want the people to be good authors or researchers? Some people do great work but publish badly written papers or publish very little. Other not do groudbreaking work but are great writers.

By top authors I mean the most cited ones, those who have/had a great influence in the ongoing development of their field.

Again, these are two different things…

If you just want to find the greatest influence or highly cited, try awards.  Nobel Prize winners, Members of National academies of science, etc..

Disclaimer: I am definitely no expert in research, but let me just share with you how I do it.
I do it largely by the help of Google Scholar (Hoo-ray for Google!). In order to make it sound "systematic", I phrase my way in two steps and an extra optional step.

Step 1: Obtain the name list of the top authors in the field of interest from Google Scholar. Since many researchers, especially in the filed of EECS, use Google Scholar, and they usually list their "research interests" in the form of tags (e.g., machine learning), we can view the authors conveniently by research interest. For example, see the results here for the top authors in the field of machine learning. You will notice that the list is automatically sorted in descending order in terms of citations.
Step 2: Stay tuned for new papers by these authors with the help of Google Email Alerts. Once you have browsed through the top author list, you should have shortlisted several most interested authors. To receive an email notification when they have new papers available online, simple click Follow on the right side of their names. Voila! You will receive an email every time they have new research published from now on!

Optional Step: Another thing I also do every year on top of the previous two points is to skim through this year's proceedings of the famous conference/journals in the field. This way, you may get a sense of what is hot these days.

Thank you for your answer. Easy to put into practice. Do you review your "author subscriptions" on a regular basis?

@siew r u referring to step 2 by saying subscription? Google sends the email to you

I refer to step 1. More specifically: do you change your list of top authors with time?

@siew Since I just started researching, I am still studying the "1st batch". But yes, I definitely will refresh my list as I go along the way. ;)

Note that how well Google Scholar works for identifying top researchers in a field depends heavily on the field.  In some fields (especially outside of hard/computational sciences, it seems), many prominent researchers are not represented there.

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Can the academic editor accept a paper if the reviewers have opposite opinions?
I have submitted a paper for review. I have made 4 revisions. The one reviewer accepted the paper and the other reviewer rejected the paper. Is there any chance that my paper will be totally accepted by the editor?

Referees do not accept or reject articles. They make a suggestion to the editor to accept or reject the submission. Depending on the journal, it is either the handling editor themselves, or the handling editor in discussion with the rest of the editorial board, who actually makes the decision.
If the journal has very high standards, it may be quite unusual to accept a paper if any referee recommends against it. In other cases, it will be a matter of how exactly the referees justify their recommendations, how much the editor trusts each of them, what the editors impression of the paper is, and so on.


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Are INRIA working reports publicly available?
Any suggestions on how to find these two papers?  They were cited in 1993:

[11] Morazavian, H. and M. Boutiller, On a theorem of Kuratoski, Working Report, INRIA, Rocquencourt, France (1981).
[12] Mortazavian H., Patterns arising from a theorem of Kuratowski in topology with appications, Working Report, INRIA, Rocquencourt, France (1981).

I emailed them two years ago. Their reply was:

"We don't have this references. Absolutely no traces....sorry."

Another place you can try to contact is the Biblioteque Nationale de France. Check, however, that the original references were really in English and not in French (I find it improbable that in 1981 a French institute would publish an internal report in English).

This is a common problem with working reports from any institution. I also have written up research in a "Working Report" series in the past. Often that report was only written for others within the research team, group or project in order to disseminate the information generated or gathered so far, or to capture the thinking done so far. Sometimes there are only a few copies produced.
Sometimes, when a more formal system is in place, copies of the report are lodged in the institute library and added to their catalogue, but sometimes not. Sometimes the reports are just added to the local library of the group. Capturing copies of such working reports was difficult even for a contemporaneous researcher and one would have to get the author to make you a copy and send it. Some of these rare copies of important reports have been cherished in the research libraries of other groups as liberated treasures. For a researcher coming many years after the event obtaining a copy is an exercise in forensics.
Today, with the advent of digital publishing, dissemination and archiving these old and obscure paper pools are being disposed of and becoming less and less accessible. The librarians see them as trash. They can see no value to an internal document that has not been consulted in 30 years and want to recover the space, often not for storage, but to "open the library for social purposes". I have witnessed huge skips of books and documents at the rear of institution libraries.
Some archivists have been aware of the problem, and I was part of a consortium that bid for funding (at national level) to attempt to recover and digitally archive works similar to this, but the accountants could see no value in it; but I digress.
It will be very difficult to locate this. Only the author would know, and they may have lost their copy. I tried to retrieve copies of some of my old reports (going back to 1974) in full text and found my own personal archives had holes in them caused by system, institution, office and continent  moves.

You could try to contact the author of the 1993 publication citing them.
And as Massimo Ortolano mentions, those titles are probably not the original translations. Maybe you can get the institute to send you a list of the 1981 publications and look for anything contributed by H. Mortazavian?

When I first attempted to obtain these papers in 2012 I found a Los Angeles address for a person who is surely the same Mortazavian.  I mailed him a request that included a self-addressed, stamped envelope, but he didn't reply (he probably didn't have the papers and didn't see a need to write back).  One of the two citing authors wrote a 1968 paper, so he almost surely can't be contacted, and the other's most recent publication was in 2008, after which time there is no trace.  I found a 2008 email address for her, but it gets returned undeliverable.


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Should I recommend a reviewer that I have no contact with?
I've received an invitation from an editor of a journal to review an article. After a brief reading, I've determined that the article's scope is beyond my area of expertise, leading me to decline the invitation. In the invitation letter, the editor kindly asked for alternative reviewer suggestions in case of my declination. While I am aware of potential reviewers who would be suitable for this article based on my past experiences, I have no personal contact with them (I knew them solely from reading their works).
Should I include them as recommendations?

