text:
How to avoid thinking about research in free time?
I work on research, trying to get grants and publish papers and the like, I really like my job, could not think about doing anything else. When the weekend comes, or just free time I have the problem that I can not stop thinking on research, it does not matter what. Sometimes it is that I feel so relaxed during the weekend that new ideas come to my mind and then I can not avoid to write them down or think a bit more about them. My wife obviously does not like this, but I try my best.
Do you experience the same and do you know how to avoid this?

What is free time?

Please Don't avoid it

It's slightly ironic that this question was posted on a Sunday, and had multiple answers within minutes.

I'd be more interested in knowing how to avoid thinking about my free time during my research hours.

@NateEldredge StackExchange is free time :)

there are very interesting comments (apart from the answer here). My proposal here now is; we could write together a small paper about this and publish it in some venue like "research papers in education", what do you think? people interested please send me an email to werner.schroedinger@googlemail.com

@seteropere Why? Overthinking about our problems makes us sick...

@EnthusiasticStudent see my answer below: How to avoid thinking about research in your free time

@flow I don't understand you proposal idea. Can you make it clearer?

@flow did you ever put that paper together?

This reminds me of "Dreaming Is a Private Thing", by Isac Asimov........" I can't tell you where I get my ideas. Can you tell me, maybe, your trick of NOT getting ideas, so I, too, can have a little peace."

I agree with @PeterJanson's answer, but I'd like to add my 2 cents on it:
Often, I find myself "constantly" thinking about a problem when I'm stuck or I'm not sure how to approach it.  Often, it's because I've got tunnel vision on the problem.  That is, I'm only thinking about it from a limited number of perspectives and can't think of other possible approaches to the problem.  I used to spend long hours thinking about a problem (even outside of normal work hours) without ever really getting anywhere on it.
When that happens, I find it's good to pursue other activities that stimulate my brain to think outside of the box.  That could be anything from reading semi-related research papers to playing video games to engaging in stand up comedy!  When I challenge my brain to approach other problems from new perspectives, I find those same skills help loosen my brain to engage in research in new ways as well.
While I never really stop thinking about research, I find these other activities help me engage in research with fresh eyes and renewed energy.  And ultimately, that has lead me to better research results and liberates me from "overthinking" the problem during my leisure time.

I believe it comes with the territory. Since being involved in research means exercising your imagination and intellect, it is hard to stop the stimulation. I personally have no problems relaxing from my research when I do other stimulating activities such as hobbies. I personally do not find thinking about my research much of a problem but I have noticed that I have a tendency to start thinking more about my science when I am in the company of what I might consider dull people. That will probably make me seem dull too!
I try to look at it, and explain it, by comparing with an elite athlete, you need to keep at it constantly to be on top. Many can see and appreciate the (intellectual) similarities.

You don't ever stop thinking, much in the way that you shouldn't tell someone to stop feeling sad/angry/upset/whatever. But, if there are actions you're doing that interrupt your relationships with others, you can take steps to try to reduce the effect of these actions.
Instead of trying to not think about research, I would try to curb activities that you may act upon as a result of thinking about research.

Keep a notebook on you that you can quickly write your thoughts down in. Dump your brain in about a minute and then move on with whatever you're supposed to be doing. The key word here is quickly - you don't want this to turn into a five minute exercise.
Concentrate heavily on what you're currently doing and focus. Easier said than done, but the key is not to let yourself get distracted with your thoughts. Even if you're not fully focused, try your best to appear focused.
Limit your discussions about research with others if they're not interested in them.
Excuse yourself if you want to think or write more in a way that might appear rude or inappropriate to others. Thus, rather than trying to write things down extensively while in the middle of a nice dinner, excuse yourself, go to the washroom, and write things down there. If you're out walking and get a great idea that you want to think about, ask to stop for a break and think then.

I think the key point here is to differentiate the things that you can control (your actions) compared to things that are much more difficult to control (your thoughts) and to ensure that your behaviors are not disturbing others. Take time for yourself too!

