text:
How do academics reconcile simultaneously collaborating and competing with colleagues?
In many fields of academia, a professor must get grants to fund his research (e.g., medicine, biology).
Early in academic career, a scientist can have naive expectations about how things work in academia and later may be surprised by the reality. One such surprise is the compete and collaborate paradox.
Later in career, it may be not so simple to collaborate and share fully your ideas, since twice a year (or so) we all submit grants and we suddenly are less friendly colleagues who share ideas, but we compete with each other or between "groups". For example, we don't let anyone see our full grant submissions. (e.g., NIH medical grants - full text must be requested by freedom of information act and only abstracts are on the web).

How do you handle in every day life, at conferences, in hallway conversations this paradox of collaborating and competing at the same time in academia?
How do you determine what to share?
Do you avoid colleagues who are known to 'tell only the minimum' at congresses and then surprise later with an accepted grant?

Philosophically, it is impossible to collaborate and compete at the same time and one has to have some ethical structure but everyone's boundaries seem to be different!

You're in the life sciences, right? Grants are needed in many other disciplines, but anecdotes on backstabbing are worse in life sciences. (You even hear of A feeding false data to B to damage B's career).

It's been eight years, what have you learned @userJT?

How do you handle in every day life, at conferences, in hallway conversations this paradox of collaborating and competing at the same time in academia?

I ignore it, except around known jerks.  I'm lucky enough to work in a research community that generally values collaboration over back-stabbing.  There are a few exceptions, of course, but they fall under the category of "known jerks".  I'd much rather gain a coauthor and get the result out together than to keep secrets and risk being scooped.
Yes, I have developed coauthors this way.  Yes, I have published papers this way that might not have been published otherwise.  Yes, I have been scooped, but only by people I had not discussed my ideas with.
Your mileage may vary.

How do you determine what to share?

I don't share ideas or problems that students (either mine or not) are actively working on, without the students' explicit permission.  Otherwise, I'm open about everything, except around known jerks.  In particular, if you want my latest grant proposal, just ask.

Do you avoid colleagues who are known to 'tell only the minimum' at congresses and then surprise later with an accepted grant?

No.  Why should I?

How do you handle in every day life, at conferences, in hallway conversations this paradox of collaborating and competing at the same time in academia?

It is very difficult indeed. Motivation for pursuing a career in academia vary significantly, and accordingly, what is considered as ethically acceptable.
From experience, it is often the issue of the man in the middle,
which in practice is the major source of frustration. Individual A talks to Individual B about his ongoing (unpublished) research. Individual B then more or less forget about where he got this information, and speaks to Individual C, who implements it, unsuspectingly.  Everyone behaves ethically at his level,
but globally, Individual C effectively can be perceived to compete aggressively with Individual A.
A solution that some people seem to adopt in conferences in my field is to only present/discuss published material, which makes attending conference less interesting, as it only involves outdated research. Another sub-optimal approach is merchandizing, i.e. present one's research at a superficial, advertising level, so that the actual real issues/breakpoints are effectively not discussed.
On the other hand, research thrives in confronting honestly different perspective on a given typically complex problem, so there is a lot to be gained in  collaborative behaviour.
Modern research is also fairly specialized, and conferences are the one place where you are likely to meet experts in your field who have given some thoughts to the problems you are interested in.
In the end, everyone has to balance these things out.
My advice would be to behave on the cautious side, but then again I tend not to follow my own advice. Another approach is to make sure you are so much on top of things that it does not matter :-)

Do you avoid colleagues who are known to 'tell only the minimum' at congresses and then surprise later with an accepted grant?

Well, life is short, so interact preferentially with colleagues whose motivation for doing research seem to overlap most with your own.
UPDATE
Striking a balance between collaboration versus (unrestrained) competition is not specific to research/academia in fact. It is the basis of civilization! What is a bit specific to academia is that it is (poorly IMHO) self-regulated. There is no such thing as academic police/justice. I found this RSA Animate to be instructive to get a measure on how a small amount of policing in enough to get the system working.
Another point worth mentioning is that predatory behaviour is in fact not that common, if only because people are too busy with their own train of thoughts, and also because it takes time for new ideas to percolate. To understand why  a given idea is novel, typically requires having spent some time thinking along similar lines.


text:
Are professional association membership fees usually paid by one's institution?
An academic usually is a member of a professional association. E.g., a professor in meteorology can be a member of American Association of Meteorology. Sometimes, the fee can be something like $300 per year. Is it always the case, that such membership fees are covered by the University (department) or a research institute? Are there exceptions?
The goal is to understand the prevailing norm (e.g., 40% (or 60? or 80?) of universities usually cover single association membership up to $500/year).

In my field such fees are paid by the individual. You could possibly get away with using grant money but certainly not departmental or univesity funds.

Accounting rules depend very heavily, almost completely, on where the money comes from and who handles it.

I am at an American private research university.
There is no general university or department pool of money that I can use to pay for professional association or conference registration.
However, I am given both an annual conference travel fund as well as individual research funds. I am free to use those as I see fit within reason for purposes that promote my research and scholarship. That would include association registration as well as annual meeting registration.
Fine print: There are some restrictions. For example, I am affiliated with some programs on campus that provide research funds but I am supposed to use those funds for those research categories. Thus, I could use the research funds given to me by the fictive Elbonian Studies Program for registration with the American Association of Elbonian Studies as well as for their annual meeting; I could use it for my general Anthropology association registration, but I shouldn't use it for a conference/association that has no connection to Elbonian Studies.

I thought there were tax implications for personal memberships.

How so? The only tax implication I can think of is the limitation of tax deductibility as a charitable donation for membership in not-for-profit associations. I'm assuming you don't mean that.

I thought it was considered a taxable benefit or some such nonsense similar to if the university gave you money to join directly.

It's intimately job related so I don't see how it's a personal benefit (as in paying for my dry cleaning or a gym membership).

Point 11 of http://policy.tennessee.edu/fiscal_policy/fi0900/  addresses the issue. My understanding has always been that while membership in Society of My Field and Licensing Body of My Field are both intimately job related, only the licensing membership is a requirement.

Huh. Glad that I'm at a private school where we have no such nonsense.

As you've already seen from the comments, there is no single solution to this problem. The rules vary greatly from country to country, institution to institution, and even department to department. You will have to check with the specific rules for your funding agencies, department, and other "revenue sources" to determine precisely which sources of funding can be used to pay for these.
(For instance, in Germany, a professor's "discretionary budget" could definitely be used to pay for such things; in the US, this may or may not be the case.)

wrt Germany: "could" maybe, but OTOH discretionary money is very valuable, so you may not want to spend it on membership fees. People I know (including me) pay membership fees ourselves, and then go for income tax deduction (Germany). The only way to ask the institute for refunding where I see chances to get it would be showing that the institute has higher savings (reduced conferene fees) than the membership fee is. Similar approaches are sometimes possible e.g. with Bahncard (railway discout program).

@cbeleites: "The only way to ask the institute for refunding where I see chances to get it would be showing that the institute has higher savings (reduced conferene fees)" - that is indeed how almost all of these memberships are paid for among my acquaintances (Germany, too). The fascinating thing is that for once, this is even a benefit that is readily granted by the (non-scientific, bureaucratic) travel expenses department.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Is there any non-commercial alternative to ResearcherID?
Identifying uniquely a researcher as author of a publication is important. There is a commercial effort to create researcher ID for every researcher. It is not likely to succeed if it is not multiple publisher effort. Something like DOI and CrossRef.
Is there truly non-commercial alternative emerging?

ORCID is supposed to take care of that and it seems to gain significant traction. According to this presentation, it should be launched in fall this year (2012). However, I am not sure whether it falls under your definition of "non-commercial".
I am myself very curious about it, my hopes are that finally it will take care of disambiguation of names like "John Smith" - for me e.g., Web of Science database is practically unusable as it shows several thousands of papers for my name :-|.

Curiously, I checked it yesterday a few hours before this question appeared. Their business model looks good to me: 1) non-for-profit organization owns the data 2) privacy settings available to the researcher 3) everyone gets to query individual data online 4) paid sponsors get bulk access via an API 5) all code is open source.

How does ORCID compare to ResearcherID?

@bobthejoe: Thomson Reuters (the company behind ResearcherID) is a part of the consortium behind ORCID.  They provide even integration with ResearcherID, as well as Scopus does. See also http://about.orcid.org/faq-page#n81.

By the way, ORCID is not non-commercial. For instance, they sell API data access for $5000 and up.

@FedericoPoloni that's the fee for membership of the consortium, which comes with API access. I'm not sure I'd class it as "commercial" as a result.