Yes, definitely. Speaking as an editor, I would love that. If the paper came to you, it means the editor doesn't know who has the relevant expertise. Your recommendation of a specific person with the expertise will help the editor a lot, and earn you some good will from the editor. Probably they won't tell the other person that it was you who recommended them.

Here is someone who would strongly disagree with this answer.

@nanoman I don't think that linked comment ("Never, ever, use another's name for anything without asking first.") applies here. The response in that thread was about listing someone as an academic reference without asking first, which I agree is a bad idea, as it implies a degree of familiarity with and approval of the referenced person's work. By contrast, recommending a colleague for a review of someone else's work based on their expertise is much less problematic.

@J.Galt it's the difference between speaking of someone and speaking for someone.

@J.Galt Yes, that thread's question was about listing someone as a reference, but the comment was emphatically much broader ("for anything"). Bob Brown went on to say in follow-up comments there: "not even to nominate someone for a prize" and "anything that implies an obligation, however small". Based on this, I am comfortable asserting that to recommend someone as a reviewer for an article, without asking first, falls within the space that Bob Brown disapproved.

@nanoman note that having your name suggested as a possible referee does not imply any obligation whatsoever. We are all free to reject referee requests, and we all do so regularly. The OP is doing so right in this post. Mentioning a name as a possible referee does not in any way imply you believe they will do it or will want to do it, it just says you believe they have the necessary expertise. No more than that. There is no obligation implied, you are not forcing anyone into anything.

@nanoman: The OP's situation seems more like providing the editor with some good reading on the subject. I don't think that using author names to point someone to their published works requires prior permission. So, I see no problem there, provided that the journal in question looks legit.

Sure, why not? There's no downside for you, and the editor is likely to appreciate it.

The downside might be that the MS is very poor and burdensome to review. The suggested reviewer might try to find out who lumbered them with the thing!

@Deipatrous they could always decline (or write a short review saying the manuscript is very poor and not worth reviewing).

@Deipatrous and they would find that the editor lumbered them with it, and not the person who mentioned their name. Suggesting reviewer names is a standard part f the review process, so if we are to get annoyed at anyone, it should be at the editor who took the recommendation and asked us to review. But really, if it is burdensome, you decline to review and there it ends.

It may make sense to know how the publisher uses such a recommendation in further communication with the potential reviewer. It happened that I recommended someone I knew. This person forwarded the message to me that they got from the publisher asking them to do the review. It sounded a lot like I was the one asking them to do the review which was simply not the case. I was quite upset with this, so I am more careful now with these kind of recommendations when I don't trust the publisher's policies.

Did the publisher send an email saying you declined to review but suggested them as a reviewer? That seems highly unusual. Most of the time one would simply register and invite the new reviewer, without mentioning why you are inviting them. Were you an editor for the paper?

@Allure, "Did the publisher send an email saying you declined to review but suggested them as a reviewer?" Yes, precisely that, and in a wording suggesting that it was me who asks the other person to do the review instead of myself. No, I was not an editor for the paper.

Having spent half an hour this afternoon whipping up potential referee names for a paper I am handling: oh, yes, please!
(And just to clarify, @snijderfrey, normally the editor should never say "I am contacting you on the recommendation of @snijderfrey". This is a breach of the confidentiality / anonymity of the editorial process. The editor / handling editor and journal staff know who the reviewers are, the reviewers don't and shouldn't know who the other reviewers are, because if they do, this gives rise to all sorts of biases. In some journals, you, as a reviewer, will receive a copy of the editorial decision sent to the authors, but you will get it in the same way the authors do: with the reviewers names removed. I am not talking about journals with non anonymous reviews, of course.)

"normally the editor should never say [...]", I 100% agree, it is just that it happened to me, and I would be surprised to learn that this never happened to anybody else. I cannot say anything about the odds, admittedly, because usually you would just not notice.

While I essentially agree with David White’s answer that this is fine and welcome and very usual, here is a slight counterpoint worth bearing in mind: it’s usually slightly better to suggest people you know personally, when possible.  The editor is certainly primarily interested in finding someone with the right expertise — but relevant secondary factors include whether the person is a good reviewer, whether they’re currently taking on much reviewing, whether they have conflicts of interest with the paper, and so on.  If you know someone well enough to judge some of these, then you can pre-filter a bit and give the editor more useful suggestions.

Yes, if you have good reason to believe that their expertise and competence is a good fit for the MS, then there should be no impediment.

I am certain most - if not all - of us have experienced this at some point in our academic careers. In the event that I am unable to review a piece, and I am aware of a colleague/peer whose area of expertise is a “right” fit, I am often inclined to provide that person’s email address for follow up. There is no harm in recommending an apropos expert to review a piece, and they are always free to decline if they are unavailable. While it is not something to be done often, again, there is no harm in doing so. The editor will likely send that person an email similar to the one you yourself recently received.


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Should I include papers in a literature review that might overshadow my own results?
I'm composing a literature review on the use of air bubbling carriers in direct contact membrane distillation. I've encountered various papers with promising findings, some of which might overshadow my own results. Should I incorporate all of them or selectively choose which ones to include?

What is your motivation for creating the literature review? What role do you want the finished manuscript to serve? What is your intended audience? To me, the choice of which sources to include follows from these fundamental questions about the project itself.

Normally one reads relevant papers in the process of work. Otherwise, one may rediscover wheel.

You should include everything that is relevant to set the stage for your own work. If there are papers that would "overshadow" your work -- i.e., if others have already done something that you are presenting as new -- then that's unethical. You should only present things as new if you honestly believe that they are new.