This kind of thinking about your work is typical if a) you like your job, and b) you do work that involves a lot of creativity. Going with the flow of your mood can help greatly in getting work done as doing creative work when you feel inspired goes much much faster. Ofcourse, a big danger is that the lines between personal life and work become vague, and you turn into a work-a-holic (if this is a bad thing entirely depends on you).
It seems that you yourself do not have a problem with this, and that it is mainly the people around you that experience it as a problem. This is imo best dealt with by communication. Setting some ground rules together with your spouse about when you act on your creativity may lessen the irritation she experiences from it.
For example, you could organise it like this: when you feel 'the urge' you can propose to your spouse that you take some time to work out a problem. She than has an opportunity to say no ("we have to go to the store/beach/parents", or "you haven't spent a lot of time with the kids today"). Of course, in a healthy balance she will also sometimes allow you to follow your urges.

A large part of the motivation to be a scientist, or a researcher, is to exercise your curiosity and let it drive you. I find that I very often thing about “research” in daily life, but not necessarily of “my day-job research”. To some extent, it is a way of thinking and approaching daily life. So, there are many non-academic research projects that can occupy one's mind, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Trying to find symmetry patterns in wallpaper or train departure times, doing a side experiment with your curry to see what is the maximal concentration of peppers one can reasonably ingest, whatever.
(A comment more than an answer, but a rather long one. Sorry!)

You will never escape this, and
for the sake of your research, don't.
We need to look at the core of the problem: your brain function. Cindi May, Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston, wrote an article about this in Scientific American:

If your task requires strong focus and careful concentration - like balancing spreadsheets or reading a textbook - you are better off scheduling that task for your peak time of day. However, if you need to open your mind to alternative approaches and consider diverse options, it may be wise to do so when your filter is not so functional.

In short, the best time for your brain to think about the research is your free time!
Remember Archimedes? He solved his problem when he was relaxing during the bath. It's the same as us today. You got the idea when you eat, when you take a shower, when you about to sleep, when you hanging out with your boy/girlfriend. Sure, the Eureka moment only comes when you have arduously been working, but it's not likely to come when you are working.
 If you have an Eureka when you are taking a bath, try to calm down a little bit :D
Unfortunately, a research requires both two things at different time: strong focus and careful concentration, and alternative approaches and consider diverse options. So it means you will likely to be a workaholic.
But the Eureka only comes when it's truly your free time, when your, erm, brain is truly relaxed. It is very frustrating for us to halt the power flood of idea that coming to our brains. But it is also hard for us to stop the current activity to rush into the lab. I will call this the Researcher's dilemma.
So, how to solve the dilemma?
I honestly don't have any efficient solution. It just up to you and up to the situation to solve this. But I think taking note is the most efficient one. You see, once you finally have a new approach, you can wait for your next morning to have your peak time of day to have strong focus and careful concentration.

Source: The Inspiration Paradox: Your Best Creative Time Is Not When You Think . Also, to find your peak time of the day, you can take the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire. Note that the research about this is pretty old (1976).


text:
How should references in non-Latin script language be treated in English paper?
Let's say I want to cite a Russian text in my own paper which is written in English. Should I:

reference it as is, in the original Cyrillic alphabet, although the readers won't be able even to pronounce it?
transliterate the authors' names, while keeping the rest as is?
transliterate the names and translate the title of the work, journal name, etc. into English?

Would the answer to this question differ between alphabets which mix fairly well with Latin (Greek, Cyrillic) and those which don't (Arabic, Thai)?

@TRiG: I am not sure I recognize why the former ones would "mix" any better with Latin than the latter ones.

Well, @O.R.Mapper. The Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets (and the Cherokee syllabary) all use letters which "match". They are the same sizes; the shapes are of roughly the same degree of complexity. A word or two in one alphabet on a page mainly in another would not stand out at a glance. Arabic and Thai (also Chinese, which isn't an alphabet) use completely different patterns to form the shapes of the letters. Thai is taller than Latin, for example. Arabic is considerably more calligraphic. Hebrew is squarer than Arabic, and would probably match better (apart from being RTL).

@TRiG I don't think aesthetics have anything to do with this. It is a question of being able to convey the information.

@TRiG: Personally, I have always found especially Cyrillic text to stand out notably from Latin text, as well, but anyway, as those considerations are merely aesthetical, I tend to disregard them if there are any more practical reasons for including the original texts (such as unequivocally finding the original publication or authors).