@Andrew "Commercial" is not well defined (as the people at Creative Commons know well), but API access seems to be the main perk of becoming a member: on that page they write that members can "submit nominations" for the board, but as far as I understand they have no voting rights, for instance. So in my personal view that counts as selling data access disguised as membership, and it is definitely a commercial activity.

For those of us in particle physics and related fields inSPIRE's HepNames1 service assigns a unique ID to each researcher (though they are rarely used outside of the database) and keeps track of their professional history, publications, citations and so on. My inSPIRE record is not really that inspiring, but there it is.

1 The successor project to the original SPIRES; inSPIRE also supports a rich search operation across affiliations, publications, names, and other data.

Wikidata seems to build up a system where researchers who write articles that are citable by Wikipedia get unique IDs.

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


text:
How to find papers having datasets?
It is becoming common for authors to upload raw data of their research when publishing their papers. However, it is still a small fraction of papers include the dataset.
Is there a way to search for papers whose data are available in repositories?
My field is computational chemistry, and I hope to find papers which have posted the raw data for the DFT analysis.

You should probabably cross-post this question at https://opendata.stackexchange.com. You might get some helpful responses from there.

What is "DFT analysis"? Please spell it out so that more people might be able to help you.

There are a number of such databases (PubChemQC comes to mind), but you need to be more specific about what data you're interested in, then you can worry about searching for papers that report databases/repositories.

Do you know if there exists a database for the type of data you are interested in? That would be the easiest way: browse the database until you find an interesting data set, and the paper will likely be referenced by the database entry (if it is a serious database).
Here is an analogy with my own field (structural biology): most (if not all) journals require that structural models of biological molecules be deposited in the PDB in order to publish the article describing the structure. Only the model used to be deposited, but nowadays researchers are also encouraged to deposit the data that led to the model. Therefore, if I am looking for the article describing a particular structure, it is often easier to look up the molecule in the PDB, possibly choose between different entries (one of they may have associated data, not only the model) and find the paper from there.

What you are looking for is probably DataCite search: https://search.datacite.org/works. If your dataset of interest has a DOI, you should be able to find it that way. You can search by keyword and DFT should bring up about 72,000 datasets. Those datasets may or may not be linked to publications.
Though it will not be useful for your work, for those that might be interested to find biological datasets I have an additional tip. I work for a life science literature database (Europe PMC), and we link publications and data. We identify data citations (in the form of DOI or citation numbers) in the text and this information is searchable. You can either add (HAS_DATA:y) to your search to identify all papers that reference data, or specify the data type (e.g. PDB accession number, or clinical trial reference) using the advanced search. Here is one example for papers on cancer that reference protein structural data: https://europepmc.org/search?query=Cancer%20AND%20(ACCESSION_TYPE%3Apdb)

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


text:
What happens if a reviewer withdraws himself from peer review process?
I submitted my manuscript to one of the journal of frontiers groups, It has been 3 months now since the submission, in the first round of the peer review process,  One reviewer gave me minor revision and the second reviewer asked me to do some extensive revision in my manuscript, I complied with the both reviewers and gave them the best answers i could,  to the questions raised by them and resubmitted revised version of my manuscript but after the first round, one reviewer endorsed my manuscript for the publication but the second reviewer withdrew himself from the peer review process and his status shows as an inactive in the interactive review forum.
I mailed the editor and ask him how the editorial staff will handle my manuscript but didn’t get any response him.
Has anyone here suffered with a similar dilemma, what usually happens in situations like these, frontiers guidelines mention that they need endorsement from 2 reviewers in order for editor to make a final decision.
What do editors do in such a situation, do they invite another reviewer?

Asking the editor is the only way to know. Editors are people who make their own decisions (based on the policies outlined by the journal). They might look for an additional reviewer, review the paper themselves, reject the paper, accept it, anything is possible depending on what the reviewers wrote (which you may or may not know). I am voting to close this question because only the editor has the answers you need.

@louic wouldn't your comment make a good answer for this question instead of voting to close the question? Others might face the same issue in the future.

@louic, I have asked the editor, if you had read the whole thing then you would have known where i was going with this instead of voting to close the questions, I sent an email to the editor but didn't get response from him. and The Hairy is right someone else can face a similar situation and they would wanna know what happens, as i tried to find similar content in the forum before asking this question

@TheHiary The close votes were probably because the question asked “what do you think they will do?”

@Basra. I did read the whole thing (obviously). If this question is not "opinion based" it is surely a duplicate, hence no answer but my vote to close stands. You should be happy I took the trouble to "answer" in my comment before voting to close, with a clear reason given.

You may not have had a response from the editor, but that is where the response needs to come from... As anyone else responding is just opinion...

@Alice. It has been more than 3 weeks and I am wondering the same thing

The two main possibilities are:

Find another reviewer.
Make a decision.

If the editor is sufficiently familiar with the field to check your revision himself, then he might go for #2. Otherwise (or if the journal's policies are inflexible) you might be stuck with #1 and have to wait for another round of reviews.

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


text:
When should we contact the editor to follow up on our submitted manuscript?
We have submitted our manuscript for publication on June 18, 2020. Until now, we haven't heard any decision from the journal. The status of the manuscript on the online system is 'under review' since July 09, 2020 (this was updated twice). According to the journal's website, the review speed is 5.0 weeks for the first decision and 7.1 for the final decision. I am a bit confused if I should contact the editor or if I should wait until I receive an answer without contacting them. Do you recommend me contacting the editor in order to follow up on our manuscript? Most importantly, if yes, when should we contact the editor to follow up on our submitted manuscript? Thank you in advance

No, it's way too early for that. Calm down and be patient.
The quoted averages are just that, averages. There are necessarily some pretty wide distributions around them, given that it may take the editor a while to find suitable reviewers, and then the reviewers have a couple of weeks to do their job (and many of them are routinely late). I would give it at least a month more before reaching out to the editor.
Additionally, there is a couple of points to consider:

It's summer in most of the world, so everyone is on vacation (or "staycation") these days. That makes everything take a little longer than average.
Everyone around the world is still a little distracted by the pandemic and the related work disruption, so long-term averages no longer match the current situation.

+1. I recently had someone contact the journal regarding a paper I was handling every few weeks starting about two weeks after submission. This comes across as very aggressive and is not appreciated by those handling the submission.


text:
Can books be included in literature reviews?
I am still not sure what should be considered as "literature" for inclusion in a literature review and what are not when writing a research proposal. For instance:

A research proposal: 500-1000 words outlining your plans for your PhD
  Please include a 'literature review’ of works you’ve consulted and
  where your ‘contribution to new knowledge’ may
  potentially be made.

Can books be considered as "literature" for inclusion in literature reviews? For instance:

Michio Kaku. (2011) Physics of the Future: The Inventions That Will -Transform Our Lives. Reprint, Penguin, 2012.
Carl Sagan. (1995) The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 2000.

I googled and found this and it says:

"The Literature" refers to the collection of scholarly writings on a
  topic. This includes peer-reviewed articles, books, dissertations and
  conference papers.

It mentions books but does The Literature above mean literature review?
Also, what about online sources/ articles? Are they "literature" for literature reviews? For example:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/jul/05/can-artists-save-the-world
http://www.theoryculturesociety.org/elinor-carmi-cookies-meets-eye/

You seem to be asking two things. First, you seem to be confused between "literature" and "literature review". I've answered that by editing your question. In short, "literature" is all the sources that are reviewed in a "literature review"; I hope the definition you quoted above makes sense now, so, yes, according to that quote, "books" are included in the "literature" that may be reviewed in a "literature review". You second question is whether books, especially practitioner books, are appropriate for inclusion in a literature review. I'll answer that in a full answer below.

@Tripartio thanks for editing my question! I think I have confused "literature reviews" with "references"!