Happens all the time. Reminds me rediscovery of calculus in 1994. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscovery-of-calculus-in-1994-what-should-have-happened-to-that-paper

@yarchik It's perhaps true that people "all the time" rediscover methods that are already known. But when they publish those, one at least typically assumes that they were simply unaware of others having done the same. The question here is about someone who knows that others have done related and similar work.

You should certainly be selective, but that selection should include, rather than exclude, papers that "overshadow" your results. But, if there are papers that do this, then what are you doing?  Well, there are a few possibilities (not an exhaustive list):

You are replicating results.  This can be very valuable and, in many fields, is not done enough.
You are confirming (or not) results in a different population, setting, or something like that.
You are improving earlier analysis by adding new variables, using better methods, or something like that.

If you are doing a dissertation, then it must contribute something new to the field. If you are submitting to a journal, then there must be some reason for them to want to publish it.

@DanielHatton  True. But I rarely hear the word "dissertation" used for undergrad work. There was a discussion about this here on Academia not too long ago.

As @WolfgangBangerth answered, you are ethically obligated to report other research you know so that you can honestly assess how novel your results are. However, in practice, when I have had a similar feeling or fear as I discovered other work that seemed very similar to what I've done, on carefully reading such papers, I could almost always find some important details in which my work was different. So, I recommend that you carefully read these other articles and take note of what your work adds to the literature. As you cite these works, you should primarily emphasize your true novelty. Of course, there is always the risk that your true novelty is not that important--that is an unfortunate risk of doing research. In any case, there should be a journal (perhaps not as popular as your original target) that would be willing to publish even a minor novelty.


text:
The concept of solid when it is used about the contribution of a paper
My Question:
What does it mean when the reviewer wrote the following sentence
The contribution is quite solid
Thanks in advance

From Merriam-Webster, meaning 4:

of good substantial quality or kind

It's synonymous of sound.
Apparently, the reviewer thinks that your paper is good, constructed on "solid" grounds.


text:
Adding a list of changes or raised rebuttal during the revision process
If the editorial manager wants a list of changes during the revision process, is it normal to add another file (what should this be called? Should it be a highlight or the name of the file is not important as they will eventually read through all files?) or where should I address my changes (which are pretty much big as the comment from the reviewer suggests to find a better way to address it - for which I can improve a result a little bit, too)?
Am I understanding this process right? Or is it needed to address the changes in the other ways?

There should be specific instructions from the editor/journal. If the instructions are not specific then you can either do what you want (not recommended) or ask the editor/journal for clarifications (recommended).

I don't want to offend anyone, and as I haven't seen the revision form yet I can't tell if it's possible to add more than 1 file. Even if the name is not so important, I know it's appropriate to use a good name such as comment_response.txt

You're not offending anyone by asking for clarifying details if someone asked you to follow a process that isn't spelled out. It's being professional!

I normally indicate the changed passages in red in the updated article text. In addition, I copy-paste all reviewer comments into a separate, new document (titled reply to reviewer comments or similar), and add a short reply to all comments explaining what I changed and why.

So you highlighted the changes in the original paper in red? I'm not sure if that's okay to do, but I don't want to do anythin in the article text (other than its content). However, as you point out, I think it's okay to attach another file like the previous answer in the recise process.

Yes, I highlited the changes in the original paper. I had never any complaints (and had the same method used in several papers that I did the peer review myself). It should not be a problem, as changing text color back to black is not an issue.

Oh, okay thank you.

Some journals make it possible to upload a manuscript with changes tracked as well as the "clean" updated version. Sursula's suggestion is similar - if anything, text color is something you care about with galley proofs in hand, but not as much during revisions. It is definitely something that can be fixed at later stages. This approach is a little more tricky for manuscripts prepared in LaTeX.
If the above is not feasible, one might write something to the effect of "clarifications were added (the penultimate paragraph in the Discussion section in the updated version)" or "We have added the values for x and z (line 271 in the revised version)" in the point-by-point rebuttals.
If everything else fails, you can always e-mail the editorial office with the additional version of your manuscript with the changes clearly marked. But most likely, there will be some provisions for it in the online resubmission form.

In my experience, a standard approach is to write a resubmission/response/referee response/rebuttal letter. The exact name of the file isn't particularly important, but making it descriptive is always a good idea. It's quite typical for these letters to start with (sometimes optional) comments for the editor, followed by an itemized summary/list of changes, and then responses to referee comments. Normally* I copy-paste the full referee reports into the letter (with distinct text formatting), and address the referees' points one by one where they appear. So if one reviewer suggestion is to improve something you would address this under said comment, and briefly add a mention to the summary of changes.
*If there is a length restriction on the response letter it makes sense to only include the salient parts.

I haven't seen yet the online resubmission form, so I don't know if we can upload more than 1 file and if we can select a group of it (as the online guidline said to attach this with that).

@W.Wongcharoenbhorn it is highly likely that you can.

@W.Wongcharoenbhorn If you can only upload one file (which I doubt), you can always put the replies to the reviewers comments at the very end of the original article.


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Search articles by a specific conference in dblp
I am doing a seminar work as part of a Computer science bachelor's degree. One of the first steps is to submit the articles that the seminar work will be based on. The topic I chose is Malware Detection, and so, I have submitted some articles regarding the subject. My instructor has rejected the articles for various reasons (From Workshops and not conferences, not peer reviews, somewhat old etc) and he says over and over again that I need to take the articles from dblp, and suggested some conferences to search by. So I want to submit the following search query in dblp:

Articles, from recent years, of specific conferences, are peer-reviewed and are on the topic of malware detection.

And another thing I want to know is:

All conferences from recent years that are on the topic of Cyber Security.

(So that I will have more conferences to search by other than the list my instructor provided)
This can all be done manually, if not possible via dblp search capabilities, but the key functionality I am missing is the free search of an article name in a context of a specific conference (i.e only from a specific conference)
How is that possible? Going to dblp, I can only see a free search box with the capabilities of which I can search either by article name or a conference, but not by both. Also searched here and found no clear solution.
Example of a conference to search in: icse.