In general, this would depend on the style prescribed by your publisher (journal, conference, etc.) For instance, a blog post cites the Chicago style manual explains how one should go about sources in Chinese and Japanese:

10.108: Inclusion of original characters
Chinese and Japanese characters, immediately following the romanized version of the item they represent, are sometimes necessary to help readers identify references cited or terms used. They are largely confined to bibliographies and glossaries. Where needed in running text, they may be enclosed in parentheses. Computer technology has made it much easier than it used to be to typeset words in non-Latin alphabets.
Hua Linfu 華林甫, “Qingdai yilai Sanxia diqu shuihan zaihai de chubu yanjiu” 清代以來三峽地區水旱災害的初步硏究 [A preliminary study of floods and droughts in the Three Gorges region since the Qing dynasty], Zhongguo shehui kexue 中國社會科學 1 (1999): 168–79 . . .
Harry Harootunian and Sakai Naoki, “Nihon kenkyū to bunka kenkyū” 日本研究と文化研究, Shisō 思想 7 (July 1997): 4–53.
That year the first assembly of the national Diet was held and the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo 敎育勅語) issued.

And:

11.89: Titles of Japanese and Chinese works Chapter Contents / Languages Usually Transliterated (or Romanized) / Chinese and Japanese
As in English, titles of books and periodicals are italicized, and
titles of articles are set in roman and enclosed in quotation marks
(see 8.156–201). The first word of a romanized title is always
capitalized, as are many proper nouns (especially in Japanese).
Chen Shiqi, Mingdai guan shougongye de yanjiu [Studies on
government-operated handicrafts during the Ming dynasty], . . .
Hua Linfu, “Qingdai yilai Sanxia diqu shuihan zaihai de chubu yanjiu” [A
preliminary study of floods and droughts in the Three Gorges region
since the Qing dynasty], Zhongguo shehui kexue 1 (1999): 168–79.
Okamoto Yoshitomo, Jūrokuseiki Nichi-Ō kōtsūshi no kenkyū [Study of
the intercourse between Japan and Europe during the sixteenth
century], . . .
Akiyama Kenzō, “Goresu wa Ryūkyūjin de aru” [The Gores
are Ryūkyūans], Shigaku-Zasshi (or Shigaku Zasshi) . . .

In summary, in Chicago style the format for article title is: transliterated/Romanized version (in double quotes), original script version, and English translation (in square brackets). The format for Hua author names and journal titles is: transliterated/Romanized version followed by original script version, with no English translation.
Harvard style and reference guide requires a translation, followed by the original name:

Milani, F. (2001) The Phantom of the Opera. [Le Fantome De L’Opera] Paris, LeRoux.

In APA Style, the order is reversed: translation goes last, transliteration goes first, and the original script is not used:

Motoki, S. (Producer), & Kurosawa, A. (Director). (1954). Shichinin no samurai [Seven samurai; motion picture]. Japan: Toho.

FYI: This is rather painful to do in (La)TeX, but relatively straightforward in Xe(La)TeX, which has native Unicode support built-in.  BibTeX is Unicode-ignorant, so it also works just fine (as far as I can tell).

The first example there, Hua Linfu, is Chinese with Chinese pinyin romanization. The second and third are Japanese.

I will just add to good Alexander Serebrenik's answer. The main point of references is to provide traceable sources to information. This means the translation of the title and journal are key. The title provides insights into the content of the paper and the journal makes it traceable. All journals have different "standards" for how to do this in detail. It is also common that articles in French, German, and/or Spanish are not translated (again local "rules"). It is not common to see, for example, cyrillic in references, instead translitteration seems to be the most common. Again, there should be "rules" about this in each journal and so the best appraoch is to contact the journal editor and ask if no explicit information is available.
Here is an example of how journals may wish to see the references:

Author(s), year. Title in original language (if possible) [Title translated into English]. Publication name in original language (if possible) [Publication name translated into English]. Volume/issue/page information (according to type of publication). [In ‘language’]

and as an example:

Krenke, A.N. and Khodakov, V.G., 1966. O svyasi povercknostnogo tayaniya lednikov s temperaturoy vozdukha [On the relationship between melt of glaciers and air temperature]. Materialy Glyatsiologicheskikh Issledovaniy [Data of Glaciological Studies], 12. 153–163. [In Russian]

I think I cannot follow your line of reasoning, or maybe I misunderstand your text. Translating the title and journal name to the paper language provides some superficial insight into what the reference is about, but other than that, providing (exclusively) a translation makes traceability worse. A document certainly can best be found if its original title is known, rather than a translation thereof.

