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Are frustrations with lack of fairness and transparency on PhD qualifying exam warranted?
I apologize for the length of this post but I feel it is necessary to accurately convey the severity of the situation. I greatly appreciate those who take the time to offer advice.
I am a prospective PhD student in a major research institution and am writing on behalf of numerous students frustrated with our department's qualifying exam (QE). Things have been getting progressively worse over the past few years such that my fellow students have decided to petitioned our department(dept.) head for a procedural change. Unfortunately, several students refused to sign the petition for fear of malicious treatment by the faculty. The response to our petition from the dept. head and other faculty was unfavorable to the point that we are considering filing a formal complaint with the University. I would like to gauge the objective opinions of unbiased parties as to whether our reasons for complaint are justifiable.
I will describe the QE procedure and summarize our complaints below:
The formal reasoning given by our dept. for having a qualifying exam is "To determine whether the student has the knowledge, skills, and ability to conduct independent thinking and creative research." The QE is composed of 4 consecutive one hour written examinations, a research assessment paper on a pre-selected journal article specific to our research field, and an oral examination where we present the contents of our research assessment paper and then answer questions from 3 faculty members until they are satisfied. Students may retake any sections which they fail the following year. If after the second attempt, all parts have not been passed, the student must petition for a third attempt. If the petition is not accepted, the student must defect to the master's program. If that student already has a M.S. from the department (as is my case) then the student is forced to leave the program and 3 years of tuition is wasted.

Students are not allowed to see their graded exams or know their exam score. This privilege was removed without warning two years ago despite being present in our universities' student bill of rights. We are notified via letter of pass/fail status only. Also, no statistics are provided regarding the range of scores, number of students who passed, etc.
The dept. never reveals what score constitutes passing or failing. We have heard via word of mouth from certain faculty who sympathize with out situation, that passing can range from 30% to 80% depending on the exam category and changes from year to year. This, however, is not administrable evidence and would most likely be denied by the faculty who told us if ever questioned.
Exam content consistently strays outside the provided list of topics. The provided topic list appears to be lazily assembled by copy/pasting from course syllabi. The 4 exams are technically supposed to be covered by the 3 courses which the department requires all graduate students to take (they do not offer a graduate class covering the fourth topic). However, questioned are routinely posed from material covered in non-required classes, some of which are only offered every few years.
Exams are written by professors who's field of research is entirely unrelated to the exam topic and/or professors who have never taught the class which the exam covers. This leads to major inconsistencies in the materials covered and puts students who took the class from a different professor at a disadvantage  Again, the dept. refuses to reveal who writes the exams. However, we generally figure it out in hindsight from off-the-record discussions.
The passing rate of these exams is very low. Less than 20% of students pass all exams their first attempt. Again, we cannot prove it, but it is suspected that the decision to pass a student is biased based on whether it is the students second attempt. Also, many students who get A's in the covered classes are failing these exams.
After our meeting with the dept. head regarding our petition, it was announced that the subjective third attempt to pass all sections was no longer going to be allowed. This is unfair as many students have required this third attempt in the past. Also, students taking these exams for the second time (which were in February), did so under the impression that, based on past history, they would get a third attempt if needed. This new policy will effectively force them to leave without a degree.

This list of complaints could go on for pages but I will leave it at that. I understand that a PhD QE should not be easy; however, are our frustrations warranted? I welcome both advice and constructive criticism.

Get a lawyer.  If they truly are violating University rules, you can bust them.

Students failing alone is hardly grounds for formal complaint. I understand that's frustrating in a situation where your tuition funds the machine, but still. Some rights should be defended with tooth and nail, though. 1) You must definitely have insight in your own results (note: not necessarily others, not even via statistics). 2) Changing rules after the race has started is absolutely not fair. I guess your university has rules for both -- demand that they are applied. Most of the other points sound like faculty are "just" doing bad jobs -- but that's probably not a legal issue (for you).

_ Students are not allowed to ... know their exam score.... We are notified via letter of pass/fail status only_ — Apparently you are notified of your exam scores.  The students who pass have a score of 1, and the students who fail have a score of 0.  (Ha ha only facepalm.)

The basic reality of qualifying exams is that they can act as an "outlet valve" or "quality check" for various departments, allowing them to pick out the best students (if they admit more incoming students than they can accommodate in RA and TA positions) or to double-check their decisions (to make sure everyone is qualified). Of course, this only works if they are free to make the decisions however they so choose. This means that it doesn't make sense for them to post publicly exact scores, nor to publicize what a "passing grade" is. So you're probably not going to meet with a lot of support for public announcement of scores and distributions
However, most of your other points are valid concerns. You can't change the rules ex post facto—if you tell somebody before their second attempt that they have up to three attempts to pass, then you can't later change your mind and say "sorry, you only have two attempts." This is completely unfair. Similarly, asking questions on subjects that lie well outside the domain of what the exam should cover is also completely unreasonable. Passing should not be contingent on taking a class you haven't been able to take because it wasn't offered!
Most importantly, though, is that it sounds that like the bigger problem is that the faculty in your department aren't taking their duties with respect to the qualifying exam very seriously. If this is in fact the case, then they should change the exam into something they can live with. Otherwise, they're wasting their time and yours, and possibly needlessly ruining people's graduate careers and professional aspirations. This is simply inexcusable. Unfortunately, short of raising a ruckus with the university administration (or being willing to file a lawsuit), I don't see much hope of things changing.

I see your point about the need for discretionary freedom with grading. However, I am surprised that not being able to see our own graded exams, even in a private meeting, is a non-issue. I did not mention it in the original post but the department has an unfortunate tainted history with preferential, even malicious, treatment of students by faculty (who are still there because of tenure). Thus, keeping the exams confidential means there is no way to maintain accountability with grading

That's the point, though: faculty members generally don't want strict accountability. They want to be able to "fight for" "their" students, if need be. A strict grading scheme and standards make such goals much more difficult to achieve.

I fail to see the downside of releasing scores to the individuals involved (each sees only his own score).  At the same time, frankly this is why one should interview other grad students before accepting into a program.  You've learned the hard way.

"Passing should not be contingent on taking a class you haven't been able to take because it wasn't offered" is not exactly true.  It is fairly common for "the" course for an exam to not be able to cover every topic that can appear on the qualifying exams.  It is left to the student, as partially a demonstration of their ability to learn on their own in a research setting, to make sure they know all material that can be on the exams, and not simply what was taught to them in the available courses.  If there's zero mention of this material being on the exam, then you're right: it's a problem.

First of all, your concerns sound reasonable and valid, if the facts are as you've stated.
It sounds as if your department has decided to use a quota-based filter to limit admission to a Ph.D (only some X fraction of students will be allowed to go on). That would explain the general mystery surrounding the process and their unwillingness to post standards for passing/failing. While they're within their rights to do things this way, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Because if they were required to state this explicitly, no one would want to come to the department to play this version of Hunger Games.
Unfortunately, it's not clear what you can do. Some things are possible:

can you document the instances of questions deviating from prescribed material ? While this wouldn't be a smoking gun ("You should know this already" - say the professors), it would at least force them to be more specific about what's contained on the exams.
can you document the inconsistencies between material taught and material asked on the exams ? for the same reason as above.
changing rules midstream is a big NO NO. This is your strongest complaint if you have to take the matter up further. At the very least, students have to be grandfathered in.

Beyond that, you should remember one source of power you do have. Professors need grad students, if for nothing else than to do the work professors have promised their grant agencies they will do. Deans need professors to spend research money on students so they can say that they're using grant money effectively. None of this works without students. Obviously you can't take collective action without numbers, but a protest where you submit blank exams could make an interesting statement.
But that should be a last resort.

In my opinion it isn't an admissions issue. Our faculty have beyond ample research funding; more funding than available students in fact. Their stubbornness to change seems more ego driven, despite the fact that change would benefit both parties. Unfortunately, I don't see a group collective action happening anytime soon. One student was confronted by a faculty member about his participation in this petition and we subsequently lost almost half of our original signatures

"Their stubbornness to change seems more ego driven, despite the fact that change would benefit both parties". It's desperately unlikely that the faculty are all sitting there thinking, "gosh, it would be wonderful to do exactly what the students have asked, but we'd lose face, so let's continue with this system that we all agree is appalling". More likely they have other motives, e.g. it would require a lot of time-commitment and lost flexibility from them to improve things. People are more commonly busy or over-controlling than self-destructively egotistical. Find out what those motives are.

It does sound like the most important component here is time: in that the faculty would have spend lots of time to change a system that is working for them.