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

Pick one article "on topic", look for it on google scholar, and see who is referencing it. Then, look for the venues where those papers have been published in DBLP. I don't think there is any automatic way of doing this.

Not necessarily a duplicate, but definitely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/134634/43873  TL;DR: Ask your university librarians.

Append the phrase " venue:X:" to your query, where X is the name of the conference.
For example, to search for papers with the word "malware" in their title published in the CCS conference:
https://dblp.org/search?q=malware%20venue%3ACCS%3A

The functionality you are asking for is outside of the scope of DBLP.
DBLP is a bibliographic database, and that does not include distinguishing conferences and journals by their fields of research. The FAQ even mentions that "it is impossible to tell where a scientific field starts or ends" (see https://dblp.org/faq/1474671.html).
However, when your seminar instructor said that you should take the papers from DBLP, most likely something different was meant, which can be either of the following two points (or both):

DBLP tends to index all conferences in non-multidisciplinary computer science conferences of at least a moderately good reputation. While this is of course somewhat subjective, whether a publication venue is on DBLP is a fair predictor for whether the papers at the venue should "count".
DBLP includes links to the publisher's versions of papers, and not to some preprints which sometimes don't have the corrections in the final paper versions included.

Note that interdisciplinary conferences and journals are sometimes included in DBLP, but not always.

I think this answer is incorrect. OP asks for searching for papers in a specific conference, not in conferences of a specific field.

@lighthousekeeper Hmm, the OP asked "And another thing I want to know is: All conferences from recent years that are on the topic of Cyber Security." - Admittedly that was sandwiched between two copies of another question that the other answer is answering.


text:
Is there a way to search specifically for literature reviews which have been written by others on a certain topic?
Is there a way to search specifically for literature reviews which have been written by others on a certain topic?
I’d like the search to either return literature reviews on their own or contained within articles. At present, when I do a Google Scholar search for literature reviews it returns a list of articles containing the term “literature review” which clearly isn’t what I want.
The reason I’m asking is because I’m looking to get an overview of the research that has taken place in a certain area.

Surely relevant papers will contain a relevant literature review?

You can do this in Web of Science. After you've searched for the topic, look on the left and refine by article type -> review.
Less effectively, but still workable, include the word "review" in your Google Scholar search. Many review articles will use that word in either the title or the abstract ("In this paper we review ...").

It's worth noting that your second suggestion won't be workable in all fields. In e.g. physics it will pick up a simply unmanageable number of papers published in the Physical Review family of journals, and also a lot of references to such papers.


text:
My potential future PhD supervisor ask me to peer review a paper
I have been working for two years after my Master and I am now looking for a PhD. I got a PhD offer from one university, met the person who would supervise me and told them I am very interested, while making it clear that I also applied to other PhD offers and am waiting for answers. They said that that it was not an issue for them.
But now he just sent me an anonymous paper and suggested to me peer-reviewing it to help me "get a foot on the ladder". I am really confused by this proposition since:

I am still working for my company
I am still searching for PhD offers to apply, which takes me all my free time,
I never reviewed a paper before.

So, I am not really in the mood to do this now since I have more urgent concerns. However, I do not want to upset this potential supervisor, nor make them believe that I am not motivated.
So, should I do this review or not, and if I don't, how can I refuse without upsetting this potential supervisor?
Let me precise that I am likely to do my PhD there if my other applications don't get accepted.
EDIT
The paper in question is anonymous and I am asked to peer review it for a journal publication. The paper subject is in my field of research but not really in the field of my potential supervisor.

Reviewing is one of tasks that most researchers usually do. If the paper is related to your field, then there is nothing to worry about the quality even if you are doing it for first time, you potential supervisor can see and modify the review comments accordingly.

Is he an author of the paper he sent you (and wants to see if you can understand their work) or does he want you take over his peer review duties? The latter one would be very weird, especially as you are still at the interviewing stage of the process.

If you don't have time to do it, just tell him that.

@Helge  Well that was my first feeling actually, that he was assigning me some of his work while I am still in the application phase. The paper is anonymous and I am asked to peer review it for a journal publication. The paper subject is in my field of research but not really in his. (I'm adding those clarifications to my post)

If you haven't discussed this in the interview already, maybe it's a good time now to ask the potential supervisor how many such reviews you should expect to help with over the course of your PhD.

So does the paper look interesting to you or what? This angst seems excessive to me. There's no risk-free way to refuse personal requests from potential future supervisors. And there's also no guarantees in life that such investments of time always pay off. Sometimes you just gotta risk wasting a few hours.

@ASimpleAlgorithm Yes it does, I guess you are right ^^'.

It might be good for you to get the experience. Perhaps the super is really just looking to see how you handle it and your expertise. I'd be more leery, however, if your review would be submitted to a journal or conference and the request didn't come from the editors. You might be able to ask whether it is "just for fun/experience" or for submission.

It would, of course, be unethical for him/her to submit your review under any name but your own. Under such circumstances it isn't someone you should want to work with in any case.

Maybe it's a matter of question formulation, but I find this to be a very peculiar request and would be equally confused as you seem to be even if I wasn't busy with other stuff.
Specifically, you're not qualified to review a paper, yet.
If he's asking your analytical opinion on a paper, kind of like a journal club style dissection of the content, then sure I guess that's no big deal. But if you are given a manuscript, written by someone else and submitted to a journal, I find this request unrealistic and even unethical.
Also, in a way disagreeing with the previous answers here, I don't think it's a reasonable request even if you were given the article in a more relaxed, journal club-like format. Because you are supposed to learn to read and understand the scientific literature, it's part of your training as a PhD student. To use that during the recruitment process, as a test is a bit unfair in my eyes.

that was my first feeling actually, that he was assigning me some of
  his work while I am still in the application phase. The paper is
  anonymous and I am asked to peer review it for a journal publication.