@O.R.Mapper You of course cannot provide only the translation.

@yo': My word, but the statement "the translation of the title and journal are key. The title provides insights into the content of the paper and the journal makes it traceable." in this answers seems to claim otherwise.

It is not a perfect world. In the Russian example above there is a Russian text with latin letters but if you consider a title in, for example, Japaneese or Chineese, then typesetting the original title with original typography would be quite cumbersome and hence it is rarely, if ever, done. I am not saying it should not be done but in reality the transalted text would typically be the only text appearing in the reference.

@PeterJansson I think "translation" and "transliteration" may be a problem here. I would be inclined to provide at least a transliteration of the title, if possible. Well, another thing is, if you identify the journal really well, then the title is optional, so ...

I don't see any reason to transliterate Cyrillic titles (aside from inability to typeset in Cyrillic, which today seems unlikely). The original language is better for tracing the paper. If you know Russian, you can presumably read Cyrillic and if you don't know Russian, the transliteration will be totally meaningless.

source: Stack Exchange

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

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

sort: votes


text:
Is it OK to refuse to cite paywalled papers?
I wonder how reviewers would react if authors of a submitted paper refuse to cite paywalled papers. Is it a valid reason to refuse citing some papers?
I am mostly interested in the field of computer science, and English-speaking venues.

Well it certainly won't go down well if you're submitting to a paywall'd journal ;)

IMO by failing to cite someone's work, I think you'd be doing the authors a disservice rather than the publisher.

Will you also refuse to cite papers published only in paper form, where you have to subscribe to see them?

Maybe just add the information to the citation: (currently paywalled).

This may be a novel idea to the young folks, but the traditional way one could go and read a journal article was to get out of your chair, go to the library, and get the journal.  If it's not there, you can request the library borrow it from another that does.  Even if you're not affiliated with a local university, members of the public can usually get library access for either free or close to free.  What you're paying for is convenience more than access - the paywall is rather less daunting than you're making it out to be.  Protesting inconvenience is not likely going to get you very far.

@BenCrowell ... In my own field (mathematics) we frequently refer to papers written before the invention of the Internet.  Some of them have been digitized by now, but far from all.

I don't see how you could possibly cite them, since I assume you also refuse to read paywalled papers.

Yes, the whole premise of the question already grants that there's a game being played requiring some hypocrisy... E.g., if "you" read paywalled stuff but then act as though it doesn't exist... that is surely beyond unethical to simple dishonesty.

@J... people on this site have strong opinions against going to the library. Apparently, an inter-library loan is a form of obscurantism.

@J... I would protest inconvenience, but I can't find anywhere to fit that into my schedule...

+1 And what about the non-paywalled papers that cite paywalled papers?  Maybe the OP should refuse to read them too.

Do the non-paywalled papers cite paywalled papers?  If so, then maybe you shouldn't cite these non-paywalled papers, too.

It is absolutely possible to cite a paper while explaining in the main text that you were not able to access it for one or another reason (or that you were not able to understand it for one or another reason, including language). This probably will make a better political statement than not citing it.

(Another way to make a statement is to thank the authors of the paywalled papers for providing you with a copy. Acknowledgments are probably the most frequently read part of a paper, so yes, this will be noticed :) )

@FranckDernoncourt: A less daring stance that you could take would be to prefer citing the author's version of papers and technical reports (on open access repositories, institutional repositories, or the authors' webpages) rather than citing the publisher version, when both are equally relevant. A related idea is to make sure that the works in your bibliography that are freely available online are given with a URL where they can be downloaded (this is surprisingly uncommon), and maybe indicate "Not freely available" for citations that cannot be accessed.

@J...
Many people don't have access to a library containing every paywalled research paper. (I know, this is shocking to some) If you build on top of paywalled material your work becomes significantly harder for many others to judge meaningfully.

@Murphy I'll say again - inter-library loan.  Any academic library will have facility to do this.  Yeah, it's a bit of work and it takes some time, but that's what research and academia are about.  It's only shockingly recently that we've become accustomed to the instant convenience of information one click away - for most of all time prior there was legwork.  If you want cheap or free access to journal articles, you do the legwork.  It's really that simple.  I'd go so far as to say it is among the chiefest of skills and job requirements for an academic.

anything we can do to discourage the disgraceful and no longer necessary tradition of making it hard for 99.9% of humanity to review research is a positive step. Hopefully the old guard will be dead soon and science as a whole will be improved.