You have implied two basic options: staying without fussing or trying to lobby for changes, or staying with some attempted hostile influence. But both cases are graduate students with low status dealing with tenured and like-minded-to-tenured professors. Someone who understood law could tell you legal strengths and someone who understood university policies could advise you on means of redress within the university. I can't do either, but I want to give another option.
There is also the option of entering another program. There would be losses, but what is written between the lines in your detailed "Here are the details as objectively as I can give them; how do things stack up?" original post is a question of "Can I from my present position obtain an appropriate position within my university, or not?" that does not consider seeking a more appropriate department and university. I know there are things you would lose by transferring out, and you might have to take some things again. But in terms of a hostile departmental administration, there are much better options than what you can work out within a university that does these things, even if you can improve some of them by academic grievance procedure (a point on which I do not offer informed opinion).
I did a second master's and was dropped on suspicious grounds (passing was 60 points, minimum for entering Ph.D. placement was 63 points, I had 61 points... after I decided that the one area I really wanted to impress the department was my thesis, and the department made me change my thesis topic, which I declared at the beginning of the year, so completely that I retained none of my earlier study--two thirds of the way through the year; the 61 was a 61 for half the time I spent during the academic year and no credit or recognition earlier). I'm looking for a more appropriate place, even though it pains me I was not able to complete my studies there.
I wish you the best, and a boss in or outside of academia who will be more humane in dealing with humans.


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Europe: Central Academic CS Job Market Service like CRA?
When searching for faculty positions in CS, I find the service http://cra.org/ads/ very useful. There you can find many job ads from North America based institutions. Is there any similar service for Europe?

This question might need to be more specific about the desired career level - research assistant, postdoc, professor?

Is there any similar service for Europe?

Unfortunately the answer to this question is no. The closest equivalent, at least in the German-speaking area, is Academics.com. I am not aware of a similarly complete portal for the rest of Europe.
Additionally, the most complete list for the German-speaking area is definitely the newsletter sent out monthly by the "deutschen Hochschulverband" (essentially the union of German university teachers). This list has rather official character and is pretty much complete for the area. However, you need to be a member to receive this newsletter, and one can only become a member by having been employed in an academic post at a German university.
(or you know a member and ask him to forward you the newsletter each month)

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Can (and should) an editor referee a paper he's in charge of?
I have reason to believe that the editor assigned to a paper we have recently submitted might have also acted as referee.
I am of course not sure because reviewers for this journal are in principle anonymous (as is standard, at least in my field). So I want to make clear this is not an accusation or even a complaint - the report sounds very reasonable anyway.
However, this has made me wonder: would it be appropriate for an editor to referee a paper that he/she is in charge of?

That editors occasionally act as reviewers is not uncommon. This does not mean it should be the norm, quite the contrary. As an editor (in Chief), I have on occasion stepped in and performed a second review when I have felt that it has been needed to speed up the process for a paper, most often because of a lack of response from reviewers that have once agreed to review. In addition, I would only take on paper where I have the specific expertise.
Stepping in do perform reviews as an editor requires attention to the roles of reviewers and editors and I feel it is important to let the authors know that I have stepped in to do the review and also why. Since, I as an editor have the final say in advising the authors on how they should revise their manuscript, for example by valuing the reviewers recommendations into a reject/major revision/minor revision/accept decision, adding own opinion to the mix is not as far reaching as might be thought. It is not unheard of that editors may look away from reject or accept recommendations based on information not observed by reviewers, but as rare as such instances are, should the intervention of an editor in the review process be. So in conclusion, yes, editors can add reviews but should do so with extreme caution and rarity.

Don't you think you would attribute more importance to your own review, though? For example, what happens if you, as a reviewer, think it a paper is good paper, but the other 2 reviewers think it should be rejected (or vice versa)?

Yes, it's appropriate. As far as I know, it's also rare.
Editors usually rely on the reviewer's evaluations but nothing prevents them from giving their own review.

I’ve served as associate editor and even editor in chief of several periodicals. Most explicitly disallow this but one explicitly requests that the AE provide one of the 3 reviews! I think the latter makes sense, since a full review has the AE familiarize themself much more thoroughly.

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Is it Illegal or Against the Rules to Hit on the Professor?
I know it is very bad for the professor to hit on the students. But what if a student hits on the professor? I know the professor cannot accept such an advance.

Are you asking whether it is against the rules for a student to hit on a professor or unethical or what?

@PeteL.Clark The rules

Then that sounds like a question to ask someone at your specific university.  Written regulations on this sort of thing vary.

downvote for unhelpful title

Why so much downvote? I'm not actually planning on doing this.

One should not downvote questions based on fallacious moral judgements placed on the asker. I am not a student nor a faculty.

The specific regulations concerning a student initiated relationship will vary by institution, from "No. Just no." to "Perhaps after you're not in their class". You should check with your specific institution.
In a more general sense however, it does put the professor in something of an awkward position - at best, you're suggesting hitting on someone who cannot reciprocate or respond.

Ah yes, for entertainment. I haven't done this nor am I planning on it.

I think there may be even more variation than your answer suggests: as much as anything, this tests the willingness of the university to explicitly enumerate undesirable behavior.  (Not every instance of poor behavior is explicitly, directly forbidden.)  Here for instance are the rules on student / faculty interactions at my university: https://eoo.uga.edu/focus-on/are-there-any-prohibited-amorous-relationships-among-university-community-members.  It does not explicitly prohibit students hitting on faculty: rather it prohibits dating/sexual relationships in certain contexts.

@PeteL.Clark More interesting is the idea of flirting with the professor to attract attention for the course. Professors aren't always very engaged with the material.

I am unconvinced flirting with a professor will make them more focused on the material.

@Fomite It only helps if you are also smart.

@Fomite You attract the attention and THEN input intellectual content. It only works if you are a nerd or "pre-academic".


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Are postdoctoral scholars considered students or researchers in other countries?
I am currently working under a post-PhD (postdoc) scholarship. In my country (Argentina) I am usually considered still a student (although it's kind of a gray area).
In other countries, would I qualify as a student or as a researcher?

For what purpose do you want to know? Also: Why would you not describe your situation more precisely (as in this question)?

The purpose in particular is this https://education.github.com/discount_requests/new. The options are Student/Researcher and some others, but those are the ones that would apply to me. Why is the purpose important? What "question" do you mean?

The purpose is important because at the end of the day you want to accurately communicate information and thus it matters what particular aspect of your current status is relevant to the recipient of this communication. Question was referring to your question as you managed to describe your situation in two sentences. Regarding Github: Is Student/Researcher one option or are these two seperate options? Because you are certainly somewhere in between.

No, Student is an option and Researcher another.

Just wondering, isn't a student somebody paying an institution and a researcher somebody getting paid by an institution? And yes, there might be gray areas (paid internships), but that's how I always drew the line. (Just feeling hesistant to give that as an answer as none of the 700 people who saw this question noted that as a difference)

@DavidMulder as I commented below, in my country the majority of Universities are free, so as a student you pay nothing. Also you can be doing your PhD or post-Phd and receive money, although not a usual salary but as a scholarship, which smudges the area even more.

@Gabriel: Still, in the case of 'free' universities it's just you and others paying for you through taxes. Additionally scholarships are per definition financial aid for students, so that seems to be pretty clear cut.

@DavidMulder I don't get your point about taxes. Yes, everybody pays taxes, is everybody a "student"? I pay for roads too but I'm not a trucker. It's not that clear cut since researchers also are able to obtain financial aid for courses, travels abroad, etc. Also, see the accepted answer below for another good point.

@Gabriel: He? All I said was that everybody is paying for a student's tuition through taxes at a 'free' university. Not that everybody is a student. And yes it is that clear cut, if it's called scholarship it's for students, just checked 3 different definitions.

@DavidMulder your comment about taxes is 100% out of place. It has nothing to do with the question and apparently a lot to do with your conservative/libertarian inclinations. The last part of your comment is reasonable though, you might want to post it as a answer.

@Gabriel: He? Conservative/Libertarian inclinations? What? What in the world are you talking about even? The government pays for students to get educated (their tuition), the government is an organization run by the people and paid by the people, so all I said was that in the end through taxes somebody is still paying that the university can offer their courses for free to you and that your argument that universities are free in your country just doesn't change anything.

@DavidMulder again: your conservative/libertarian comments are completely out of place. The fact that in my country Universities are free is quite relevant regarding your original cmmt: "isn't a student somebody paying an institution" since I am in fact not paying anybody (and neither is any other student) and hence your argument is not applicable. That taxes pay to maintain Universities on the other hand is indeed absolutely irrelevant since it adds nothing towards resolving the issue. It is just an out of place commentary by someone with conservative/libertarian  inclinations.