Whereas pretty much everyone recognizes that a literature review needs to be scholarly, people often seem to get confused about whether it is the literature review itself or its source studies that have to be scholarly. Many people argue that both need to be scholarly, but I disagree: whereas the literature review itself needs to be scholarly (that is, you need to do your review with scholarly rigour), I believe it is sometimes quite appropriate to include source studies in your review that might themselves not be scholarly works. So, to directly answer your question, yes, it might sometimes be appropriate to include non-scholarly books as part of the literature that you review in a literature review.
The challenge, though, with including non-scholarly sources is that a lot of them (maybe over 80% of books and magazines, and maybe 99% of web pages, just to make up some numbers) are garbage as far as scholarly usefulness is concerned. So, if you want to include such sources, it is absolutely critical that you carefully evaluate their quality before deciding to incorporate their arguments and conclusions in your literature review. The advantage of peer-reviewed scholarly sources is that some scholars have already done that work for you. If you use practitioner sources, then you have to do that work yourself. And if you don't, then garbage in, garbage out: your resulting literature review will be just as trashy as the sources you included.
Because of this, some scholars refuse to ever include non-scholarly sources in their literature reviews and advice against doing so. However, practitioner sources can sometimes provide excellent insights and data, and are often much more up-to-date and relevant than any available scholarly source. Thus, I think it's worth the trouble. For an excellent example of a scholarly literature review that incorporates many non-scholarly sources, see Elliot, Steve. "Transdisciplinary perspectives on environmental sustainability: a resource base and framework for IT-enabled business transformation." MIS Quarterly 35.1 (2011): 197-236.
For your specific situation, the books you mentioned seem to be written by respectable physicists (I don't know, though, since I'm not a physicist). If so, they should cite their sources for their claims and arguments. These sources that the books cite should be peer-reviewed. So, if you only repeat claims from these books that cite peer-reviewed sources (and in your literature review, you should cite both the book and the book's source), you should be safe. So, if you do that, then you can benefit from including in your literature review the exciting ideas of a popular book written by a serious scholar. However, if the book doesn't cite peer-reviewed sources, then you should question the reliability of its claims.
I talk about these issues in more detail in a working paper I wrote about how to build theory using literature reviews. Caveat: Some of my ideas have changed since I wrote it, but the sections on the Practical Screen and Quality Appraisal are quite relevant to the points I've raised here.

include a 'literature review’ of works you’ve consulted - does it actually mean include the review that you conducted on the literature and "the literature" can be practitioner books?

so if we define literature review as ‘an interpretation and synthesis of published work’ as from http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/writing/writing-resources/literature-review, the interpretation and synthesis are the literature review coming from the person who is pursuing the PhD?

Yes to both questions.

Note carefully the word scholarly in that description.  It refers to works whose intended audience is experts in the field, and which either present novel research or interpret existing results in a novel way.  Books can fit that description; often they will have been published by an academic publisher and reviewed for academic merit by expert editors or referees, prior to publication.  Scholarly books are sometimes called monographs, especially in the sciences.
The books you mentioned by Kaku and Sagan are not scholarly books.  They are intended for a non-expert popular audience, and they don't present new research or expand the state of the art.  The same goes for the online sources you listed; they are newspaper articles or blog posts intended for a popular audience.
A literature review is how you show that you are familiar with the state of the art.  It convinces the reader that they should believe you when you say that your proposed project is feasible, novel, and interesting.  You want to show that you are an expert, or are on your way to becoming one. Citing a popular book won't achieve that; it puts you at the same level as any random person interested in science who can read a bestseller list.

thanks. can you show us any good examples of literature review? Where can we access these literature reviews and scholarly books?

Every published paper or thesis in your field will have one - where the authors discuss previous work on the topic.  As a random example, the first two paragraphs of https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08727.  To be very honest, if you have never written or even seen a literature review before, I do not think it will be very possible to draft a successful research proposal for a PhD application, and you may not be well prepared for graduate study.  Have you discussed your application with a faculty mentor at your institution?

Have you discussed your application with a faculty mentor at your institution? not yet. when I was doing my BA and MSc, literature review was never taught and emphasised so now I am lost!

A literature review describes what is already known (and what is not known about a particular topic). So, given your research question, your literature review needs to explain to the reader what previous original research (especially empirical work) has concluded on this question and what is still unknown. This previous research will include findings from both books and papers, but will likely be light on blog posts (unless they present an important argument that is not made elsewhere). At the end of the literature review you need to drive home how your work will help to fill the holes in the literature.

This may also be helpful. Although this blog post relates to grants, it  describes how you can get across the literature and the gap you are addressing quickly. And that is likely transferable. https://theprofessorisin.com/2011/07/05/dr-karens-foolproof-grant-template/

Try this article, which explains what a literature review is an how to conduct one: http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/writing/writing-resources/literature-review


text:
Is it acceptable to cite good papers published in predatory journals?
I am facing a little bit of a conundrum. I am currently writing a research paper in a pretty niche industry field and I am going through a literature review. During this process, I have found a recently published article about a similar project, which faced some of the same hurdles my group went through.
Problem is, while I can ascertain that the content of the paper is - in fact - of acceptable quality, it was published on a journal listed in the notorious Beall's List of predatory publishers.
Checking the journal's website, there are some indicators that it might have become legit (e.g. Scopus and DOAJ indexing, no submission fees, clear editorial guidelines), but also some "stinks" that make me think twice about considering it reputable (e.g. submission via email, promise of fast review times).
Now, the question: Provided that I and my colleagues can ascertain the quality of the paper, is it acceptable/ethical to cite it, despite its (unfortunate) choice of publishing venue? Or would doing so somehow be a breach of academic integrity?

@Sursula Thanks, it is pretty similar to my issue! My google fu failed me, I browsed the website to find similar questions with several combinations of "predatory" and stuff before posting, and this flew directly under my radar...

it is very easy to miss a question that is differently worded. No worries.

For your purposes, the main issue should be whether the paper, itself, is correct, since you may be able to depend less on the review process finding issues. But if you can verify the paper with your own review there is no reason not to cite it.
The authors may have made an error in judgement in their choice of publisher, but the actual results are independent of that. You aren't "advertising" a journal with a citation, but recognizing prior results.
You may have no option, actually. If you depend on that paper in any way you need to cite it.

Good point. We found out about this paper while we were looking for previous research on the topic that might have surfaced in the last 2 years, and it has a lot of similarities with our (independently carried out) project, so not citing it could as well qualify as academic dishonesty.


text:
How do I know if I should write a paper or an essay instead of a post on Facebook or a personal blog?
I find it difficult to put in words what I observe. However, I will do my best to describe my confusion clearly, although if I could truly describe it clearly, probably I would have already found the answer. So, any help from you is appreciated.
It has been a long on-going dilemma in my mind that I unfortunately can't resolve myself. Nowadays, people tend to write their thoughts a lot on different social media. Although most of them are lack of surrounding discussion, some of the posts might be really outstanding with correct logical inferences. From another side, I constantly stumble upon popular scientists, philosophers who wrote an essay or paper on specific topic and it attracted a lot of attention in scientific and/or academic world. Take as an example one of my most recent findings - "Tragedy of Commons" by Garrett Hardin. He argues that there is no technological solution against overpopulation and describes, to me obvious, problem with common goods - people tend to overuse freely available resources of nature. Now, except just reference section, the whole essay and the point he is making looks to me kind of trivial that nowadays people who share same opinion discuss it over glass of beer. Does it mean that people who are writing similar thoughts on Facebook instead of writing an academic paper or not writing at all are missing an opportunity to contribute to the general knowledge of humankind? If not, what makes this essay so popular when it is written by someone like Garrett and not when by a bypassing stranger with the same thoughts? Is it a style of writing or reputation of the author? Why is it that truly great discourse will just dissolve in the noise of social media posts and not be cited anywhere?
Another example is rather about mindset. The wikipedia page about Hans Kelsen says he was jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. Later,

Kelsen met Sigmund Freud and his circle, and wrote on the subject of social psychology and sociology

It could be my insecurity and doubt in myself. Still I want to understand. Is it truly normal for someone from one discipline to write a paper in another discipline just because that person got some ideas to share? Because it makes me wonder how much thoughts I could have written down and perhaps published if that is something acceptable. I am sure everyone once in a while gets ideas where they debate some statements in their mind. Does it mean we should go and write a paper even though we are not experts in that field yet our thoughts are logically valid? Now back to social media, in fact, this is how I believe people write their posts there. As soon as some more or less valid arguments come to the mind of people, they rush to post it on social media. Should they have considered to write an essay out of these thoughts and publish? If yes or no, then why?
As a last point, I will mention that there are even debates between scientists in a written and published form. For example, Manny Lehman replies to Lee Osterweil in the paper that he named as "Response To An ICSE9 Keynote Address By Lee Osterweil". I am sure there are other popular examples from physics and other disciplines. My question is why wouldn't they just discuss it via mail or in-person, or via calls. If you advocate that people writing meaningful posts on social media should also consider writing papers, does it mean that commenters also should consider writing their answers as papers instead of comments? We all have seen heated debates under some post on Facebook. What qualifies a reply to some paper as a separate "response paper"?
So all of these sub-questions can be summarized as one question "How do I know if my thoughts qualify as a paper/essay, especially philosophical discussions or are they just one more idea for a post on Facebook that brings no value to academic world or whatever world it is for which Garrett Hardin wrote his "Tragedy of Commons" and Hans Kelsen wrote on the subject of psychology while being a jurist?"
Sorry for the long question but I could not put it elsehow to make it more clear.

These examples are from decades ago. There were different norms for publishing at that time. Do you have a more recent example that illustrates your question?