@j... I find your assumption that every library will have such access ridiculous. It may well be possible for researchers in developed countries, but you are forgetting the countries which don't have such arrangements for whatever reason. The actions of the publishers are some of the chief reasons journal piracy websites exist.

Are not journals themselves something of a paywall? Access to a journal is (generally) not free - somewhere along the line someone is paying out some money. Arguing that one should not cite papers published in journals which require no payment is ridiculous - you'd have nothing to cite. Arguing that you should not cite papers which are not freely available is at best quixotic and at worst foolish. In order for the journals to exist they have to make money somehow. If you believe making money is a bad thing, I suggest you work for free for a while and see how it works out. Best of luck.

@BobJarvis many branches of science have already moved pretty much entirely to open access like physics did with arxiv.org . We've long passed the point where distributing copies of research papers is a significantly costly afair. It's only bad habits, bad assessment metrics for academics and elderly researchers who don't know better who are causing the harmful practice to continue.

Just to be sure... Is this question asking about refusing to reference paywalled material i.e. not use any content from it at all, or about using the material without referencing it?

@BenCrowell: somehow, in CS arxiv lacks the prestige it has in physics. Many readers don't value it, so many authors don't submit there. Worse, ACM (one important publisher) forbids putting the camera-ready text on arxiv just so.

@MarchHo If an university lacks sufficient access to literature, it might be better for one's career to do research elsewhere, especially because in such a university I'd expect on average bigger problems (say, it might lack successful scientists that can act as advisors). I don't presume that's fair, only that it might be true.

@J... This is not necessarily about protesting inconvenience; it may be about protesting a publication system that relies on publishers whose business model is being a quasi-natural monopoly and who externalize their costs to the scientific community. (Having said that, I think it's a bad idea, due to the answers below.)

@J... Is there an app that lets you browse the library remotely?

Refusing to cite relevant literature is tantamount to plagiarism. Paywall or no paywall.

What about refusing to cite at all? Would make the work much more easy! :)

@henning There is absolutely no monopoly here.  Journals are highly competitive, even.  "Freeware" alternatives can and do compete successfully. Journals provide a service - peer review management and dissemination. They charge the consumers of that service for that service - that's not "externalizing costs", that's how almost every single enterprise works on this planet.  The exceptions are those which are, in fact, monopolies (forcibly maintained by government mandate) and charities.  Charities can readily compete with free enterprise.  Want change? Start a donationware journal.

@CapeCode "people on this site have strong opinions against going to the library" -- please explain? As a librarian, I find this disturbing :(

Does this have anything to do with Sci-Hub?

@LindaJeanne I wrote my thesis in the library in order or avoid distractions from everyone else. It was highly productive.

@GEdgar What percentage of research papers have been digitalized?

The comments here seem to assume the author has read the paper and refuses to cite it, which would be unethical. But what if the author cannot access the paper due to the paywall and their financial situation? You cannot expect the author to cite a paper they cannot access.

If I was reviewing a paper, and the authors failed to cite important literature, I'd recommend rejection until the authors provided correct citations.  It's the authors' responsibility to provide appropriate references.
I assume that many other reviewers would feel the same.

Indeed. While I understand the OP's argument, you can't just ignore relevant literature..

I don't think this answers the question because the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.  If the authors refuse to cite paywalled papers but still cite appropriate sources (however unlikely this is in your field), should the refs reject the paper on principle?  I think this is what OP is asking.

@user1717828 I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you talking about a situation where an author makes some statement citing paper X (non-paywalled), but the referee believes the author should have used paper Y (paywalled) to justify that statement? If you're citing just to justify a statement, that could be fine, but citations are often used to give credit, and in that case there is no flexibility in which paper you need to cite.

I wonder how reviewers would react if authors of a submitted paper refuse to cite paywalled papers. Is it a valid reason to refuse citing some papers?