@Gabriel: "fact not paying anybody"... Yes you're are... you're paying the government and the tuition is just spread out and distributed over all ages and normalized for wealth... that's not conservative or libertarian or anything, that's just economics 101... and it does add to the issue as it clear up the issue why you aren't explicitly paying the university, but still are a student.

@DavidMulder you libertarian technicalities indeed add absolutely nothing. I am not "explicitly paying the university" because, as I clearly explained in my first commt answering you, Universities are free in my country (because my country gives a d@mn :). There's no "issue" to clear up there (unless of course you have so rooted libertarian/conservative inclinations such as yourself), much less regarding your original argument that " isn't a student somebody paying an institution" after I specifically explained that such point was 100% immaterial to the issue at hand.

@DavidMulder: "Still, in the case of 'free' universities it's just you and others paying for you through taxes" - yes, but the same can be said about some of the researchers' salaries.

Sometimes, postdoc is considered to be an abbreviation for "post-doctoral student". This has no practical meaning, though.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a poll, not a question.

In general, if you are not enrolled in any course and also are not enrolled in a program in which you may eventually earn a degree, you are not a "student."

That's not necessarily true. In Quebec (Canada), postdocs have a mixed status--they're registered as students at the university and get some tax benefits as such on the provincial taxes, but not the Federal taxes.

This does not hold in many countries - and universities might officially consider you a 'student' just to sidestep labor law and employ you in worse conditions in many respects...

At my university you are considered as student if you are working towards a PhD and do not earn more than a given amount of money or you are enrolled in a bachelor's or master's program, regardless of the income. There are just too many different rules to give a general rule of thumb!

I think postdocs are assumed to be employees as research staff (not students) of each university , as far as they have contracts with universities and may receive salaries. They do not take courses in the university. They conduct some researches in a research group in collaboration with professor(s) there. Their research topic may be something very close to their PhD project, something near to their PhD research in other concept (such as interdisciplinary projects), or something very different.
PS: Some PhD students also have research contracts with universities and are assumed to be employees of those universities, but I think their difference with a postdoc is that they receive a degree but postdocs are not receiving any degrees.

All of the things you say about postdocs could also be true of PhD students in some places/fields. So these things don't serve to distinguish between "student" and "researcher."

@ff524 Or PhD candidates in those places aren't really “students”…

It's also relatively common in the USA for post-docs to have non-university appointments. There are many government and private labs that hire post-docs to do research as employees. These positions have various levels within their respective companies/labs.
For instance, I am a postdoc at a USA national laboratory. Here, postdocs are considered long-term temporary employees (with some reduced benefits and a reduced salary compared to a full staff member as you would expect). We aren't considered students or under any particular education program, though there are development programs offered to help in the transition between a full-time student position and a full-time research position.

Just to further show the range of possibilities, in the US in mathematics, postdocs are usually considered faculty.  (In particular, they are university employees, and not students.)  They usually have (light to moderate) teaching duties, and often have official titles involving words like "lecturer", "instructor" or "assistant professor".  Of course, they are still temporary positions of 1-4 years or so, and are not tenure track.

In my Australian university, Postdocs are considered faculty in all fields not just math : )

In Australia, postdocs at universities are academic research staff with fixed-term contracts. They have the same salary and working conditions as permanent academic research staff at the same level (typically level A or B), though permanent staff would usually be hired at level B or above.

By academic staff do you mean faculty? If not this only holds for some universities because postdocs are considered faculty at my Australian University.

Yes. "Faculty" is a term less often used in Australia than elsewhere. Most universities have "academic staff" (i.e. faculty) and "general staff" (i.e. everyone else -- admin staff, technicians, IT staff and so on). Postdocs are academic staff.


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How to transfer or delete a Google Scholar profile from my own account?
I accidentally created my advisor's Google scholar profile using my personal Gmail. Now I can't find a way to transfer the profile to him, nor can I delete his profile in my account.
Does anyone have any idea what to do?
This is almost a tech support question, but since it's so unique to academics I figure I should ask here.
I tried to look at the Google product forum, but there is no forum for Google Scholar. They don't have a support line for Google Scholar either. I have not found a way even after posting on the Google product forum. I'm truly stuck.

Have you asked Google yet? It is a tech support question for them.

@BillBarth I tried to look at Google product forum https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/en, but there is no forum for Google scholar. They don't have a support line for Google scholar either. Do you have any idea where I may ask?

If anyone is coming here for update, I have not found a way even after posting on Google product forum. I'm truly stuck.

As far as I know, this is still an issue in 2023. That's insane. And to think that some fields use google scholar for their hiring / promotion process…

Google Scholar profiles are not transferable. But you can delete the Google Scholar profile from your own account. Then create a new profile while signed in to your advisor's account.
To delete the Scholar profile from your own account, go to Google Scholar and click on "Settings":

then click on "Account":

then click on "Delete or recover your Scholar account."
There, you'll have to affirm that you are sure you'd like to delete the account, and that you understand you have 30 days to change your mind. Check all the boxes, then click "Delete account":

Opinion that doesn't add to the discussion: this is stupid. What are researchers supposed to do if they leave academia, permanently or temporarily? Google scholar is a way of displaying researchers' personal data and published papers. That's fine, but once you leave academia, you essentially lose all control of this process and you can no longer manage the account. This just seems like a very poorly thought out network.


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Is it acceptable to use Mathematica to derive results in your research?
While doing research in statistics, sometimes I came across complex integration that I can't or don't want to solve analytically.
Is it okay to use Mathematica to solve the integration and use the result in my research? Do I need to report this in the academic article? My qualm is that perhaps I am supposed to be able to solve these things by hand.
(Some context: I'm from the social sciences and thus unfamiliar with what's permitted regarding these tools.)

I am not sure I understand the question. Is there any rule in social science that says you are not supposed to use any tools to solve math problem? (I am not in social science)

I'm 100% ignorant about what's kosher since this situation has never come up. Whenever I take quantitative class, the implicit assumption is that I have to do the math by hand, hence my hesitation. Perhaps the answer is indeed "duh, why don't you use it?"

It is as much OK as the use of R, Excel, MATLAB or your pocket calculator to do computations with numbers - so, yes, but some knowledge of what can go wrong and how you can validate or sanity check results is helpful.

@Stefan potentially both. Is one acceptable and the other not?

Besides what @Stefan said, numerical integration is usually not a big issue if the integrand is reasonably smooth, since we would usually be interested in an approximate value anyway, and there is such a wide variety of software for numerical integration that one could even get away with saying "numerically evaluated".

You can use Mathematica to do some checks of its own results. I was surprised to find a bug in Mathematica while  doing some research.

Is it okay to use Mathematica to solve the integration and use the result in my research?

Of course it is.
It might be useful, though, to make the Mathematica code employed for the calculations available to others, either through a public repository or by a note in the paper suggesting to contact the author(s). This will allow reviewers or other readers to check your calculations, or, possibly, reuse or extend them.
In a paper where I made extensive use of Mathematica, I wrote the following note at the end:

To those interested, the authors can provide the Mathematica notebooks of the full calculations developed in this work.

For the last quote: As a reader I would probably prefer to read "The Mathematica notebooks of the full calculations can be found at..." (probably even as additional documents for the article). Would save me an inquiry and an attachment to the article would be more stable than a website or the author's email address.

@Dirk Generally speaking, I agree with you. For that particular case, however, we were more interested in establishing a collaboration with the just 2-3 groups around the world that have been working on that topic, and inquiries were thus welcomed.

The problem with this approach is that referees will be unable to access the notebooks without breaking anonymity (unless you proactively submit them with the manuscript as supplementary material). For what it's worth, my experience is that collaborations are more likely if you remove the additional hurdle of having to contact someone and wait for a reply (allow them to "try before they buy", if you will).

@ChristianClason In that case, the reviewers could have required the notebooks through the editor, without breaking anonymity: notice that a general repository might not necessarily guarantee anonymity. For what concerns collaborations, in my field it works the opposite: since it's a small field, we are all quite willing to contact each other.

@ChristianClason Notice anyway that I don't want to suggest to use the "contact us" way over the repository way: it's just an example of what we did, taking into account the traditions of our field.

@MassimoOrtolano Sure; explicitly offering to share is already more than most people do (+1). I just wanted to offer my experience (in a different field). I still stand by my recommendation to (also) to submit the documents as supplementary material to make everyone's lives easier.