" Now, except just reference section, the whole essay and the point he is making looks to me kind of trivial that nowadays people who share same opinion discuss it over glass of beer." Exactly: 52 years ago it required a publication peer reviewed by other academic to discuss these topics, because discussing that over a glass of beer would have meant "discussing with a lunatic about crazy topics".
Social media & co reader have an attention span of 5 seconds: it is not possible to discuss anything, they are just reacting to some written stimulus.

@Dawn, unfortunately no and surprisingly enough only such old papers raise this type of questions in me. Do you know if there is any material about norms for publishing? It will be interesting to read how norms changed over the time. I think this can explain a lot to me and resolve confusions

@EarlGrey, "Social media & co reader have an attention span of 5 seconds" - I think it is a good factor to consider on my way of understanding if I should write a paper. I do not want to look silly in the eyes of other scientists by them thinking "this could have been a facebook post, not an article"

At worst, the feedback you will get from other scientists is "you should update yourself to the state of art on topic X" which is not a moral evaluation, simply an assessment of your knowledge at the current point in time and it is a quite common feedback. It simply states the necessity for you "to stand on the shoulder of giants". On the other hand, you may want to confute some past ideas: if the idea is new, it means you have to discuss state of art, if the idea is old, you will likely find someone that already discussed its confutation, start from there.

"These examples are from decades ago. There were different norms for publishing at that time". @Dawn, I found out there is a type of papers called "Position paper" which I think is what I was looking for as an answer. This type of papers contains opinions and views on some matter with a logical explanation why it is the case. So, I think if authors of those old articles lived today, they would still publish their thoughts in form of a position paper.

Well, position papers exist, but likely Hardin would have published this as a theoretical political science article with more formal game theory in it. It is super-simple game theory that he just chose to show without math.

@Dawn, does it mean one can publish articles of the same style, it just takes the right field and journal to submit the article to? Because the whole article of Hardin is more like an opinion justified by arguments

No , it just means that game theory was newer and had not been applied to such situations in those early years. There is a lot of opinion there (some very controversial and somewhat racist, if I remember), but if you read carefully he does set out a game theoretic argument early in the piece.

@Dawn, imagine I think that one of the reasons why bugs appear in the software is because most of the developers are not familiar with formal math. Would that constitute a good article and how should I approach writing such an article if there is no statistics of how much developers actually know math? Or is it something that one should not write an article about? Because definitely, it is a no-brainer to write this kind of an opinion on Facebook. But how legit is this topic for an article?

No, this would not be a good article because you could easily add some actual empirical evidence. You could survey developers about their familiarity with formal math or empirically compare the code of those who do and do not have formal math training or catalog the math curricula of educational programs that train developers. When the bar to the next level of research is very low I don’t support writing such an article.

@Dawn, thank you very much for your thoughts. Then, it appears to me that my thoughts supported by valid arguments are totally worthless to share anyway unless I conduct a survey which could still be biased.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

I don't see much reason to think in terms of "X instead of Y". Many prominent scientists are active both in academic publishing and in social media and/or write for general public. It is perfectly reasonable to discuss matters both in press and "over a glass of beer" (i.e., on Facebook).
The largest difference for you would probably be the expectations of most academic publishers. You are not really supposed to "share your thoughts" in a scientific paper. You are supposed to extend knowledge in a somewhat reliable manner by starting with some existing knowledge and enriching it (in most cases) by means of data analysis and experiments.
If you understand very well what is generally known and what is generally unknown, and you can demonstrably make a reliable step forward, you can write a paper about it. Otherwise consider it an informal chat, which can of course be a productive pastime as well.

"If you understand very well what is generally known and what is generally unknown" - do you think this comes only from experience or is there any other way I can read about what is generally unknown in the field? Obviously, I am not going to compete solving "Millenials problems" but I still want to make my small contributions into some subject

Discuss in online communities. Read Wikipedia endnotes. Search in Google Scholar, read what you find interesting (esp. with high number of citations), then check works these papers cite and papers citing the paper you read. Find what are major journals in the field of your interest and see what kind of works they generally publish and how they are composed. Might sound like a steep hill, but the point of the journals is to publish "new knowledge" rather than just ideas that make sense.


text:
When trying to establish a connection with a STEM field professor, is it appropriate to ask them out for coffee?
I have a friend who is trying hard to establish a connection with a well-known professor at a generally top 5 school for STEM in the U.S. This professor is frequently at some good seminars around the area.
My question is: is it appropriate for my friend to ask out this professor for coffee?  She has tried several times - trying to meet him one on one before the start of seminars, some other scheduled times, etc.  This may be relevant, so I will note that she is female, and the professor is male.
He has turned my friend down with reasons such as "I'll be traveling and can't meet for coffee", or "sorry, but I won't be able to make it today."
Otherwise, the professor answers all of her questions and gives great advice to her, in terms of how to advance in the field.  Based on what she tells me, he is very polite and helpful.
Personally, I would never ask a professor out for coffee - let alone try repeatedly, after he or she has said "no" several times.  I would email to start some dialogue and perhaps meet in his / her office.  So I just want to know whether perhaps I should hint to my friend to stop trying to get him out to coffee and that maybe he's not so into the idea of letting students schmooze with him one on one.
I wonder if this is sort of specific to the STEM field academia culture, too; e.g.  if we were in film school or business school, I think it'd be much more "normal" to ask a professor out to coffee to try and build a relationship.

We know nothing about your friend. Is your friend a undergrad or grad student at the same university? Applying? What's the reason for the desire of the connection?

The language you're using here is very strange, but perhaps you're not a native speaker?  To me the phrase "ask out" essentially always has romantic connotations, and in a non-romantic setting you would phrase things differently (e.g. "meet at a coffee shop").

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Is there a coffee place on campus, near his building?

I don't think that this is special to any type of professional environment. The professor is polite and responsive. However, they repeatedly tactfully refused an informal meeting, which indicates that they are uncomfortable with it (indeed, they may be coincidentally busy at the given time, but often this would be reflected in the suggestion for rescheduling, which I don't see). In my opinion, your friend should take the hint and reevaluate their approach, e.g. schedule an office meeting.
As to whether it is appropriate to ask, as long as the tone is professional, I see no problem in asking, just as I see no problem getting 'no' for an answer. This, however, may in some cases be culture specific.

@Roland the time investment is the whole point. Going for coffee does not literally "grab a double espresso in the same coffee shop before returning to the department." It means "meeting to discusss [research, professional prospects, etc.] in an informal setting "

I think even the professors I'm on good terms with would laugh at the idea of leaving their office (where all their notes are besides) to take 20-30 to walk somewhere and back to chat with me.

@Azor-Ahai This exactly.  Going out for coffee is much more time than likely that professor's own graduate students get.  It's a pretty tall ask for a random hopeful...

@J... Plus, frequently when I sit down with a prof, they send me articles, hand me books etc. Can't do that from a coffee shop.

I've met faculty at coffee shops when I was a graduate student, either because they wanted to get coffee or because they weren't coming into the department that day and the coffee shop was more convenient.  It's not strange in-and-of-itself.

I have to chuckle at a number of these comments, because pretty invariably informal meetings that end up getting scheduled happen at the coffee shop.

It is not appropriate to waste other people's time. As a general life principle, anyone wanting to talk to me without being able to articulate a reason beyond wanting to "establish a connection" or "build a relationship" with me quite clearly is doing it to advance their own self-interest without having anything meaningful to say to me, and without really being interested in my work or in me as a person. Professors are human beings and don't like to be manipulated or used as pawns by students looking to advance their careers by networking with them. I would bet that the professor's refusal to go have coffee with your friend has something to do with him getting the sort of ick factor that I'm getting when I hear that someone wants to "establish a connection" with me.
The professor may also be concerned, justifiably or not, that going out for coffee with a young female student who is asking to chat with him for vague reasons may be asking for trouble beyond the waste of time that such an outing would entail.
To summarize, she has asked him several times, and he has repeatedly said no. It may have been more or less appropriate the first time, and clueless the second time, but asking more than twice would be quite inappropriate in my opinion, and likely to leave a pretty poor impression.

@Magicsowon Is it? Many professors have limited time and limited people skills to control manipulative or pushy people. Frankly, if someone doesn't take a NO several times, insistent to form a relationship according to her terms, even sends a friend to SE to figure out how to do this, it is a clear sign that she is pushy.

@Magicsowon Indeed, it is not an assessment that most professor can afford to directly tell said person.

@Magicsowon I think calling her pushy and manipulative is rather unwarranted given how little we know about the situation.

@Greg Or she's just a little clueless. Come on.

@Magicsowon thanks for your comments. Can you clarify which part of my answer you consider to be "strongly worded"?