Certainly not.  There are a few areas where this could be OK; for example, if you are citing expository material for background (rather than to assign credit), then you can choose whichever sources you feel are best.
However, in many cases you have a scholarly obligation to cite papers, for example to give credit to people whose work you are building on, and there are no acceptable grounds for refusing to do so.  It's a serious form of academic misconduct, even if it is done for idealistic reasons.
If I ran across an author who refused to make necessary citations, I would be extremely displeased, and I would recommend that the paper not be published until the citations were included.  I would not fully trust that person's judgment in the future, and I would be suspicious that other papers might be missing important citations.
Instead of omitting citations, you could add some brief commentary about the lack of open access.  (Reviewers or readers might dislike it, but it's in no way academic misconduct.)  You should be very careful with that, since you could really offend an author who has made the paper available, just not where you looked.  For example, it might be in an institutional repository.  If you want to avoid giving offense but still encourage open access and help readers, you could give suitable arXiv or repository links to each paper for which you can find them.

you could really offend an author who has made the paper available - and those who haven't as well.

@DanRomik: Good point.

At what point is an author ethically justified in refusing to go through the hassle and expense of acquiring a paper that is not made accessible by the authors?

@Kenny this is not an ethics question. Authors are free to acquire or not acquire anything they wish/don't wish to, and make various other decisions. Eventually, as a result of those decisions the author will either produce high quality, useful research that other scientists will appreciate, or he/she will produce low quality, useless research. There is nothing unethical about producing useless research (assuming it's not done with fraudulent intent), but it's not good for your career. (I guess one can argue that sabotaging your own career is unethical, but I would just call it incompetence.)

@DanRomik Since the comments are not for extended discussion, we probably should not delve too much into this but I was commenting on the idea that it is a "scholarly obligation" to acquire papers but not apparently a scholarly obligation to make them accessible.

@KennyPeanuts yes I think I understand the point you were trying to make, but I disagree: I don't consider it a scholarly obligation to acquire papers, it's just something you may need to do if you want to produce good research that's relevant to the work other people in your field are doing.

@KennyPeanuts: The scholarly obligation is to cite, not to acquire.  If you are aware of a paper, you can't pretend you don't know about it just because you don't want to track down a copy or can't.  Of course citing a paper you haven't seen is awkward and can look bad.  In practice it's almost always worth the effort of tracking it down.  But the difference is that omitting the paper entirely is unethical, while citing it with an explanation that sources say it contains something but you do not have access to it is unusual but ethical.

(Incidentally, I think authors do have a scholarly obligation to make their work as widely available as reasonably possible.  But much of the world apparently disagrees, as judged by their publishing behavior.)

@AnonymousMathematician your point is well taken but the challenge is in its implementation. At one extreme, you are made aware of a paper written only in Chinese and only available in the reading room of a library in China (most reviewers would accept that it is OK to not track this one down). At the other extreme, the paper requires ILL but is available (most reviewers would say you should track this down). So there is a line somewhere between these two extremes. Where is it?

@AnonymousMathematician The problem is that for the most part, where that line sits is determined by first-world researchers at well funded institutions and thus what it means to meet one's scholarly obligation to cite is largely defined by a rather privileged group of people.  As a researcher at a small, less well, resourced school, it can be a huge time and resource commitment for me to acquire papers that are paywalled, so I am regularly confronted with this as a practical problem.

@KennyPeanuts I find the problem you posed interesting.  An even more extreme example is that we are aware (via reference) of ancient papers that we do not have possession of (e.g., Aristotle's lost works).  How should these works be cited?

If you would like to boycott paywalled journals, go right ahead - that is your right. As a reviewer I would reject your paper for not citing relevant sources. As a reader of your paper and/or author of a paper you didn't cite, I would be severely antagonized as well.
The bottom line is, your ideological battles should not be waged on the backs of honest readers and authors who dedicate their lives to producing and disseminating good science. But if you want to commit career suicide, be my guest - no one will stop you.
Edit: the saying "Be the change that you wish to see in the world" also comes to mind. In that vein, if you don't like paywalled journals, the honorable course of action would be to simply not publish in them yourself. This would be vastly superior from a moral, ethical, and philosophical point of view to waging some kind of take-no-prisoners, collateral-damage-be-damned nuclear warfare against them, which is effectively what your question is proposing.

Said better than my comment said it, comment withdrawn and upvoted.

Regarding your edit, I don't think it's a good idea to encourage early-career academics to "boycott" the reputable journals of their field because they read on the internet that they have a bad karma.

@CapeCode thanks for your comment, but to clarify, I wasn't (and am not) encouraging anyone to boycott anyone else - quite the contrary I should think, considering my use of terms like "career suicide". In my edit I was expressing an opinion that if OP was going to boycott paywalled journals, then one particular kind of boycott is more legitimate than another. This is not the same as encouraging a boycott though.