For symbolic integration specifically, I would not find it sufficient to just provide the Mathematica code, if the result wasn't verified in some manner.   The result may depend on the Mathematica version used, on the speed of your computer (!) and even on what other calculations you did in the same session (!).  That's because integration uses heuristics, time constraints and subresult-caching.

@Szabolcs Yes, I agree, and this should be actually stressed for any of computer calculations or simulations. A colleague of mine, speaking of circuit simulators like SPICE, is used to saying that to use such a program one should know electronics much better than it (to understand when the results are wrong). I think that this statement can be generalized to any computer analysis.

"the authors can provide the Mathematica notebooks of the full calculations developed in this work" IMO the large majority of persons will not follow this path... vs "available at" most people would clickthrough and look at the source and probably copy/paste/run in Mathematica.

Quick thought experiment: If you do keep the "available upon request", best case scenario is every reader asks for the Mathematica source... which would result in the author needed to manually respond/email to each every person... if the paper becomes really, requiring the author to respond to each person would be in some cases untenable.

@TrevorBoydSmith It's not that every field is composed of thousands of people: there are (sub)fields where there are a few tens of people around the world, and the email traffic would be quite manageable ;-)

@MassimoOrtolano ya that's why I took time to rewrite my text to include "in some cases untenable". But here's another thought experiment: 50 years later you can't email someone who is dead. But if the code is attached somehow then at least you have a copy of the old code (happens in old engineering papers often where the paper that has old code is more valuable because although the code is old... it's still code that can be understood and ported).

@TrevorBoydSmith Yep, you're right, I didn't think about that aspect.

I take this question as not specific to Mathematica, but equally relevant to any other computer algebra system.
You have an integral or an equation that you cannot solve.  You have a piece of software that will give you a result.  But you don't know how it arrived to the result.  Is it okay to use it?
What matters is whether the result is correct, not how you arrived to it.  You should understand the problem you are solving, and you should verify the solution.
Personally, I would be very uncomfortable using such a result blindly, especially knowing how easily certain automated symbolic calculations, such as definite integration, can go wrong.  But luckily, most of these types of results are much easier to verify than to compute.  You have an indefinite integral? Differentiate it!  An equation?  Substitute back the solution!  A definite integral?  Do it numerically and compare to the symbolic solution!
Writing in your paper that "this is the result of the integral because Mathematica said so" is not okay, if you didn't verify it.  Just stating the result without saying how you arrived to it is fine for as long as you have verified it and it is also obvious enough for any reader how to verify it.  If it is not obvious, then prove the result in the paper, i.e. show how you verified it.

Given that you mention integration, I should point out that doing definite integrals automatically is notoriously difficult, and all computer algebra systems will occasionally return wrong results.  That's a very good reason to always verify.

This is the right answer. There are certainly bugs in Mathematica. I have hit on them a few times. The source code is not open, and the bug-tracker is not public. Do not trust Mathematica's answers blindly!

@BorisBukh Except that it is irrelevant that the code is not open ... I hear this as an argument against using Mathematica many times, but in this case I don't consider it valid.  Open source systems also have bugs, and also give wrong results.  I will only trust a result when it was verified in some way, but I don't particularly care if the software that produced it is open source or not.

@BorisBukh There are of course some situations when open code is important (but I don't think this is one of them).  One particular example that affected me personally is Mathematica's FindGraphCommunities function.  I am fairly sure about what methods it uses, but these methods are 1) not properly documented, with references and 2) the code is not open.   Thus I cannot use this function and say that "the result was produced by method X described in paper Y" ...  (Note that FindGraphCommunities produces a type of result which really cannot be verified without recomputation...)

Some computation (such as those of symbol antiderivative) are hard to perform, but easy to verify. For those, the implementation is relatively unimportant. For other computations, the only way to verify computation is by replicating it, or by convincing oneself that the code that produced it is bug-free. The latter is impossible if the source is closed. (Numerical integration falls into the latter category.)

Similarly, a closed bug-tracker prevents users from quickly discovering if they experience a well-known issue. Some might even not realize that the result they get are wrong.

@Szabolcs the advantage of open code is that you can examine the code yourself, and check it for bugs, if you care. This does not prove the code is not buggy, but probably helps. If the code is closed, you have no way of checking anything; more importantly, you have no way to fix anything. When I use a open source library/program and it has a bug, I try to fix it so I can do the job. When I use a closed source library/program and it has a bug, I bang my head against the wall.

As Szabolcs writes, verification is important and that's also the case if you were to do computations by hands using methods you think are reliable. There are cases of erroneous results in the peer reviewed literature that were not noticed for quite some time where researches have actually used the wrong formula taken from the published article for many years.
An example is the article by L. Chatterjee, G. Das, R. Goswami: Z. Phys. D 32, 73 (1994), a mistake was made in the computation of the cross section for the radiative capture of a charged particle in the ground state. It was an elementary math mistake due to using inconsistent branch cuts, as pointed out here. That mistake was not noted by the authors precisely because it led to a strange effect of an apparent discontinuity in the cross section, this effect was interpreted as an interesting feature of the capture cross section.

authors: عسليه وعد كيمو قلبي انا


text:
In CV, how to mention articles published only in arxiv?
In the publications section of the CV, what is the best title for articles that have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed conference or journal and have only been published in the arxiv.org ?
How about "near future publications" ?

Does this answer your question? Can something published on arXiv or optimization-online.org be mentioned in my CV?

@Sursulasupportsthestrike , My question is not whether arXiv can be mentioned in CV because I believe it can be. My question was how to mention it. And I got the answer.

The official word used by NIH is "Preprints".  I believe this is the correct industry term.  Some links for more information:

NIH
Wikipedia

Scopus uses this term too

Accepted but not yet published: accepted, forthcoming, to appear, in press
Under review but not yet accepted: under review, submitted to [journal/conference]
Not yet submitted: manuscript, preprint
Not even finished yet: work in progress
The term "near future publications" would only be appropriate for the category of accepted but not yet published work, but even there it sounds strange and unidiomatic. I have never seen anyone use this term before, and there are many better alternatives.
For any other category it is simply not appropriate at all because you do not in fact know whether your submission will be accepted or not. It would be like listing "near future jobs" on your CV simply because you are convinced that you will definitely ace the job interview.

Another common term for accepted but not yet published is in press.

I'm not a fan of ''Under review'', I feel like people use it to their advantage by submitting to a certain journal and then put it down as ''Under review at X'' when applying for a job knowing that there is a very good chance they will be rejected by that journal.

@Tom I also dislike specifying where it's under review, but the fact that it is under review is still useful information IMO. If it's just a "preprint" it may not be intended for publication at all.

In addition to @Tom's concern, I'd also note that I'm not a big fan of listing "work in progress" on a CV. From my experience in maths, it's not so unlikely that an article which is currently "work in progress" will still be so one or two years ahead (even if it seems right now like you're certainly going to submit it within two months because, you know, right after the current teaching period ends you'll finally have enough time to complete it...)

@JochenGlueck yeah, maths research is definitely subject to Hofstadter's law.

If you want to have your paper 'under review', but it's actually not done you can always submit to the Journal of Universal Rejection https://www.universalrejection.org/

@AlexbGoode The journal seems to be defunct.  They seem not to have published an issue since 2013. :P

There also needs to be a way of saying that it has been uploaded with no intention of sending it to a journal (in my case because I have no way of paying open access fees and there is no academic point, at least in the UK, in my publishing it if it isn't open access).  Peer review is the first step to acceptance by the research community, not the last, and it isn't the only route.  In the end the quality and correctness of the idea is all that ought to be important.  Citation count is also a quality indicator, so no problem in putting highly cited ArXiV papers on CV.

@user71659 Added your suggestion to the answer.

Simply write your paper and add an arXiv preprint with the URL there. Here is an example:
Kevin Du, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Niklas Stoehr, Alexander Warstadt, Ryan Cotterell
"Generalizing Backpropagation for Gradient-Based Interpretability" arXiv preprint, https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03056

If your intention is that they are preprints intended for later formal publication, I'd list them as "Work in Progress".
Another alternative is to list them as "Unreviewed Publications", though I'm not sure I recommend that. But it is accurate if you consider them finished and don't intend to submit them to a publisher/conference.
The former is a definite plus if you are seeking employment. The latter may have issues.
In a "Work in Progress" section you could mark those that are "nearing submission" as such. But it is (IMO) useful to also have some projects there that are in their earlier stages.

How about "near future publications" ?