@Magicsowon well, that's the vibe I got from OP's description of her friend's behavior. I'm not assuming anything, just trying to give the most relevant answer I can. The sad fact is, some students do try rather hard to "establish connections" with professors in a transparently self-interested way. I'm not judging them, since this is partly due to the system that requires them to show achievements and letters of recommendation to get into grad school or find jobs. But having been on the receiving end of such behavior, I can attest that it is annoying. If that makes me sound arrogant, so be it.

@Magicsowon I strongly suspect that -- were he in such a situation -- Dan would never "say it out loud" (especially to anyone to whom it applies), but by cutting through the politeness and diplomacy of normal social interaction, I suspect this gets to the heart of the OP's professor's reluctance to meet for coffee in a clear and unambiguous way.

Otherwise, the professor answers all of her questions and gives great advice to her, in terms of how to advance in the field.

I would say that she has successfully already established a connection with this professor. Lucky her: you can find many variations on the question "How do I get professors to answer my e-mails?" -- both on this site and elsewhere on the internet.
My experience as a math professor is that, generally, we appreciate direct requests. (Especially if they are made in such a way as to not presume the answer will be yes.) For example, your friend should feel free to ask the professor directly if she: wants a letter of recommendation; wants a suggestion for a research project; has a technical question about one of his papers; would like feedback on a research idea; etc.
Indeed, I have made and received all sorts of invitations out of the blue, to and from people I did not know at all well: to travel out-of-state to give lectures, to collaborate on research projects, etc. This is perfectly normal in math culture. It is of course perfectly polite (and common) to decline, but sometimes such invitations will be accepted, and indeed a couple of my research collaborations have started this way.
Usually one would "establish a connection" if one wanted either: (1) to pursue a friendship or romantic relationship for its own sake, or (2) to smooth the way to make career-motivated requests in the future. I wouldn't recommend (1), especially after he has repeatedly declined coffee invitations. As for (2), I would recommend not worrying about first "establishing a connection" and instead simply make her requests directly.

OP's friend is not their student, nor even (apparently) a student anywhere in their school. They are just one of tens of thousands of prospective students applying. American academics can be quite formal and strict about this; this comes across as trying to ignore, shortcircuit or unduly influence the admissions process.

And as OP points out, he's already said 'No' at least twice, and a polite 'No' is still a 'No'. OP's friend not listening and persisting is at best annoying and at worst potentially fatal to her application.

Also, since academic careers can be stalled or killed by even one false allegation of sexual harassment, and in some colleges male academic staff (even down to TAs) are advised not to even have a closed-door meeting on their own with a female student to mitigate that risk, let alone an offcampus 'coffee' with someone who isn't even an enrolled student in their dept let alone college, you can see why the professor might well be declining the meeting - even if he's a helpful guy and believes she's a very good applicant.
So at best she comes across as pushy, persistent, not listening and disrespectful of his time. Consider that if a male prospective student repeatedly pestered a female professor to 'have a coffee' alone, it might be construed as stalking, or worse
Even if we totally set all that massive context aside, she's not even remotely communicating effectively: instead of repeatedly asking him to have a 'coffee meeting' with undisclosed purpose, which he is clearly not prepared  to do, it would be better for her to have stated a clearer request by email "How can I apply to dept X?" or "How can I make my application to dept X look better?", which again brings us back to strongly coming across as trying to ignore, shortcircuit or unduly influence the admissions process. Also, busy professors (of whatever gender) have no obligation to answer any such emails, of which they receive a very high volume daily (if they're in a top-5 US school), in which case she should have demonstrated both courtesy and initiative by not pestering him further, and instead tried to find a graduate student, postdoc, recent graduate, recent applicant etc. who actually was willing to speak with her (voluntarily, at a setting, time and place of their choosing, not hers) and give her advice. But she didn't do that.
Let's allow that she's well-qualified and has a shot at the graduate position, and it's her lifelong dream. Remember with (say) a 1% accept rate there might be 99+ other similar applicants for the same position. Let us assume for the sake of the professor's sanity they are not all behaving similarly. Ultimately, she's competing with those other 99, so if she continues to pressure or annoy the professor, the chances one of the other 99 gets picked go up.

Is it appropriate?
It depends on the culture.  I assume you're asking for Europe and United States, in which case the answer is that some would consider this appropriate to ask.  That does not mean it's appropriate that the professor would do so for multiple reasons:

Some might see this as trying to get around merit by becoming a favorite or knowing someone on the inside.  Some people think it's highly unethical to hire or favor on the basis of "who you know" not "what you know" but this depends on the culture and environment.
The request is incredibly time-consuming with little benefit for the professor.  Not everyone likes coffee and a drink is not worth an hour or thirty minutes of a person's time, especially if they're at a top 5 school anywhere.  They probably have huge responsibilities.
Since a top teacher's time is limited, what would happen if 10% of prospective students did this?  It wouldn't be possible for his/her time.
Some people may feel uncomfortable seeing students or prospective students in a casual environment that could be misconstrued by others.  Also, some cultures have experienced legal implications of accusations, which true or not, have made some higher-ups consider whether a meeting with anyone is appropriate.  Unfortunately, people "higher up" tend to be targets in these accusations.

So while in most cases, there's no harm in asking, I can't think of a single case where a top 5 professor in any field would grant this request.

If he keeps brushing her off, it might be time to move along. I think it's important that she be clear about the intention of the meeting since coffee sounds a lot like a date.


text:
Working for one professor, want to write paper with another party
I am a PhD student working for a professor as a research assistant and being paid with stipends. One of my friends in the same department asks me if I can collaborate on a project branched off his PhD research. That project is a completely different field than my current research, despite of that some of the background ideas can be used in my part.
He has done all of the theory work, and just needs someone to implement using computer programs. To me the task is not really hard at all, since he has streamlined the theories. I expect to finish the programming part without spending too much of my effort, and there is no (hard) time limit.
Now he has generously offered me a chance to be in the authors list (I believe only us two, and he's the first), as the credit of my work. I understand that working for somebody else while getting paid for my own job is not good, but the publication is really luring to me. I talked to him about the chance of my name being included only in the acknowledgement, but what a bad idea of that.
My question is what should I do? Should I ever talk to my professor? My friend is like hard to refuse since the work isn't really a burden to me.
While I wish to keep anonymous, I truly thank you all for any idea, suggestion, or criticism.

EDIT: As I mentioned before, our work isn't really very related. But it happens that at present I need to improve my own research methodology, and the techniques to be used in his project exactly fit my need. (I think this is a good lesson to me; never be "too" focused in my own research, and learn from other fields) Is it okay to talk to my advisor in this way, that while I'm helping him, I also make my own stuff better?

Talk to your advisor. If they are okay with you being a co-author, you are good to go. If not, they would eventually figure out you co-authored a paper behind their back.

@RichardErickson Yep, cheating on work sounds not good. Somehow I need a permission, or otherwise I might have to stop.

Ask your professor if it is okay with him.
During my PhD it was never a problem to work with other PhD's, it was actually well received and encouraged. Even collaborations that go beyond the professor's own group. Of course your own work should have priority, but spending some of your time on other projects has not been problematic.

Thank you for your excellent answer. I might be worrying too much but what do you think could be a reason he refuses giving permission? Suppose I can manage time, and the other two parties go along well. I'm trying not to start the talk with a bad reason.

Unless you are way behind schedule in your own work I cannot see any reason why he would say no.

You are a PhD student, and your main goals is to further your knowledge and advance science, in general. It's of secondary importance that the project you talk about is far from the topic of your PhD research; as long as it won't harm your PhD research, doing other projects is great. I don't think you need a permission of your adviser (unless you have something very urgent to finish for him, or something like this); you might want to inform him/her about this side project, but I really don't see how a (sane) adviser would have anything against it, if it's not a huge project that would take all your time for months...
During my own PhD I worked with a number of people in other universities, and PhD students I advised (3 so far) worked with whoever they saw fit.

Keeping your advisor in the loop is professional courtesy.

While I don't think it a good way either not to ask for permission of my own advisor, I appreciate your idea that collaborating in other fields is beneficial and I should be confident with doing that. One thing I want to add is that the programming part of his research is somewhat related to what I'm doing now, and some techniques in the former will be used to improve my own work. Is there a good way to mention this to my advisor? Is it good to say though not really a relevant field but the methodology is exactly what I need?

for the downvoters: please appreciate the fact that in my field (mathematics) is it normally considered a bad sign where the advisor co-authors work forming a part of PhD thesis.

It is definitely good to say that the side project coding would improve your coding skills (and your CV). Hell, you could be doing coding exercises instead!

Exactly! I want to learn a somewhat new-to-me but highly related language for that project. I have to learn it before I graduate anyway!