It's up to the reader to decide whether they want to pay out for a paper that is behind a paywall or not (they might decide against it out of poverty, lack of interest, or because they are boycotting such papers; that's entirely up to them). It's not up to the author to decide whether the reader should be informed about the existence of such a paper or not. On the other hand that implies the reader has no right to complain if a paper is only available behind a paywall.

I am in agreement with a number of the prior answers that state that it is an author's responsibility to ensure that appropriate literature is cited.
It is often the case, however, that multiple possible citations are reasonable.  For example:

A single extended work can often be effectively cited from any of a family of related publications, e.g., the original idea, a refined and well-formalized version, a practical demonstration, a review paper with a good discussion, etc.  Typically one needs to cite just one or a few out of the set.
Some works are cited to give examples of a large class of related work, rather than for that individual work per se.

In cases like these, where there are many reasonable alternatives in citation, it seems entirely reasonable to me for an author to choose to favor more open publications over less open publications.  It will not allow ideological purity, as there are of course those many cases where you do need to cite something that is not open access.  Still, rewarding those who choose openness may be a good compromise position to promote openness without compromising other key ethical principles of science.

I disagree. You should cite the *most relevant" previous work(s). Doing otherwise is to do your readers a disservice. You can cite an alternative, open access one, too (and I'd appreciate that, if I can't get the paywalled one).

@vonbrand And how do you define "most relevant"? In my experience there is often a lot of flexibility and subjectivity in the choice.

@jakebeal I suggest the following as an operational definition of "most relevant": "a paper I'd be most inclined to cite if I did not know or care whether the journal it was published in was paywalled". Subjective or not, this is well-defined, and I agree with vonbrand that not citing the papers that in your opinion as an author are most relevant is doing a disservice to your readers. Whether you can somehow hide behind subjectivity to get away with it and not get caught is beside the point, since it seems pretty clear that the OP wants to wage his war on paywalled journals publicly.

@DanRomik That seems a bit silly. If I am citing a lemma which is well known and where the original source isn't known, or if I am citing expository material which is in many places, then I should choose the source most useful to my readers. That means things like well written, in a major journal, using modern vocabulary, written in English (if I am publishing in English) and so forth. I have no problem adding "publicly available, on the arXiv or in an open journal" to that list; it is another thing which will make the citation more useful to my readers.

@DavidSpeyer good point, and I see my operational definition is flawed. I guess the correct definition of most relevant is that it best serves the interests of the readers, and you've convinced me that accessibility of the paper is a legitimate factor to consider - as long as this is done from the point of view of considering what serves your actual readers (in contrast to the OP's idea of trying to fight a crusade that, while well-intentioned and having the goal of ultimately helping the community of all readers, will do a disservice to the specific readers of his specific papers).

@DanRomik: but there is in practice no difference between the questioner "fighting a crusade" vs merely "holding the opinion that free access is of more benefit to actual readers, than you or I think it is". So the most likely outcome is that the questioner will do the latter and you will still think they're doing the former, because they over-weight (in your opinion) this property that you initially thought should be weighted at zero, but David persuaded you is non-zero.

Many of the answers have talked about fairness of citing other papers and that is hugely important. You need to cite others for both academic honesty and to give credit to the work that you've built off of. But another (possibly more important) reason of including related works is proof that you're knowledgeable in the area.
If you're publishing on a topic and skip half the relevant papers, how are readers and reviewers able to know that you've done your due diligence and understand the area? It's an important indication that you actually know what you're talking about and are knowledgeable enough for someone to take you seriously.

Instead of refusing to cite paywalled articles, what about contacting their authors, encouraging them to upload their articles to an open repository? John Dove has proposed this idea recently.
He imagines that the (open access) publisher itself could do this work on behalf of the author, checking each reference against a database of open access articles and emailing the author if it was not found.

Franck, you're forgetting that not very long ago most sources were only available in physical form anyway, so paywalling-or-not was irrelevant. Whether an article is behind a paywall or not is irrelevant w.r.t. citing it - in my opinion. If you used it, you need to cite it (choice of versions notwithstanding).
Of course, if you wrote your own paper and it really doesn't relate to paywalled work, then you don't have to cite any of it - but remember it might be relevant and you didn't know it.
Now, it would be interesting if you could make the argument "I did not cite paper X because I did not have the money to get the copy and read it" - but that's unlikely to be true unless you're, say, an undergrad from a poor country or something. And even then it probably won't be accepted.