If they are under review you could use that as a heading, but otherwise it is a bit tentative. Work in Progress implies continuing activity, which is a plus, I think. That is the impression you want to give a potential employer.

If the manuscript is complete and posted to arXiv (or some other preprint server), I would not call it a "work in progress".  If I see "work in progress" on a CV, I am going to assume that the paper is not written yet, or even that the basic research has not yet been completed.  I think that the standard term is "preprint" (this connotes a completed work which has not yet been submitted for publication).

I've never seen ''near future publications'' and would consider it strange if I saw it on a CV.

I don't think there is really a need to label them as "Unreviewed Publications" if they are on ArXiv.  Might be a good idea to include citations (or link to the Google scholar page where the citations can be found).  I'd say an "unreviewed publication" that others had built on is better than a relatively uncited but peer reviewed paper that the research community has essentially ignored.

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


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Tips on finding experts on a specific topic
Ladies and gentlemen, hello.
Attracted by one research topic, I am facing a challenge of finding the most relevant sources, more precisely, of identifying the reputed and most qualified authors.
My question is not about a general sources search. Not about asking myself a question, thinking up proper key words and looking them up in academic data bases. Once I set myself a goal, including the one of searching for literature, I may go as far as it is physically possible. But apart from spending much time, my main concern is that in the end I will most certainly miss out on all or many experts in my subject.
Thus, I am looking to understand is there a way for to know which are the most important researchers who already wrote on a certain quite narrow subject? Maybe someone can recommend sites specialised in such kind of search?
Obviously, I already looked this question up on internet search engines but they do not return any meaningful results. Furthermore, I also saw this post which is too narrow and does not provide a general solution. Finally, asking senior researchers is not an option either because I am not affiliated to any institution.

Read the most important papers in your field and look at the author lists. If someone's writing a paper on a topic then that person is (arguably by definition) an expert on it.

Does this answer your question? How do I find research groups that do work in field X?

@cag51 Not exactly, but it is still informative. Thank you.

And make sure to check conferences outside of your geographic area - e.g. Americas, Europe, Asia?

@cag51 In a hindsight, and having gone tried the advise from the link, I conclude that:   1. Your comment is the closest to what I expected as an answer 2. My question is a duplicate from the one you referred to

What you are looking for might better be identified using a bibliometric search rather than a typical literature review. Bibliometrics search and analyze metadata related to scholarly publications more than the actual contents of the studies. In your case, the metadata that you are interested in is identifying the leading authors in certain topics of interest.
A colleague of mine published an article that shows how to identify the most relevant literature using free bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer. That is, by beginning with a topic search on a citation database (e.g. Scopus or Web of Science), you can identify the most relevant body of literature, authors, schools of thought, etc. based on cocitations and other bibliometrics:

Walsh, I., & Renaud, A. (2017). Reviewing the literature in the IS field: Two bibliometric techniques to guide readings and help the interpretation of the literature. Systèmes d’Information et Management. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316560668_Reviewing_the_literature_in_the_IS_field_Two_bibliometric_techniques_to_guide_readings_and_help_the_interpretation_of_the_literature

You can get the article by following the link. It should set you on the right track.

Thank you. Did not mark it as an accepted answer yet because I have to check it out first.


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Are there any implications about review paper acceptance if the proposal has been accepted?
So I recently submitted a proposal to a prestigious review journal. To my excitement, the proposal was accepted, and the journal has invited us to write a full review. Now the official policy of the journal is that acceptance of the proposal doesn't guarantee acceptance of the manuscript.
My question, I suppose, is mostly regarding how happy I should be about my proposal being accepted. How often do review papers get rejected if the proposal to write them was accepted? Is there still a good chance that our review paper could be rejected? Or does that typically only happen when authors of accepted proposals deviate a lot from the paper that they proposed to write?
Thanks in advance

My experience is that review articles undergo peer review like any other article. So if you write a review on underwater basket weaving, it'll be sent to experts in underwater basket weaving, who might say things like "X group did a lot of work on the materials that give the best results, and you didn't mention their work at all". If the editors decide based on the reviews that you don't actually understand underwater basket weaving enough to be able to write a review, then it might lead to a rejection.
If you make a good-faith attempt to cover the field + address review comments though though, the chances of acceptance should be pretty good. After all, they did accept the proposal, which means they think a review article is appropriate + you're qualified to write a review.


text:
Is there any limit to the amount of data that can be taken from a research paper for writing a review paper?
I am writing a detailed literature review of some twenty papers available on a newer topic of interest, which form the core of the topic. I am extensively using data from all of those twenty papers.
I want to know whether there is any limit to the amount of data that can be  taken from a research paper (with proper citations and referencing) for writing a review paper. Will the excessive use of data (methodology,  experimental results, author's proposed and unverified hypothesis etc.) from a research paper be called plagiarism?

@henning I have edited the question.  I am doing this 'excessive' use of data from all those 20 papers available in the field of my interest.

I would suggest that the greater part of your paper should be your original analysis, not just a repetition of others results.

Note also that facts are not subject to copyright (as opposed to the rendering of figures and/or tables). If you produce your own tables and figures from the facts (numbers) in the papers, you need to cite your source (as usual) but no permission is needed to reuse the plain facts reported in the paper.

Plagiarism, according to Marriam-Webster, quoted here:

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
to use (another's production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

From your description, it seems you are not committing any of these offenses. Review papers necessarily report large amounts of work and results from other researchers and are therefore, in a sense, derivative. This isn't plagiarism, as long as the sources are painstakingly referenced and acknowledged (as you do). The originality of a review consists in synthesising the existing body of work, identifying different strands in it, examining present shortcomings as well as best practices, and suggesting further research at the cutting edge.

Writing a review article is not plagiarism as long as you cite all sources correctly. If you don't, it's plagiarism.
Besides this, there are, at least in STM, limits regarding the amount of data that can be taken from a research paper due to copyright and permission handling, see the guidelines of the STM Association.

use up to three figures (including tables) from a journal article or
  book chapter, but:

not more than five figures from a whole book or journal issue/edition;
not more than six figures from an annual journal volume; and
not more than three figures from works published by a single publisher for an article, and not more than three figures from works published by a single publisher for a book chapter (and in total not more than thirty figures from a single publisher for re-publication in a book, including a multi-volume book, with different authors per chapter)

use single text extracts of less than 400 words from a journal article or book chapter, but

not more than a total of 800 words from a whole book or journal issue/edition

Note, that in most cases you have to ask for permission or at least notify the publisher about the re-use of the material.
If you want to use more, you defenitely have to ask for permission and might be charged. But this is a copyright an not a plagiarism issue.

looking into the linked document, your quote appears rather misleading: the guidelines state that their purpose is reduction of adminstrative work: up to those limits permission to reproduce should be given without charging a fee between publishers that are members of that STM publisher's association. So those limits may have practical consequences in the procedure and possible fees to obtain the permission, but they don't have anything to do with the question of plagiarism. Note that most of the publishers still require notification (i.e. you get the permission automatically by asking).

@cbeleites It's absolutely correct that the mentioned amount of data that can be taken from a research paper has nothing to do with plagiarism as clearly stated in my first paragraph: Plagiarism is about not citing correctly. But one of the initial questions was very general asking whether there are any limits. I wanted to address this.

@cbeleites I edited my answer to clarify the difference between plagiarism and copyright.

As noted, you are not talking about plagiarism.  But you may be talking about copyright violation: even if "facts" cannot be copyrighted a particular list of experimental results can.
On the other hand, a certain amount of a copyrighted work can be quoted in a review.  This is the doctrine of "fair use".  If you need legal advice, consult a lawyer.  Perhaps your own institution has lawyers on staff (or as consultants) that you can consult.

It should be noted that "fair use" is particular to US copyright law, although many countries have similar (but usually more limited) provisions for educational or scientific use.