You should definitely talk about it with your professor. There is also a good chance that your current contract has a clause stating something along the lines of "any published work will be cleared by prof. X". When your name will appear on the paper, you will have an institutional affiliation so you need your professor's OK.
If your professor is worried about the time you take away from your own project, you always have the option of working on your own time and only asking him to use the affiliation.

"any published work will be cleared by prof. X" -- Oh no. You should not need approval, by your advisor or anyone else, to publish with an institutional affiliation. (Obviously you need approval to use institutional resources, but that's an orthogonal issue. And coauthors need to approve the paper, but in this case the advisor would not be a coauhor.)

I have that clause in my current research contract, and had it in my previous ones, in France and the UK. That does not mean I could not publish without my supervisor listed as a co-author, nor that I could not build my own network of collaborations.

I always suspected some areas of sciences being guilty of academic slavery...

I should check with my contract. Good point.

But I think for my case the affiliation is a less concerned issue than my energy.


text:
What defines the legitimacy of an IRB?
As we know, researchers without university affiliations who need IRB approval for human subjects research can obtain approval from an independent IRB.
What defines the legitimacy of an independent IRB? Logically, a university IRB derives an aura of legitimacy from the accreditation that its university carries, but how does an legitimate independent IRB differentiate itself from a "fake" independent IRB?
In other words, if I wanted to start my own Independent IRB and start approving research projects for independent researchers, nonprofits, and industry groups, what exactly would I need to do to become "legit"? Alternatively, what stops random people from starting up a "predatory" IRB that exists to rubber-stamp any old unethical garbage research in exchange for large cash payments?

Is the legitimacy of a self-claimed Independent IRB defined by the soundness of its ethical judgments? E.g. if you make good judgments, approve ethical research, don't approve anything unethical, etc., everything is golden. If you approve bad things (either intentionally or incompetently), you lose face and become seen as "fake".
Is the legitimacy defined in terms of inputs? e.g. if you have enough advanced degree holders, persons who have passed certain research ethics exams, etc., you are legit, else you are not.
Is there some formal accreditation process that wannabe independent IRB's must go through? In other words, if you have the formal accreditation certificate, you are legit, else you are not.
Is there no "gold standard" in legitimacy, and funding sources, journals, etc. all make their own independent determinations as to which IRBs to recognize? E.g. perhaps someone's research results turn out to be groundbreaking, but they can only publish in a third-rate journal because they used a small, discount IRB not recognized by most high-impact journals.
Is the real requirement simply that the research be vetted by someone other than the researcher(s), and using a formally constituted IRB is just a Best Practice that researchers typically choose to follow in order to reduce the likelihood that they will harm a research subject?

Alternatively, what stops the following from being heard more often?

I got all this research approved by Uncle Bill's Discount Cigar and Research Ethics Adviseorium on Maple Avenue, behind the bowling alley next to the pawn shop, what do you mean they are not legit?

To be clear, I'm considering an analogy with "diploma mills" and "predatory journals", entities that technically provide a service but are generally considered problematic in Academia. A hypothetical "IRB mill" or "predatory IRB" would presumably exist primarily as a profit-making venture and not as a strongly ethical body. It might give out rubber stamp approvals to questionable research in exchange for large cash payments while providing little in the way of actual ethical oversight or guidance, or it might actually provide ethical guidance but not on the level generally considered a best practice and/or charge more than reasonable rates for its services.
I might expect that if there really were "fake" IRB's, someone would have performed a sting operation or expose by now, the way that there have been several "stings" of predatory journals (trying to get obvious crap or nonsense approved for publication) in the past few years. For example,

I submitted a copy of the Milgram Experiment to TomorrowIRB 21st Century Ethics, Inc., and they sent it back with a letter saying that they would approve it immediately if I paid them $20,000 by Western Union and signed a piece of paper promising not to use political prisoners. They are either on crack or predatory! Beware!

This might of interest. There appears to be some kind of accreditation system that IRBs can go through.

@Anyon thanks. That link does mention that "A significant percentage of independent IRBs are accredited", implying that non-accredited independent IRBs are actually a thing. So are these unaccredited IRB's still "legit" in some way, really able to approve at least some types of research and gain some level of recognition for said approval, or are they ethically no better than getting your research approved by a bunch of random people you met at the bar the other day?

@RobertColumbia - my suspicion would be that the 'unaccredited' IRBs are in the process of being accredited. For the researcher, the career risk to going through a 'cut rate' IRB is pretty significant.

Note: I'm not actually planning to start my own IRB, either on my own or with people I met at the bar, so this question is really a hypothetical - what's the actual process for becoming a "real" IRB, and how are "real" IRBs distinguished from incompetent and/or predatory ones that exist not to exude Best Practices in applied 21st century human subjects research ethics but rather to exchange money for rubber stamps?

In the United States, this is governed by Title 45, Part 46.

Paragraph 101 states that this applies to all research funded by or "subject to regulation" by the US Government
The same paragraph also states that an Agency Head may determine that a foreign IRB system is equivalent and may be substituted

The key requirements for US IRBs are:

Subpart A, Paragraph 107: IRBs must have at least 5 members with varying backgrounds (as enumerated)
Subpart A, Paragraph 108: IRBs must have sufficient meeting space, staff, written procedures for its deliberations, decisions, and adverse incidents
Subpart A, Paragraph 115: IRBs must keep detailed records for three years (as described)
Subpart E: IRBs must be registered with HHS (Office for Human Research Protections and/or Federal Drug Agency).

Most of the other subsections detail the basic rules that IRBs must enforce (e.g., involving fetuses, prisoners).
From what I can tell (and I am no expert), the only barrier to people using Uncle Bill's Cigar Shop IRB is that if a subject is harmed by an IRB-approved protocol, Uncle Bill is going to get sued. Uncle Bill may also have legal problems with the Government if they fail to follow the federal regulations governing IRBs (i.e., if they approve something that is clearly not permitted under CFR).

This is a great answer, thought someone could also answer from a non-US perspective. For example, if I am a small pharmaceutical firm in the Czech Republic and find myself in need of an independent ethics review, would I be expected to use a US-accredited IRB like firms based in the US or is there a separate EU-based accreditation system? Would I be required to use an EU IRB, or could I choose (for whatever reason) to choose a US-accredited IRB?

Thanks, updated my answer to partially address these questions (top two bullets); sadly, I know very little about research outside the US, will leave that for another answerer.


text:
Is a mislabled reference an example of scientific misconduct?
In a dissertation, I noticed a mistake in referencing. In such a way that the material related to reference number 17 was mistakenly attributed to reference number 18 and it seems like a typo error. I wanted to know if this is an example of scientific misconduct? Two references are mentioned in the reference list and it seems to be a typographical error. This thesis has been defended and published.

An isolated incident of a typo is absolutely not scientific misconduct. Scientists are human. If you don't mind me asking: why are you interested in this question, and are you asking as a student / aspiring researcher, as someone who knows the person who made this mistake, or as a senior researcher?

Honest mistakes are not misconduct. They're still mistakes and should be corrected if possible.
Too many mistakes or extreme errors might drift into misconduct by being negligent, but not everyone thinks that way. This is not one of them, in any case, as long as there was no intent to deceive.

I have accepted this but was taught something very different just entering university - that intent had no applicability to academic misconduct and that mistakenly citing "C McRab" when you meant "C McRabb" was as evil an act as copying your entire dissertation, the penalty which was automatic course failure and recommendation for expulsion. The explanation given was that readers don't and can't know what your intentions were, so the very fact that the reader was deceived is enough to "get" you on a misconduct charge. I lost so many hours checking, rechecking, and checking everything again.

@RobertColumbia I've never heard of it working that way; to the contrary, some very obvious intentional misconduct like image manipulation has been very difficult to convince journals and universities to take seriously as a problem. Perhaps for the purposes of a particular course an instructor might set a draconian policy like that. I could maybe see an issue if ref 18 was the author's own work or something, but otherwise they have absolutely nothing to gain by attributing something to ref 18 when they meant 17. Still, it is quite sloppy especially with tools available to avoid it.

"mistakenly citing "C McRab" when you meant "C McRabb" was as evil an act as copying your entire dissertation, the penalty which was automatic course failure and recommendation for expulsion." << Is that a joke? If anyone who misspelled my name was expulsed from university, there wouldn't be anyone left in my university department.

@RobertColumbia I find it hard to take seriously anyone who would tell you that a typographical error is "evil" or on the same level as plagiarising a dissertation and deserves failing a course or being recommended for expulsion.