The above alone, would even deter me from considering to start there. I think it might be worth thinking about what kind of work environment you want to get yourself into for the coming 3-X years of your life.
But again, it's possible that I misunderstand something in the OP. Just my two cents...

I second the feeling that this particular place may but unneccessary load on PhD students and have them do busy work for the PI. I was asked to help with reviews during my PhD (not before) and my PI always acknowledged my by adding my name (he used to sign his reviews). Yes, it is a learning experience but the terms are unclear and inappropriate as a method of evaluation. Among other things, reviewers are not supposed to send manuscripts to others.

Thanks for your answer, I had the same feeling. I tried to clarify the question with him but I got the request right. I'm a bit lost since I really got along this person during the interview, yet this kind of request makes me quite distrustfull and it is hard to tell if there are good intentions behind this or a will to take advantage of my absence of experience.

@MaiKar "it is hard to tell if ..." well, you can always try to ask him/her what this particular request is supposed to do with the admission process. I know that it might be tricky to find the right formulation at times, but as a general rule of thumb; when in doubt, just ask :)

I learnt a lot through editing/reviewing the text of papers in progress that my proposed advisor was involved in, while I was awaiting acceptance at the graduate school. I was fortunate to be included as co-author of the later ones as my own program started. Allow me to suggest you be as helpful to your advisor as you can, but then when you are in his program, express an interest that you be on track to produce papers of your own to establish your credentials get his ok to submit abstracts to conferences/journals and so forth. It takes about a year to get on the publication track, and you have about 2 to 3 years before your doctoral qualifiers, so you have time. Your eventual doctoral degree and dissertation will most probably require some publications, or allow your prior program related publications to be used as source material. So get going. Remember: Publish or Perish.

Thank you for the record. I agree it would be wise to do so. In my case it is a bit different since the paper in question is not a paper of his team but an anonimous paper to be reviewed for a journal. It is in my field of research, but not really in the supervisor's field.

As the paper in question, is directly in your field of research, that is exactly why your supervisor asked you to handle it, and possibly with the thought that you will become familiar with the specific formatting/editing/standards of the Journal concerned. Therefore if you chose to submit an abstract to be considered for an article call in that Journal, you would not need much preparation time. Good choice. It will shave 2 years off your publication schedule.

I think this answer misses that the person asking the OP for a review is not the OP's advisor. Only a potential advisor among several candidates. Also, my personal belief is that "publish or perish" will make you perish by forcing you to publish low quality work.

A literature review is an effecient way for you to have general overview about the state-of-the-art development in you research area. Most supervisors require their Phd students to do a literature review before starting the actual research.

I don’t think this is the kind of review meant here. My understanding is that the advisor has asked the student to peer review a paper.

@Dawn Yes indeed, the paper is anonymous and I am asked to peer review it for a journal publication.


text:
Can I help the impact factor of a journal by citing my own papers?
Lets say I have published paper A in a journal.
I am now ready to submit a new paper, paper B.
Paper A is cited in Paper B.
Since B is related to A, I will probably submit it to the same journal.  Would this help the journal's metrics?
Or, lets say paper A currently has no citations.  Would they be reluctant to accept paper B?
The reason I ask is that it seems like a single person could tackle an area of research that nobody else cares about, submit paper after paper to the same journal, and achieve a paper-to-citation ratio near 1:1 (is that  good?).

why was this downvoted? I have honest questions.

I upvote the question because it is a common dilemma amongst young researchers as the Or part asks: "lets say paper A currently has no citations. Would they be reluctant to accept paper B?"

Some metrics specifically account for self-citation distortions by offering stats with and without self-citations included.  This can be useful for at least two reasons I can think of: (1) a common tactic by less reputable scholars is to facetiously and needlessly cite themselves or their friends, so metrics that exclude self-citations help remove the incentives to try to game the metric in question; (2) it offers some information on whether the material in question is "of general/active interest" or only of rather specific interest to a few specialists, which some journals care about.

Many people on this site dislike bibliometrics. The down votes could be the expression of their frustration.

You shouldn't help a journal improve its impact factor.  For impact factors (or any other metric) to be a useful guide for prospective authors or readers, the impact factor has to be earned by the journal on merit, not as a quid pro quo for accepting your paper.  "Would they be reluctant to accept paper B?" if that is considered by the journal, it is not a journal you should consider!  I've been asked by journal editors to add citations to their journal in accepted papers, which is not something that should happen, and my opinion of the quality of the journal was adjusted accordingly.

Since B is related to A, I will probably submit it to the same journal. Would this help the journal's metrics?
I fail to see the connection. One paper having one more citation is irrelevant to journal metrics (eigenfactor excludes self-citation, while JCR does not, if I'm not mistaken). Also, I'd expect that papers published in a particular journal would include citations to lots of papers on the same journal.
Or, lets say paper A currently has no citations. Would they be reluctant to accept paper B?
Very likely, no. I don't see as costumary for a referee to look at citation record of cited papers. But, if A is not being cited, maybe that's indicative that this research is not suitable to this journal.
... achieve a paper-to-citation ratio near 1:1 (is that good?)
No. Especially if it's a self citation.

Quoting Wikipedia, "In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the number of citations received in that year by articles published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total number of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years".
Accordingly, self-citations (by an author, by a journal, or by both simultaneously) are not excluded in the main metric. It is true that in some cases self-citations are discarded (for instance when comparing journals or manuscripts), but it would be ludicrous to exclude, for instance, the New England Journal of Medicine self-citations, and this applies to all reasonably good journals, whose ranking remains stable excluding them:

Regarding your questions:

Impact Since B is related to A, I will probably submit it to the same
  journal. Would this help the journal's metrics?