There are three closely related things that your question seems to conflate. Most of the existing answers mention plagiarism and copyright, but in academic publication, originality is also important:

Plagiarism: As long as you properly cite your sources, there is absolutely no concern about plagiarism. You could literally copy and paste an entire book; as long as you clearly cite the author and you clearly say that your work is a copy-and-paste, there is no problem with plagiarism. (Obviously, that extreme example would have a serious problem with the following two items.)
Copyright violation: If the works you are borrowing from are copyrighted, then you need to be careful not to copy-and-paste too much from them, even if you properly cite your source and explicitly mention that it is a copy-and-paste. How much is too much is a subjective question, but a widely accepted standard is that up to 10% of an article or chapter is acceptable, especially for purposes of research and education. However, note that I say "copy-and-paste": copyright does not protect ideas; it only protects the expression of those ideas, that is, the exact words used to express the ideas. So,if you merely borrow the same ideas and completely rewrite them in your own words (beyond mere paraphrasing), then there is absolutely no concern with copyright violation. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, databases (that is, unoriginal facts compiled as a table) are not copyrightable; you can freely copy them without concern for copyright violation (as long as the facts are truly unoriginal; if a lot of originality went into those tables, then it gets sticky and varies by jurisdiction).
Originality: Regardlenss of moral issues of plagiarism and legal issues of copyright, when publishing academic work, you must also be concerned about originality: most publishers require that your work be truly original in some way; that is, it is not a mere rehashing of ideas that have already been published. So, merely copying other people's work and citing it might not be sufficient to be published. That said, what you describe should have no problem meeting this standard: combining multiple published works almost always creates a new, original work. The question of how original is enough is a very subjective question that depends on the editors.


text:
Whom to cite when describing an argument in another paper that builds upon yet another paper?
There is a research Paper Y which presents some experimental result. The author has cited Paper X to justify and explain the reason of that result. I am writing a review paper and included the result of Paper Y.
Can I cite Paper X in the review paper to give the justification of the result by Paper Y as already done by the Paper Y itself? Or will it be somehow called mindless copying from Paper Y? And should I cite Paper Y also (along with X) while including the correlation between result (Y) and the reason (X) as the author of Y was the first to correlate the two?

I will use 'Johnson (2016)' and 'Smith (2015)' rather than 'Y' and 'X' in my examples:

Explicitly corroborating Smith's (2015) hypothesis that mice love cheese, Johnson (2016) demonstrated that mice ate cheese rather than carrots, when offered both.
Smith (2015) argued that mice love cheese. Johnson (2016), citing Smith, experimentally verified this hypothesis.
Johnson (2016) interpreted her experimental results using Smith's (2015) conjecture that mice love cheese.

If you want to be critical rather than 'mindless' about Johnson's interpretation of the result, just offer alternative interpretations (with additional citations). However, if the original interpretation is plausible, and if the issue is not the focus of your paper, it's okay just to follow Johnson (and thereby Smith).

What about succinct "Mice were found to eat cheese (Smith, 2015; Johnson, 2016)"?

@Lobachev, sure. However, I thought OP wanted to emphasize specifically that Johnson had an experimental result and used Smith's theory to interpret it.

If you restate the ideas from Y about X without making it clear that is what you are doing, then it is not mindless copying but plagiarism. If you need the ideas, make it clear where they come from.
A short explanation of the relationship between X and Y will not be a problem, and indeed is possibly necessary.
If you want to add a longer discussion of what X says about Y, you should make sure this plays an integral part in the 'story' in your review, and you should give enough details for your work to be basically stand-alone. If you just reproduce ideas that could otherwise be left out, that might reasonably be considered mindless copying, and you should instead direct the reader to Y instead.
In any case, make sure you check X to see if Y is reporting on it accurately. It is not unheard of for one paper to incorrectly use another.

"In any case, make sure you check X to see if Y is reporting on it accurately.  It is not unheard of for one paper to incorrectly use another." I strongly agree with this. Secondary citations should be avoided as much as possible. An author may misquote something, use it in the wrong context, or interpret it incorrectly.

You can write: "In paper [y], [x] was cited to justify their results [optionally: by the following line of arguments: ...]". If you want to elaborate more on the content of [x], you should do that in your own words.


text:
Writing a review article on a similar topic already published by other authors
There is already one review article on a topic of interest published few years ago. I want to write a review paper on that broad topic with some new insights.Can I cite the papers that are already used in that older review article?? Or should I only use the newer research articles which were available after the publication of the older review article??

It would help to explain WHY you are writing a literature review on a topic that has been so recently treated. A similar (but not duplicate) questions asks the question you didn't ask but should clarify: SHOULD you do such a review at all? https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11666/a-systematic-review-already-exists-in-the-literature-when-is-a-newer-one-requir. I'm not saying you shouldn't; I'm rather saying that it is hard to helpfully answer you without understanding your reasons.

If you're writing a new comprehensive review on the same subject you'll probably end up citing many of the same references. To be explicit, yes, you are allowed to, and supposed to, cite relevant literature. Suppose instead that your review article focuses on newer developments, or some specific aspect. Then you can refer the reader to the old review paper, and include references to the most important papers therein. No matter the form you choose, I would be very surprised to see two reviews in the same field with zero overlap in choice of references.
A related question is when a new review is justified. There's a nice discussion in
A systematic review already exists in the literature. When is a newer one required?

Of course you can cite papers that are used in the older review article. But if the older review is well done, it should dispense you from reading most of them. And therefore also from citing most of them. On the other hand, if your viewpoint differs from the older review's in some respects, then you may have to do your own synthesis of some of these papers, and therefore to cite them.


text:
Should patents be included in review articles?
If so, then how should one reproduce the patented drawings in the review articles without any copyright (IPR) violation ??

yes. And do you really have to reproduce them?

Yes..I need to show the experimental setup they have used.

see https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18256/how-to-reuse-a-figure-from-a-patent-is-it-free-to-reuse?

Yes, everything relevant should be included.
For citation ruels see How to reuse a figure from a patent? Is it free to reuse? .


text:
What is the minimum number of research articles that must be cited to write a review article?
I have extensively researched about a new area as part of my Doctoral research and want to write and publish a review article in some Science Citation Indexed (SCI) journal. But the problem is that there are only about 20 articles published till date  on this new area. I have seen many review papers on other areas published in SCI journals and found that normally the number of cited and referenced articles are quite high (sometimes even above 300 papers). And then there are non-SCI  journals where review papers are having very less number of cited and referenced articles (20-50 or more).

if you are talking about the same area then it will be the same articles that were reviewed by the other reviewer as per your other question : https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/104061/review-article-in-an-area-already-published-few-years-ago

@Solar Mike The two questions are not interlinked.

So you are telling us that you have two narrow areas of interest in your research...

The minimum papers you need to review will depend on two things:

Your research the field (which might be relatively small or large)
The depth vs breadth of your review

In computer science, there have been quality review papers in highly respected venues which only focus on around 10 papers, but where the review lacked in breadth, it made up for in depth, which can be more important if you are looking to make a valuable contribution to the field.
An example is this paper published in TSE.

The paper (link) you provided has 66 references though only 10 papers were shortlisted after 'inclusion/ exclusion' (as per the abstract).

Then 66 is a LOT less than the 300 you mention.

@NumeroUno : That is correct but as implied in the answer, the number of papers cited to conduct the actual review is 10. I was under the impression that you were asking about the number of papers used to compose the dataset for the review and its analyses, which is what influences the quality and depth of your review, and thus, your scientific contribution.

Your article needs to be interesting, the number of articles is secondary. If a field is very new than a review of a few articles could be interesting. However, if there are only 20 artcles it could also mean it is just too early to take stock, and your sub-sub-field is not ready for a review article yet. The purpose of a review article is to find partial answers on which there is some form of consensus, and identify open questions and new directions of research. Is your field sufficiently ripe for that?
Also look outside your discipline. It may be that there is a longstanding research tradition dealing with that issue in another discipline.

Asides the depth of what would be discussed, the area and its level of maturity, the quality of the survey and the definition of its scope also matters. A number of recent and well known literature can be considered while highlighting major strengths and limitations of each proposal as well as new interesting insights that could be considered in the future. The point is that the contribution of the paper should be glaring to the reader of the paper. Also, it may be highly required to properly define the criterion for choosing the articles you are considering if you have chosen a sub-set of literature from a particular scope. This should also reflect in the title and (or) abstract of your paper. Another very important point is the style of organizing your survey paper. For instance with 20 main references you can still write a survey with over 80 references. The other 60 references could be used to strengthen specific points within the paper as well as other secondary issues of importance within the paper. In this case, it is highly recommended you show the readers what value can be derived from those 20 references by showing a summary table with strengths and limitations, salient differences, metrics, qualitative/quantitative comparison etc. or illustrations and charts, all leading to more intuitive questions to be answered in the future.