@RobertColumbia "The explanation given was that readers don't and can't know what your intentions were" the readers can't know your intentions, but they ought to be able to apply common sense and if in doubt apply Hanlon's razor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor ).  This is nothing more than than "Golden Rule" (treat others the way you would reasonably expect to be treated if the positions were reversed).  In this case, the reader can find out all they need to know by reading references 17 and 18 (which is after all what references are for).

@RobertColumbia I feel for you, but I guess your supervisor wanted to do a sort of 'karate kid' on you to make careful citation second nature; but he also was a bit unhinged if making good on the threat. There's enough redundancy in a citation to disambiguate (e.g. page number when volume+issue is given)... He has some grounds when you have "C Rab pers. comm." but those get taken with a grain of salt anyhow.

The presence of "revisions" and "corrections" for dissertations alone logically suggests that errors are an expected part of the process.
I'd regard this as so minor that if the dissertation has already been published, it wouldn't even require a correction, unless corrections are simple to achieve. A small amount of critical thinking will get the reader to the right reference, the authors of those ideas have been given credit in the piece, and that this is probably sufficient. This is, in the grand scheme of things, no worse than a confusingly phrased paragraph.
Academic misconduct requires some evidence of intent or negligence, I'd argue.


text:
Exams during MBBS
What are the national and international competitive exams an Indian medical student can take during his/her undergraduate years (during MBBS)?
Specifically, I am looking for an international olympiad type competitive test on medical subjects (Anatomy, Physiology...) which I can apply from India.

Can you please say something about why you are asking this question and what you are really trying to accomplish?  Right now, this is a "make a big list" question, which is generally off-topic on this site.

I am looking for an international olympiad type competitive test on medical subjects (Anatomy, Physiology...) which I can apply from India.


text:
What gown do I wear to student graduation when I have two doctoral degrees?
I am a Professor at a college in the US where we wear regalia to the student graduations. I have a PhD, but am about to complete another doctoral degree from a different university, neither of which are where I teach. Do I have to choose one gown to wear to graduation or is there a specific way to represent both degrees? I have yet to find any guidance on this!

Does the university you teach provide gowns for its staff members, possibly with different designs based on their academic positions within the faculty?

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17232/is-doing-two-phds-a-good-path

Do as you please. Who cares, so long as you do not misrepresent yourself?

Not being from an anglo-saxon country, it makes me feel slightly sick that these antiquated displays of power are still a thing in the 21st century.

Why not wear both of them?

Which degree is most relevant to what you actually teach?

First world problems :-)

@Sixtyfive Not to diminish your personal reaction, but I wouldn't describe academic dress as being much of a 'display of power'. Having university officials on a stage or platform and giving them large salaries or fancy titles is surely much more of a display of power. Most Western academic dress is a evolution of mediaeval European religious dress rather than from the robes of kings or lords. And there is academic dress in many non-Anglo-Saxon countries, from Portugal to Thailand (where graduation ceremonies are very serious royal occasions).

@dbmag9  Yes!  I have a colleague whose doctorate is from a Thai university.  His academic regalia are much more suited to the hot climate here in Georgia, USA, than my own European-derived regalia.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, a research doctorate requiring a dissertation and defense, namely the Ph.D. and a few equivalent degrees, is the highest-ranking doctorate.  So, if your second degree is not a research doctorate, you should wear your Ph.D. regalia.  (Not an answer because the second degree is not stated.)

You have got to wear two gowns. If you have four Ph.D. degrees, then you must wear four gowns.

Cut both gowns vertically and then sew the left side of degree 1 to the right side of degree 2.

"Two doctorate degrees" - I would say wear whatever you feel like (this is a joke, to be clear)

Presumable with two doctoral degrees you have the nous to figure that out.

I'd go for the cooler looking of the two.  Some older schools (McGill, in Canada, for example) have gown styles that predate the standard issue at most schools.  There regalia is definitely cooler looking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dress_of_McGill_University)

@AdamChalcraft In the US, it should be the right side of degree 1 to the left side of degree 2 so that it can be read left-to-right chronologically. (Your right, so that it's on the viewer's left...)

As no one who matters will actually know which degrees you hold and what gown goes with which, the choice of gown will be yours! If you own both, choose the one that is the most distinctive, colourful, or photogenic.
That is what your graduands and their families would want for their photographs.
(If you only own one, then the choice has already been made for you.)

Unless any of the colors involved clash with what the students will be wearing, but this is also just a photogenic-consideration and of low priority

Or, if you really want to bear the expense of two sets of regalia, you could alternate which you wear. (Don't try to wear two hoods.  It's generally improper in the United States and tacky everywhere.)

Yes, you can wear whichever you choose, but the intercollegate rules laid down in the late 19th century suggested (but did not require) that you should wear the regalia of your most recent terminal degree.
On the other hand, I suppose you should probably wait until you earn your second degree before wearing it as part of your current faculty function. If you choose otherwise, as a degree-in-progess individual, your tassel would be worn on the right since you have not graduated yet.
I imagine you'd want to wear the gown of your degree granting institution at your own commencement as a student, and I'd check with your professors before doing otherwise.
The most important point is that you should not attempt to blend both styles into a uniform resembling a clown costume. For example, if you have earned hoods of two different colors, you should pick one color and its associated regalia and not attempt to include the other.
http://intercollegiate-registry.org/revised-intercollegiate-code/

Actually, my beret (yep, beret) has the tassel affixed.

Thank you for your answer. I have strong ties to both of my graduate schools and want to ensure that I do not disrespect either by accidentally skipping a known rule of etiquette. For that same reason, I will not represent my new degree until it is officially granted. Too many things can happen at the last minute!

Thanks, I made a correction and linked to some more info.

Is there any such thing as an academic gown that doesn't resemble a clown costume?

@TomV is there is it's probably only awarded for getting piled high and deep under creme pies at clown college.

@TomV I am now inspired to check the regulations to see if there is any explicit limit on permitted shoe length


text:
Is it possible to obtain a bachelor's degree by passing some test to prove equivalent knowledge rather than attending a university?
Is it possible to obtain a bachelor's degree without attending a university? I'm talking about passing some kind of test or series of tests to prove my knowledge. I'm not asking about buying a fake degree or anything related to that. Is there a name for this type of procedure/way of obtaining a degree? Is it practiced in the US? If yes, is it possible for non-US citizens to pass these tests? If not, are there any countries that practice something like this?

I know of a few private schools in Scandinavian countries that provide remote education programs that are accredited to grant up to a master's degree in some fields. Hence, you don't have to attend physically, but you would have to attend classes via some video conference setup and deliver homework via a webpage.

@Arnfinn I would like to know which one are these programs and are they in English? can you send me any link?

@SSimon I don't know much about it. You might want to check out http://www.icde.org/institutions

I imagine most schools would fight tooth and nail against that becoming a legitimate option, no matter how much sense it might make.

In general, no, it is not possible to get a bachelor's degree from an accredited university in the US purely through examinations.
It is possible to get course credits that can partially satisfy graduation requirements through tests such as those administered as part of the Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs. However, these normally tend to be restricted to satisfying general education requirements, rather than the in-depth major requirements.

If they say they will award you a degree for your "life experience", it really means they want to collect your money.

...and the degree will be utterly worthless.

Well... You will gain some life experience in return... Hopefully!

It might actually be feasible to do this for a two-year degree. Some Community Colleges in the US will give you an Associate of Arts or Associate of Science degree in Liberal Arts or General Studies for taking a well-rounded set of General Education courses. Many of these General Education courses (e.g. Calculus I and II, French I, US History, Intro to Microeconomics, etc.) are ones for which Credit By Exam has long been available - a corresponding Associate's Degree Exam could consist of more or less having to take all or at least most of those exams in one swoop.

@RobertColumbia: But then you have an associate's degree, while the question was asking about a bachelor's degree.

@aeismail I know, but I was providing an example of something that might be more realistic.

Very skeptical of @RobertColumbia's hypothesis above. Would need a specific case of that happening to be credible.

In France, it is possible to graduate from many degrees by proving that you've acquired the necessary skills during at least 3 years of experience. This procedure is called VAE.
The official web site
The way the degree is awarded depends on the organisation that delivers it.
The available degrees are listed on the National Registry of Professional Certifications.
Each degree has an official description that list the skills that has the degree's holder, and the positions they're expected/prepared to hold. It is the reference against which the applicant will be evaluated.
Example of a bachelor in management and control of chemical processes
I've received a Master's degree using this method.
I had to write a memoir of around 100 pages describing my professional experience. For each job I had, I described the position, the skills I've applied and how they are related to the degree I wanted.
Then, I had to present it in front of a jury. They requested a supplementary work to evaluate some skills that were a bit under-described in the main document.
After receiving a positive evaluation, I received the degree. It is the exact same degree as someone who would have graduated traditionally by taking courses. There is no way to tell them apart.
The only difference is that I did not receive any grade.