Yes, it is common practice among researchers and journals.

Lets say paper A currently has no citations. Would they be reluctant to
  accept paper B (quoting A)?

No, as long as the citation is appropriate.
Also consider that a citation increases the likelihood of your article A being looked afterwards by other researchers and quoted subsequently, and that an overlooked article can always become a sleeper hit.


text:
Best way to translate paper? Services for hire?
I need to read an article that is in Russian.
The article is located here, and the PDF is freely downloadable. The journal is very well known in my area of research (Topology) and publishes almost everything in English, just not that paper apparently.
What is the best way to translate it?  That particular PDF will not allow me to select the text, so I can't even copy and paste into Google translate (even then, it is an arduous process and requires an additional interpretive translation on my part).
How would you do it?  Are there any services I can pay to translate it?
EDIT: I checked some translating services, and it looks like it will be too costly (in the hundreds of dollars).  So I need tools to do it myself...

Find an English article citing this paper and contact its authors to ask whether they have a translation.

@FuzzyLeapfrog that's good I'll try emailing a couple of people

I think google translate is not a good idea because you need the meaning of your text but the program can't translate it.
I suggest using deepl program and you change the meaning of each sentence and you must fellowing the purpose of your paper.

If you value cost over quality
Run the PDF through OCR (optical character recognition) software, then paste it to Google translate.
If you value quality over cost
Hire a freelance translator on any popular freelancer site. A fee of $100 -- $200 is reasonable for the article you link. Try to find freelancers who are math students: they have a good command of the terminology, and the cost could be somewhat lower.

I would have very little hope that a translator who is not a mathematician would produce a reasonable translation.


text:
Can nice pictures be a deciding factor?
Let's say Paper A was recently accepted by a fairly prestigious journal (the top in my subfield).  Now, there is a new Paper B, half of which gives a more detailed description of an object in Paper A for pedagogical reasons. This half of Paper B  may not technically be new, but there are lots of pretty pictures in it (not merely pretty, of course, they accurately illustrate the particular object of interest). Much effort went into creating the illustrations, and this will probably be apparent to the reviewer.
What are the odds that the same journal would accept Paper B, if the first half of Paper B would not be accepted on its own merits?  To what extent can an editor's or referee's judgement be affected by nice colorful images?

Why not target Paper B at a journal more suitable for such pedagogical descriptions rather than trying to "fool" anybody? (Not that nice figures aren't a plus, in my opinion, if they convey the information they're supposed to well.)

@JAB okay, I didn't really like the word either so I changed the title.

Good illustrations can have disproportionate impact; this is true. Reviewers often seem to be swayed (I'm uncomfortable with 'fooled' here) by new or interesting looking images. This is generally true, and papers like this often are frequently cited, so that is good for the journal. Effort invested in this area is likely to be rewarded, though it may not substitute for substance.
However, as to your specific question about the same journal accepting it, that may be very difficult to judge. It depends on what the other half of paper B is. If the same explanation is applied to some problem, I should think it will be well accepted. If it's a restatement of a previous paper, unless it contains a contrary viewpoint, I think it's unlikely to pass muster. This is assuming, of course, that the reviewer/editor connect it to the previous paper. If they don't, then it's a fresh paper to them.

I once saw research on how much more likely your cognitive science paper was to be published if you included meaningless fMRI pictures, but I forgot where.


text:
Long review time for my papers?
It took 5-6 months to hear from the referee in both of my accepted papers.  In my one rejection it was only a couple of weeks.
I do not think it could possibly take 5-6 months to read and understand my papers.
Should I conclude that my referee's wait a few months to even begin reading my papers?  Are they trying to answer questions I posed, to piggy-back before others see the publication?  I just am having a hard time understanding the delay.

5-6 is slightly long. Have a look at the journal's guidelines for reviewers. Often they expect the reviewers to finish their work within 3 months. If so, you can inquire with editor, although don't expect too much.

@henning I will look for that.  I just hate to "push" the editor because I'm not a very established researcher and they might tell me to "get lost".

Possible duplicate of Is it possible to make a decision upon a manuscript just within a month?

It depends on the field and, within the field, on the  journal. For many reasonably decent journals in mathematics, 5-6 months would be very fast for a referee report.

If your paper is hard to read or brings very complex results that people in your field typically find hard to understand, then it can be hard to find reviewers. It would similarly be hard for reviewers who do accept to finish quickly, perhaps not realizing what they had gotten themselves into at the time they accepted it.

I increasingly find that a large chunk of the response time comes from the editorial stage (finding & assigning reviewers) rather than the actual review stage (in my field typical deadlines are 20-30 days).

It very probably is 2-3 months before the referee has time to look at your paper, since that is about the length of a teaching block.

I know of couple of cases where the reviews were submitted in few weeks but it took the editor 4 more weeks before he sent out the reviews to the authors! So, it may not only be that the referees are taking a long time to review the paper.

How do you know it's the referees who are sitting on the paper for 5-6 months? Some of that time could be the editor sitting on the paper - the time taken for referees to respond is usually confidential information available only to the journal's staff.

Reading your paper is not the only obligation your referee has. They are active researchers who, besides their own research, have teaching, administration, thesis defenses, other papers to review etc. They are also normal people, who have to make their personal life function.
5-6 months is a long time, but depending on the field and the length of your paper, it is not unusual.
Don't be so worried about other people stealing your ideas. Most likely the referees has more ideas of their own than they have available time.

Oh, I'm not worried about them stealing anything.  I just wonder if they're (leisurely) trying to answer questions I often pose at the end.  Your last comment is probably true.  Whenever I go to conferences I'm thinking to myself "There's so much to do in my own narrow field that I'll probably never seriously think about presenter X's work".