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Is there a citation network crawler [tool] for building a bibliography?
Is there a service/software where I can feed a bibliography, say in BibTex format, and I get all “Cited By” references as a response? In other words, is there an automated “Cited By” crawler?
Background:
I'm currently hunting down case reports about a rare disease, because I need more cases for a dataset (yes, about medicine).
At the moment, I am filling up my Zotero Library by manually walking through Google Scholar's "Cited By" feature. The first day of doing so was expectedly productive. Within a few hours, the article count went up very fast. But right now, each "Cited By" page yields one or two new articles and I have about 114 articles to go. That, in itself is great, because it tells me that I might have visited most articles within the citation network. However, towards this end, I need double-check for duplicates all the time and it's very time consuming. I find myself scrolling through entries, or searching, checking whether I might already have added a paper, or not.
This is so tedious.
The very reason to continue simply is the occasional discovery of a new cluster of case reports that were not referenced by the previous one—and I really need a larger number of cases for the analysis.
I wonder whether I should stop here and look at — Mendeley — PubMed etc.
but I'm not sure whether this would cut time or assure the coverage of most of the citation networks.
Suggestions, very welcomed.

I really don't understand what you're asking. The best I can make out is that your current challenge is having to manually resolve duplicates. If that's the issue, then just import everything regardless and then use Zotero's duplicate resolution folder to clean up the dataset afterwards (you can search online how to use it; I use it quite a bit and it works great). If your challenge is more involved then that, then please revise your question for clarity, and then you might get more helpful answers.

Changed, as suggested. Thanks for getting back.

Your revised first paragraph is nothing like what your original question seemed like, so the revision was very necessary. Unfortunately, I have no idea about a ready-made tool for this. I've written custom R scripts that could do something similar, though not iterative crawling. The problem, though, with Google Scholar is that there's no API and web crawlers get blocked after 50 or fewer results are returned. Web of Science, though, has an API.

Some options here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13329/map-tree-of-citations-references

This can certainly get tedious, and searching in both directions (i.e., using the "cited by" entries) is certainly the way to go.  That said, if you start at your university library, especially a medical library, you will have access to tools that are tailor-made to do medical searches, like Medline.
If you're having issues, by all means, go talk to a librarian.  Their job is to help people like you get their jobs done.  They absolutely love to do it, and they're usually very good at it.
To put things in perspective, though, 15 years ago the only way to do what you're trying to do is to wade through hard copies of the Scientific Citation Index and photocopy the articles after finding them in the Medical library stacks. (i.e., -- we used to walk thirty miles to and from work, uphill both ways!)

Kudos on recommending going to an academic librarian. They love to help with this kind of thing.

Certainly there are. Data Cite offers such services https://mds.datacite.org/.
Yet, you might not need to pay for such service, must probably your academic institution's library has a platform and an API that can be queried for the data you are looking for.
Many universities in the US rely on exlibris.com for their libraries' platform. Here is their API's website. https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/apis. I employed it recently to retrieve metadata from  2500+ publications. It took a few days to write the code and 15 minutes to get the dataset.
So do not just ask the librarian, ask also the library's data scientists (they might be the same persons).

Have you tried this tools?
https://whocites.com/
It can help you to build an author and citation network directly from google scholar.


text:
Find a specific paper on information retrieval method supporting literature research searching not by keywords but by documents
About 2012, I did a literature research on the following topic but unfortunately lost my results. Specifically one paper comes repeatedly to my mind, therefore maybe someone knows about this or subsequent research.
The research question of that paper was about information retrieval, specifically full text mining of scientific literature to automate literature research.
The researchers built a custom spider/search engine which takes as input not a set of keywords but set of documents.
They described that this approach allowed them to find relevant branches of research they were not aware of.
Which paper was it and/or what is state of the art regarding this topic?

I can't. The question is about specific paper.

This is a "content of research" question and should be closed.

This is probably not the older article that you are looking for, but a colleague of mine published an article that shows how to identify the most relevant literature using free biblilometric tools such as VOSviewer. That is, by beginning with a topic search on a citation database (e.g. Scopus or Web of Science), you can identify the most relevant body of literature based on cocitations and other bibliometrics:

Walsh, I., & Renaud, A. (2017). Reviewing the literature in the IS field: Two bibliometric techniques to guide readings and help the interpretation of the literature. Systèmes d’Information et Management. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316560668_Reviewing_the_literature_in_the_IS_field_Two_bibliometric_techniques_to_guide_readings_and_help_the_interpretation_of_the_literature

Perhaps you'll get lucky and the original article you're looking for might be in their reference list.


text:
Offering of a grad class rescinded for incomprehensible reason
A course came up that I was interested in (C*algebras). It's a grad class but was offered to a select group of undergrads including myself. I accepted the offer but then once the class started I received an email saying the following:
"Dear XXX,
I have just noticed that you have not completed Math 311. I think it would be a terrible idea for you to be doing the operator algebra course before completing that. It would also be irresponsible of me to let you do it. This isn't really dependent on why you didn't complete the course. The appearance alone would make me look bad.
Best, XXX"
I replied that I have 100% on all but one assignment and an A+ on the midterm. I haven't yet taken the final but it will be scheduled by the end of the semester. (I couldn't take the exam for health reasons that he knows of.)
He knows I am an A+ student and has given me 2 A+'s in the 2 classes I have taken with him. I tried speaking with the instructor of the Math 311 course and asked him to speak with said prof to see if he could convince him that I know the material but I'm not sure how that will go.
I don't know why this prof would rescind the invitation when we seemed to have previously had a good rapport. The prof does know that this would be my 6th class for the term which may be a contributing factor. (4th at 4th year or above)
Is there anything else I can do to increase my chance of getting into this class?
Also I don't want to damage my relationship with this prof further as I hoped to ask them to do a summer research project.

It seems to me that the reason is pretty clear in the mail you got. On paper it will not look good that the professor allowed you to take a course which you were not (on paper) qualified for, and therefore the professor has decided to protect his own reputation in the department.

Was the option to take the course offered to you by verbal or written invitation? Have you taken your case to the Department Chair?

@TobiasKildetoft Reading the case and following your conjecture, the question we should ask is, was the approach unethical. The instructor granted an option to take the course, and then took it away. The rejection letter is full of conjecture and self-remorse ("I think ..." "It would not be ..." "... make me look bad"). It has little to no objectivity. When the case has truly followed the path as presented, I fear the instructor has let pride or arrogance or self-doubt get in the way of being true to original offer. If so, I would hold, the instructor deserves a rebuke.

@Faust How many classes are typical for a term?

For a math student typically 3 on rare occasions 4.

The invitation was verbal but it's a Moore class and I was assigned problems

His reason is is not incomprehensible.  When you were invited you were taking math 311 and it was assumed you would complete it.  The may be some strict rules.

Look, the thing with these kinds of questions is that process varies significantly from institution to institution based on their regulations, bylaws, etc.  I actually agree with the instructor's decision, even though the email is unprofessional.  It is usually not allowed for a student to take a course in which they have not yet completed the prerequisite for that course.
Having said this, there may be a solution.  In many institutions, exceptions like these are handled by a specific entity such as the Faculty Council, the Department Council, the Vice-Dean for Undergraduate Studies, the Vice-Dean for Graduate Studies, the Faculty Dean, etc. Since I don't know your institution, I can't begin to say which one of these would be the proper route to take, but typically a request or a petition could be sent to the responsible body, and they would then study it and make a decision based on your unique circumstances.
My advice in this situation would not be to get upset, nor to talk about how the reason was "incomprehensible" or anything along these lines.  I would say you that you should write a letter/email/petition to whomever is responsible in your faculty and ask that an exception can be made based on the circumstances and situation that you pointed out in your question.  Talking with the instructor of the Math 311 course probably won't help because technically, the professor of the Grad course is simply following proper university procedures and guidelines. if you are close with the instructor of the Grad course that you want to take and are familiar with him, I would say that you should talk to him in person, and ask him about what the official channels would be for getting this exception and see if he would support you in this.
Don't attack. Don't accuse. Don't get upset. Just try to find out the solution that complies with all relevant bylaws and regulations.  That is my humble advice.

Ask him if you can at least audit the grad class, and if he would allow you to hand in any assignments and take any exams and be graded on them, informally and not for credit. And ask him if he will allow you to register back to his class later if and when you successfully complete the Math 311 prerequisite requirements and in that case have the grades you received up to that point be counted as official. (Since this may happen late in the semester, you will want to check with your department/major adviser to make sure this would be allowed. Most institutions have a registration deadline of some sort, and you may need to file a special petition and get it approved to pull off a maneuver of this type.)
This proposal seems so reasonable that I can’t think of a reason why he would refuse. At the very least, it seems to undermine his “irresponsible/makes me look bad” argument. Allowing a student to audit a class does not make anyone look bad or irresponsible, ever.
Good luck!


text:
Is it acceptable that I plot a time-series figure with years increasing from right to left?
I have a plot like this in my paper, but one of the co-authors says The x-axis is backward. I think as long as keeping all figures in the same style, it is ok. But I am not sure if there is really such a rule that years should increase from left to right? My field is environmental science.