Many US universities offer online degrees (e.g., ASU), these courses generally require some degree of coursework and often have mandatory online attendance and participation. I would not describe these as simply a series of tests to prove my knowledge.
I am not aware of any reputable university in the US that runs a pure self-study degree program. In the UK, a degree usually consists of fewer classes (modules), fewer exams, and often no course work. The UK also attempts to have consistent marking across universities. This means that it is possible to offer self-study courses where students are evaluated to the same standards as traditional brick-and-mortar students. The University of London has offered a number of self-study courses that lead to BSc and BA degrees for decades. These programs have a self study option where you are only required to take, and pass, the examinations. As I said in this answer the courses are not cheap and can cost more than £4,000 a year.

The University of London has offered this since its founding. I think it has more students around the world than in London.

The simplest version of what you ask is not really possible, so far as I know. However, a more moderate version is often possible, quite far beyond merely "advanced placement" exams for first-year and second-year undergrad courses, if you are able to make a sufficient case for it. That is, it is sometimes possible to propose to an academic dept "testing out" of upper-division courses they offer... and/or getting credit for a given course by doing well participating in a more advanced course for which the given course is a prerequisite.
Unsurprisingly, the latter device is not often invoked, because it's often not clear that it is in many students' best interest to give them the opportunity to hugely screw up... Nevertheless, it may be possible, if you can convince the dept somehow that it is very plausible that you merit very-advanced-placement.
But it is probably unlikely that you could do the whole undergrad curriculum at a U.S. college or university in such fashion, in any case, due to "breadth" requirements (which are actually a very good thing, in my opinion).
Thus, in my own personal experience, I was allowed to take more-or-less grad-level math courses as an undergrad, and get some credits for the prereq undergrad courses, due to my extensive reading ... (in those days, with no internet, math books from the county library were one of the cheapest entertainments! :) This was very helpful, and saved me some money, but this device did not eliminate my need to take many other courses, by being physically present. Physical presence was also (anyway at that time) necessary to make a good case that it was reasonable for me to request such an indulgence.
So, it is probably impossible to get credits/degrees for free by "testing out". But it is probably also possible to generate credits and save money by "testing out" in one way or another, if you can convince the people that it's worth their while, and is plausible, to let you attempt to show them your competence in your major area (in the U.S. sense).
It is also true that some other courses allow "testing out", e.g., language courses, programming courses, maybe basic science courses. But this can get you only half-way through a U.S. degree.

The Bologna process in the European Union reorganized the higher education and, among other things, fixed a Bachelor's degree to consist of 180 credit points. Each credit point should represent roughly 30 hours of work. Thus, a Bachelor's degree is kind of hard-wired to some time of study and generally, there is no way around this in the European Union. In other words:

A Bachelor's degree in the European Union is not an exam that you have to pass, but a degree that you obtain through successful studies.

This seems to be true in other places of the world as well. The Wikipedia entry starts with

A bachelor's degree [...] is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to seven years.

(empahsis mine).
This is different from other certificates, such as language certificates.
As others mentioned, there are universities that do not require that you sit through any courses, but you may study at home, but still, you need to study.

It is possible to attend courses remotely.  Most American colleges have at least some degrees that are offered via distance learning.  They are regular courses with regular assignments.  You will want to use traditional nonprofit or state institutions and not the for profit firms whose reputation is concerning.  You can't test out of college because an important element of college is a process of mental maturing.  Various fields have a variety of mental disciplines that can't be taught faster than the mind is willing to conform to them.
In addition to acquiring within-field knowledge, students need to learn how to think about problems in an effective manner.  Students need to learn how to learn so that when they leave college they can continue to advance within their field.  You cannot test the ability to acquire future learning.  You can capture this in other types of work such as papers, field work and so on.  College isn't well designed to exam out of.


text:
Should unsavory but otherwise scientifically correct experiments lead to retractions?
The following occurred at my university (this is from a preliminary report that has been published):

Three colleagues requested permission to perform a certain chemical experiment (analyzing environmental samples) in a laboratory. The request was denied as the lab does not have sufficient ventilation for this sort of job. The colleagues ran the experiment anyway for several months. This was uncovered when several workers in nearby offices complained about headaches, skin rash and breathing difficulties. One person had to stay in a hospital for several days. The scientists have been suspended from or have left the university.

Apparently, the results from these experiments were used in a publication.
Should this publication be retracted? One argument is that the researchers knowingly risked the health and lives of persons to conduct their experiments. Others argue that the results themselves are OK and that the ‘side effects’ do not change the validity of the paper. Are there any ethical standards that deal with this situation or similar cases?

Of course it should not be retracted. I can't see any reason for doing it, assuming that the same experiments are not unethical and can be safely conducted in the appropriate environment. The rest is matter for the University and the experimenters.

Sounds like the ethics part has been remedied - those responsible have been sacked.

The reason of a retraction is not punishment, but to erase incorrect results (mistakes or lies). Ethical violations should be punished, but retraction is not a tool for that.

@Greg: Well, for instance, in research with human or animal subjects, it seems to be standard practice that studies must have prior ethics approval and oversight, and that the lack of this is grounds for retraction.  See for instance http://retractionwatch.com/?s=irb.  Maybe you disagree with this, but in any case I don't think your comment accurately reflects prevailing standards, in general.  I am not sure about this specific case.

It might be interesting to seek the opinion of the Committee on Publication Ethics.  I wasn't able to find a case quite like this in their database.

In an initial submission for peer-review you should be upfront about how the data were gathered. Different journals may follow different ethical philosophies: you can simply request their stance on the particular issue.

A major problem with unethical behavior of this sort is that it casts doubt on the reliability of other aspects of the research. If they were willing to conduct secret experiments that endangered the lives of colleagues, how might you expect them to act if the results were not as they desired them to be? If you're willing to risk people dying for your experiment, surely you'd be willing to lie about results or other methodological practices to get it published, too?

@Greg I would suggest that it could be the decision of a journal to retract an article if they find out it does not adhere to their ethical standards. I at least hope that this is possible.

@NateEldredge My comment reflected the standard in Chemistry, not in life sciences

@skymningen yes, it seems like a good solution

In human and animal work, the Declaration of Helsinki was written in 1964 and was designed to provide ethical oversight of medical research. Work that was done without proper ethical oversight cannot be published in most reputable journals. If it was somehow published, it would be retracted. Most journals require a statement in the paper that good research practice was followed. Other fields presumably do not require such statements since the frequency of such unethical and dangerous behavior is rare. That said, research that wad conducted in a manner that was more dangerous than necessary should not be published, and if published should be retracted.

That's very interesting, but could you add some citations or links to support your claims about this longstanding tradition? This article would seem to suggest that this so-called tradition may not be as longstanding as you claim.

A "long standing tradition" is simply false. Take the years 1930-1945 in Germany and how they experimented on humans and how this got into books.

@DanRomik I consider 1964 long standing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki

I think the question is whether a breach of workplace safety rules (harming bystanders) should be treated the same as a breach of human subjects ethics (harming the research subjects).  It's not obvious to me that they are equivalent.  Are you aware of any specific instances of retractions in the former case?


text:
Can an Iranian journal accept submissions from Israeli researchers?
I am an Israeli researcher and am planning to submit my paper soon.
I noticed that an Iranian journal¹ has suitable editors and am considering submitting there. I wonder whether such a journal might accept my submission.
Are there are any general rules prohibiting Iranian journals from accepting submissions from Israelis?

¹ It is a journal of an Iranian society, published in Iran, and almost of all of its editors (but not all of them) are Iranians.

Iranian authors (based in Iran) have published in the Israel Journal of Mathematics. So it's not entirely unheard of.

A possibly relevant data point: Note the location of the authors of https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01574 (and two more papers by the same authors).

You should simply ask the journal's editors.
There is absolutely no problem or danger, to you or to them, in doing that, as Israelis and Iranians get in contact as academics all the time, all over the world.
(I would also bet an acceptance would be possible but that's pure speculation.)

In fact I agree with this answer and upvoted it.  However, depending on the kind of journal I might consider emailing to the personal (academic) email address of one or more members of the board rather than a journal email address.

@PeteL.Clark: I think that's not necessary, but I suppose there's no harm in doing that.

The journal will not explicitly prohibit your paper based on your nationality as the academics in Iran, just like any other country, will judge the paper based on scientific merit. However, many government organizations are strictly against such behavior and will take action if they found out such a paper was published. These actions include forcing the journal to retract a paper or punishing the editor for accepting it in the fist place. This situation might sway the editorial board to reject the paper, just to avoid such troubles. However, if your nationality is not obvious based on your affiliation, I wouldn't expect any issues (even if the editorial board knows you're from Israel).