I’d add to that, were your accepted (quickly reviewed) submissions "off season" in your field? That is, would the timing of them correspond with term time or holiday (summer) time or conference season? The length of the review time might be more to do with that than accept/reject decision (although I’m told that some reviewers aim to reject as quickly as possible to save time re-reading but I’m sure the comments will tell you if that’s the case).

It’s unlikely they’re all sitting on the paper, although as has been mentioned it’s very field-dependent. A six-month delay in my field without any feedback would be approaching a four- to five-sigma event, but in math or some humanities fields, for instance, it might be more common.
What is possible is that the editor has some reviews in hand, but not enough to render her decision. If somebody is straggling, then a new review has to be solicited, leading to more delays.

Actually it is fairly common to just have a single reviewer in math.

A personal experience as editor (which might help understand why this happens):
An interesting paper finds its way to me via the editorial office. I usually try to use one of the suggested reviewers and another one - so those are invited and have about 3 weeks to reply. Both reviewers fail to reply within 21 days and the next on the list are invited ... After about 12 weeks, I have two reviews: "Reject" and "Minor Revision". In that case, I prefer to get a third opinion (which is also policy) - so add another 6 to 8 weeks. In total it took 24 weeks from submission to a 'Major revision' decision - and resulted in a very unhappy author.
Unfortunately there is no easy solution: it is difficult to find (good) reviewers, and they tend to be inundated with review requests as they are known to be reliable.
Complain to the editor-in-chief (or publisher) - in a friendly way of course - perhaps they can reduce the time given to reviewers or find other ways.


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With computation tools available, why are we still not teaching any proofs in the first-year calculus/linear algebra for deeper understanding?
My understanding of the first-year calculus/linear algebra in the U.S. is that: students basically only need to memorize all kinds of math formulas instead of theories (even for theorems, for example Newton-Lebnitz theorem or L'Hospital's rule, they only need to know those final form formulas without having to understand anything else like conditions in the theorem in depth). For most schools (not places like Harvard/MIT/Princeton), we do not teach any proofs at all to non-math majors.
I understand that perhaps most of the science/engineering/business/medical students don't need to know any proofs, but in the era when lots of math computational software and A.I. tools available, do students also need to know plugging in formulas and do computations by hand? At least from my teaching experience, most students still have really superficial understanding of the formulas they use, and the reason behind this is largely due to that they don't know why they are true.
On the other hand, as part of higher education, I don't see the point of not teaching any proofs in calculus/linear algebra. Certainly, you don't have to teach them the long proofs of the change of variables formula in high dimensions or the existence of Jordan normal forms, but at least the basic things like epsilon-delta language, formal definition of limits and spectral theorem for symmetric matrices. Rigorous mathematical thinking, at least in my opinion, is something that could benefit college students' overall development much more than just memorizing formulas and will surely make them better thinkers.
I understand that freshmen in the U.S. colleges may have little math maturity in understanding math proofs. Well, then we simply integrate rigorous math proofs into their education from scratch.

With computational software (and now AI) available for so many years, why are we still not teaching proofs in the first-year calculus/linear algebra, but instead still simply teaching students to plug functions/equations into formulas and do calculations that can already be done with modern computation tools?

Update: I removed AI from the title. My mail point is why we are not teaching deeper things like proofs in calculus/linear algebra given computation is no longer a challenge, rather than A.I. is going to replace blablabla...

Are those downvoters students or professors, I am eager to know!

I assume you are a graduate student in math. Why don't you go to your advisor and ask this question? Incidentally, the situation depends heavily on the country. In much of Europe teaching proofs to undergraduates is a norm.

The answer is simple.  A university with a 10% graduation rate would go out of business very quickly.

@MoisheKohan Please don't assume this. I got my PhD in math quite a while ago. I have been teaching calculus and linear algebra for the past few semesters. For the second part of your comment --- that is why I added United States in the tags.

@AlexanderWoo Could you elaborate on that a bit more and write an answer? I am interested in knowing how teaching proofs in calculus will have a butterfly effect on bankruptcy of schools.

Then I am surprised by the question. Maybe you were teaching exceptionally strong undergraduate students but many of the students I teach come from high school unprepared and have trouble with basic arithmetic and do not know how to think logically (and feel offended by attempts to teach them this skill). Still, in all my undergraduate classes I require students to know at least some of the proofs.

@MoisheKohan If this is what confuses you, let me explain: I ask this question not because I have serious taught proofs to U.S. undergraduates, but because I was told I am not supposed to teach proofs to calculus and linear algebra students. I am actually okay with my job. But Stackexchange is a place one can ask questions without being judged. That is why I am asking it here instead of asking it to my department head.

I am fully aware of how weak the background of many undergraduate students are and that is why I suggest that maybe we can add rigorous mathematical thinking to part of calculus.

@NoOne: If you ever get a chance to teach logic to average undergraduate students, then you will find that most of them are simply unable to learn to do logic (as opposed to parroting and applying logical formulas) in any reasonable amount of time with any reasonable amount of effort.

@AlexanderWoo Formal logic is hard. what about teaching specific logic: epsilon-delta language, for all/there exist? I am not supposed to teach this as well. Please write an answer, otherwise the comments will be soon moved to chat or deleted by SE.

@NoOne I downvote anything that's predicated on "We have AI now, why are we still doing XXX???"

@AzorAhai-him- Thanks for explaining. But my real intention is because of the existence of AI, we human should learn and teach something deeper to the next generation.

... yes, exactly.

@NoOne: Specific logic is just as hard.  Let's say you gave students a hypothetical list of houses in a (small) town, a list of the people living in each house, which houses had dogs, and a list of all parent-child relationship, and asked - is it true that, for every house, there exists a resident with a child who lives in a house with a dog?  Most students would not get this consistently right without explicit instructions about exactly what to check.