@SolarMike: OP's current version of the image increases right to left, but she wants to know if there is a rule that it should go left to right instead.

@NateEldredge reviewer seems to think so...

Can you explain any benefit of doing it this way increasing right to left?

.tsael ta ,lanoitnevnocnu s'tI

Do you think it would be confusing to have the y-axis go from 100% at the bottom to 0% at the top?

You could change the label of the X axis from years to "years ago". However, that's generally only reasonable in fields like like paleontology and geology, where the units are thousands or millions of years. When you're dealing with individual years, making it relative to "now" changes the meaning as the paper gets old.

Could you clarify why you think the years should be in descending order like that? Doing so might elicit an answer that more directly addresses your particular situation.

If I saw a chart like this, my first instinct would be to assume that left is past and right is present/future, and once I got around to reading the year numbers, my next instinct would be to assume that you're trying to trick people.

One more thing you might consider - change the X axis labels to multiples of 10.  It's just weird having axis labels that all end with 2 or 7.

@DawoodibnKareem, if she only has data at 5 year intervals ending with in 2 and 7, she really doesn't have a choice.

@CramerTV The data seem to vary considerably more rapidly than at 5-year intervals.

@CramerTV the graph above appears to have data for every year.  But even if she did only have data from years ending in 2 or 7, she could still label the axis with multiples of 10, in which case the data points would fall BETWEEN the tick marks on the axis, rather than directly above them.

@JMac There is a long tradition of y axes going top to bottom in various fields. For instance, the coordinates on the computer screen you are looking at (computer graphics).

@Barmar: this is a good idea, but the numbers should be relative then (from 0 to 117 in OP's case). There would be no confusion there, but as you rightly mention the paper may get stale quickly (or at least the graphs)

In geology, I see both. Increasing age, or decreasing age (=time). Just be clear and label the axis (as you do!).

"With increasing age, this happens..." can make it more logical to plot years as in your example.

In which language is the paper written? Maybe in RTL languages charts are plotted RTL too?

@Bakuriu another user posted this as a comment on one of the answers "In a right to left language, Cartesian coordinates are the same. x goes up from left to right."

The "rule" is that you should create figures that make it easy for readers to understand what you are showing. That's because we use figures to convey information. So, if your choice of axis is confusing readers, then you've violated the rule. Looking at your figure, I find it confusing, and several of the others here appear to have had the same reaction.
So yes, in this sense, there is a "rule" that years should increase left-to-right unless you have a very specific reason to it the other way around, and that reason is to make something easier to understand -- for example, if you were talking about what someone would experience who is traveling backward in time.

Perhaps if this were the year of birth, and you're looking at something that correlates to the age of the person.  But then it should be labeled by age (ascending) not birth year (descending).

I think readers will be strongly expecting that time increases from left to right in a graph.  It's probably not a "rule" that you'll find written down anywhere, but it's certainly the overwhelmingly common practice. Having time go from right to left will very likely confuse your readers, and I don't think it should be done unless there is a very strong reason for it.

In a right to left language, Cartesian coordinates are the same. x goes up from left to right.

@QuoraFeans: Thanks!

@QuoraFeans That seems to be typically true for plotting on a Cartesian X-Y scale, though it isn't always true that the direction for time is the same for all types of charts and data. For example, my Hebrew-speaking colleagues have their (Gregorian) calendars organized such that time travels from right to left. At https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72562/is-the-mental-model-of-time-advancing-to-the-right-in-charts-globally-accepted one answer mentions that in Arabic, charts with a time axis can be RTL (though I see contradictions elsewhere).

@BryanKrause I've seen diagrams on placards in Israel where time was indeed right-to-left. Which, not being a Hebrew speaker myself, was confusing at first.

As others have already pointed out: The convention is that the numbers should increase from left to right. And even though it's not really a rule, but only a convention, it is so common that any deviation might be hard to justifiy.

However, it might be the case that you're just using inappropriate labels. You mentioned that your field is environmental science, but did not exactly say what the graph shows. For example, if your graph shows information about something like "How much of a certain substance that was emitted in year X can still be detected today", then the order might make sense. But then, the labels should be "The number of years that have passed", turning the absolute years into a duration, then being properly ordered:
^
|
|
+-------|----------------|------------...-----------------|----------->
  after 1 year    after 10 years      ...          after ~100 years
  (from 2017)      (from 2007)                      (from 1917)

(That's only a wild guess, based on wondering why you chose the "wrong" direction in the first place - but you might think about it...)

actually, you had it all guessed right, amazing.... but I think I will just go with the others, and change my figures to the conventional style....thank you so much!

Carbon dating springs to mind, anything with a half life, or of epoch scale, and especially a log scale back to a cosmological event. Estimation of the historical distance to the moon. These have been cases.

It is most common to increase chronologically from left to right any time you plot a timeseries along an x-axis, so that would be the standard unless you have a good reason not to do it that way. You are certainly allowed to do it differently - but you should have a good reason.
If you didn't do it that way a reader will tend to assume there must be some specific reason you chose to do it in a non-standard way. Alternatively, they will assume this must be done in the usual way so many readers will initially interpret it as if it was done in the usual way.
For your example image, even though I knew to pay attention to the x-axis, I initially thought there was a decrease in whatever you were studying over time. It took me a few extra moments to go, "oh, right, its the other way around, so I have to flip the trend...so it's actually been increasing over time, yes?"
One way to think of it is: readers are accustomed to being right-ward facing, wondering what comes next in the series. If you were trying to estimate what the past must have been like, based on more recent times, then it makes sense to start with the most recent time period on the left. If you are trying to imagine how things will be in the future, it makes more sense to start with the oldest time period and work towards the future on the right of the scale.

The problem is that axes usually can be thought of a having an origin at 0 and extend from there in negative or positive directions. Normally on a horizontal axis the positive direction is to the right and negative is to the left.  So moving from left to right moves to higher numbers. Of course time series plots don't usually show year 0, but you might want to think about where the origin (x=0) would be on your graph.   It's true that this is really just a convention and probably one enforced by people who are used to left to right languages (not to mention people who think maps should have north at the top).

This is the right answer.  Maybe people who grow up with RTL languages think that positive numbers increment from RTL, but people who grow up with a left-to-right language definitely think that numbers increment to the right.

Would you explain what maps having north at the top is supposed to have to do with this?

Having maps with north at the top, east to the right is a convention many people are used to, but it's arbitrary.  That's why people notice it and are sometimes confused when maps are oriented in other ways, i.e. with south at the top.  So it's the same issue as having your axes go right to left (and up meaning higher number on the y axis).

@Elin As I wrote in another comment, numbers going up in the y axis are much less universal as a convention. For instance, computer screen coordinates go top to bottom, and so do row indices in a matrix.

Yes those are good examples,  although I would say that indices in a matrix  are not representing a number line so they aren't axes (although sometimes people use them that way, probably usually as the x axis).

Just saying: 1H and 13C-NMR spectroscopy orient the increasing scale about «chemical shift» from the right to the left, as chemists equally do about locating absorption bands by wavenumbers in infrared / IR spectroscopy (left: high number, right lower number).  The convention «left = low, right = high number» then is typically followed in mass spectrometry as well as in Raman and UV-Vis spectroscopy even if for the two later the colleagues from physics sometimes disagree, too.

Backwards graphs are fairly common in some circles:

Source

Is it acceptable?

If the paper is written in a right-to-left language - then yes, but then - please also place the Y axis labels on the right side of the figure.
Otherwise, it's only appropriate if:

you have a reason to plot your figures like this, and
you clearly indicate, graphically, the direction of progression along the X axis, with text or graphics or both, e.g.

(ugly PNG image, but you catch my drift); and it wouldn't hurt to switch the Y-axis labels to the right right in this case as well.

A graph axis is a (segment of a) number line.  Numbers increase to the right on a number line.  Not all variables are numerical and therefore not all variables support axes: categorical variables are a prominent example.
The first thing readers notice about your graph (even before meaningfully looking at it) is that there is a decreasing trend.  Do you intend to convey that some quantity is decreasing?  If so, then this graph conveys your intent.
Only after carefully inspecting the horizontal axis does a reader discover that you have a non-numerical independent variable (because your labels are not in number line order).  Do you intend to treat years as non-numerical data?  If so, then this graph conveys your intent.