And even if you did give explicit instructions, many students would have trouble because the relationship between 4 objects (house, parent, child, dog) is too much for them to keep track of, never mind the quantifiers.

Incidentally, matheducators stack exchange might be a better place for this question.

And this is why more engineering schools are taking over control of math classes for engineers, cutting their funding to math departments.

I'm a professor of mathematics who teaches a lot of linear algebra and calculus. I did not downvote, but I suspect downvoters disagree with the premise of the question, that access to AI tools should mean that we teach more proofs in these courses.
Even ten years ago when I started as a professor, students had apps on their phones that they could point at a classic calculus problem like "Compute $\int_{0}^\pi \sin(x) dx$" and get an immediate answer. So, like you, I decided to de-emphasize rote computation. For sure, my students still learn the basics in calculus, like the limit quotient definition of the derivative, power rule, product rule, quotient rule, chain rule, Riemann sums, fundamental theorem of calculus, u-substitution, and integration by parts. But, instead of doing dozens of examples where we compute such derivatives and integrals by hand, I only do a couple, then show students how to compute them in Wolfram Alpha.
This frees up a LOT of time, which I use to focus on the concepts of calculus. Sometimes we do go through an actual proof, but much more important to me is that they understand that calculus is about the study of limits, and what happens when $x$ undergoes a very small change. I focus a lot on secant lines limiting to tangent lines, what goes wrong for $f(x) = |x|$, and the geometry of the fundamental theorem of calculus. I also teach students how to apply these concepts, and what the derivative and integral are good for. We talk about sensitivity analysis, linear approximation, Newton's method, lots of real-world optimization problems, and lots of real-world integration problems, e.g., from probability theory. I'm now doing sequences and series, still focusing on the main tests for convergence and divergence but also showing students how to answer such questions using Wolfram Alpha, and then focusing on what sequences and series are good for, e.g., applications of Taylor series (to solving differential equations, or physics, Bessel functions, etc.), interest on bank accounts, build-up of medicine in a body due to dosing and half life, etc.
I teach linear algebra the same way. We certainly do some proofs, but you can get at the concepts of linear algebra very nicely using just a bunch of true/false problems. We focus a lot on the geometry of linear transformations, applications of eigenstuff, etc.
I try to remember that my university teaches about 100 students calc 1 and calc 2 every year, and probably 60 students linear algebra, but only ends up with 20 math majors per year. So in both classes a large majority of students will not be math majors. It would not be sensible to teach a course consisting entirely of proofs. Instead, I emphasize the concepts, applications, and the importance of rigorous definitions and theorems, even if students lack the mathematical maturity to prove those theorems. More important, to me, than students knowing how to prove a theorem, is knowing that it's essential to check the hypotheses before blindly applying the theorem, and knowing what to do if the hypotheses are not satisfied.

Thanks for sharing your experiences! Very interesting and helpful! Just curious, what proof did you do in linear algebra? I tried to prove the associative law of matrix multiplication in front of students and feel like it was abstruse to them unless I seriously spent lots of time explaining...

We prove things like the Spanning Subspace Theorem, which says that the span of some set of vectors forms a subspace. Similarly for the Distinct Eigenvalues Theorem. But, we have a designated proofs course, and students don't formally learn induction till then, so usually we just do the case for $n=2$ and $n=3$, then waive hands about how "the same kind of argument works for any $n$." We've also proved things like "similarity of matrices is an equivalence relation" or "the space of polynomials of dimension $\leq 2$ is a vector space", etc.

Readers should keep in mind that David White teaches at a fairly selective college that the average student would not be admitted to.  I suspect what he attempts to do would be a failure at most universities.

at least the basic things like epsilon-delta language

This is one of those things where, once you understand it, it seems trivial. It probably seems to you like you should be able to explain it in about 10 minutes and there's no reason your students shouldn't understand it immediately.
However, for 99% of students, epsilon-delta language is very confusing. I remember spending weeks trying to get intuition for it -- and this was after I had a good fluency with the computational aspects of limits and derivatives. Now it seems easy, of course...but that doesn't mean the next generation will find it any easier than I did.
In a larger sense, this is a common failure mode for instructors -- as we refine our courses, we tend to add more detail that we find interesting, or make them more rigorous in a way that we find satisfying. However, such changes are often counter-productive in that we shift our focus away from the fundamentals, and students end up with worse outcomes.

at least in my opinion, [this] is something that could benefit college students' overall development...and will surely make them better thinkers.

A lot of people feel this way about their pet subject. Philosophers in particular often say that the world would be a better place if everyone had a philosophy minor. I've heard similar claims for foreign languages, computer programming, literature, art, math, physics, etc. And I don't necessarily disagree; I personally have found great value and joy in all of these fields (except maybe philosophy). Indeed, as discussed here, this is the whole premise of the liberal arts experience in the US.
But there is a limit to what students can reasonably be expected to learn in four years. Is there room for improvement? Almost certainly. But trying to force novice students to cover more advanced material in a class that is (for many) already quite difficult and fast-paced is probably not the way to go about it.

Thanks for the great answer! This makes me think a bit more about the limitation of what student could learn. I previously only thought about that background and since they are teens, they should be able to learn fast and grasp a lot of things even with weak background. Now it doesn't seem to be the case.

@NoOne I was an excellent math student in high school. In a small urban HS, about 10-12 kids make it into "Math 5" which is supposed to be pre-calculus, I think. The usual teacher died so another teacher took over. I don't think she was as good nor as charismatic and friendly. She tried to teach us about epsilon-delta and I just could not get it, and nobody else seemed to either. I would have rather she focused on the equations with less theory so I'd have those memorized before I took uni Calc I and II so I could focus on the theory and proofs. (ended up in geodetic science--not too much math