"I am mostly interested in the field of computer science, and
  English-speaking venues."

You do not really talk about journal standards and reviewer quality.  In an epoch of "publish or perish" perils, there is a lot of computer science conferences and journals, with different levels. Some won't care about the quality of your paper, as long as you pay. This is a first option.
If the intent is to address publications with higher standards, and one has a strong religion against paywalls, computer science is  a world where you have options: indeed, many CS people publish online, preprints, extended versions, or open access journnals. Then, if you really want to play, you can cite the online etc. versions, and put the "paywall ref" as a note:

Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
  Entscheidungsproblem", http://turing.sci/comp-numb.pdf (also appeared
  in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2-42, 230–265,
  1937)

Thus, you show you know the relevant literature to the reviewers. Some may like or not that you do not put the references in the standard way, but you might have more troubles with the editors or the publisher. But it might be ok with open access CS journals, because the times are changing.

What is the most important, with respect to the reviewers, is to show and prove that you know what you are writing about. I disagree. What is the most important is to serve the readers you are ostensibly trying to inform by writing your paper. Intentionally hiding relevant information from the readers is unacceptable from a reviewer's point of view and would be immediate cause for rejection, regardless of whether the author has shown himself to be knowledgeable about the subject he was writing about or not.

You do not disagree. The question was about reviewers. Publishing means making something public, and thus should serve the readers. Reviewers and publishers are filters. I do not see (yet) where I promote hiding relevant information.

Additional comments: a handful lot of the papers published are not read (apart from the authors and the reviewers). A lot of papers are published only because academia requires publishing. It would be nice if only worthy papers were written and published, but only in a beautiful world

LaurentDuval I do disagree. Specifically I disagree with your statement about what's most important to reviewers (and since I have a lot of experience as a reviewer, I dare say my opinion about what's important to reviewers counts for something). Are you seriously saying that you know better than me if I disagree or not? Maybe it's an English language thing, but you should know your statement that I don't disagree comes across as pretty bizarre.

I do respect your opinion and expertise. I do apologize if my formulation sounded offending. I believe that we were not talking at the same level of the review  process. Let me rephrase: as a reviewer, one thing important to me is that the authors prove they know the relevant litterature, since science should be a cumulative process. I am picky about accurate references, but that's a personal think. Some editing could be done at the editor or publisher side. I removed the sentence because I do not think my opinion is a general rule

Okay, thanks for the clarification, and no worries, I wasn't offended.

If an author studies certain papers and they contribute to the work, such that the citations would actually show where certain ideas came from, then by omitting them, the author behaving like a hypocrite at best and plagiarist at worst.
If there is a paywalled paper that you didn't actually read, you shouldn't cite it, because then you're only citing it to stuff your list of citations. If someone were to interrogate you about that cited paper, you would be immediately exposed as not knowing anything about it beyond the superficial summary of its results given in the non-paywalled abstract.
Useless citations that exist just for the sake of inflating the list of citations (to make the paper appear more important and more thoroughly researched) should be trimmed, regardless of whether they are paywalled.
If you did read the paywalled paper, then it behooves your readers to know that you read that paper, and to make up their own minds whether they want to chase the citation through the paywall. You're not actually yourself conforming to the ideology of eschewing paywalled papers, so don't foist that ideology on your readers.

It's a reason, it might even be a good moral reason, but how do you intend to communicate it at first? I'd hate to have to go through a round of reject/resub. in order to let the reviewers know that I didn't cite a critical and well-known reference on purpose. Also, it hardly seems fair not to cite an article that is relatively ancient which was written, submitted, and published when authors had no or few alternatives for submission and this issue was not so hot. The Elsevier math journal boycott seems to have petered out, do you expect that another boycott is going to pick up steam?

If, by some marvelous coincidence, all the most relevant papers are non-paywalled it would be mostly okay.  You absolutely must cite any paper whose work you're building on, regardless of the paywall.  If you use any information/data/ideas from a paper, you have to cite it.  To do otherwise is academic dishonesty.  I wouldn't say that you can "refuse" to cite any paper for any reason.  If it so happens that your paper doesn't need to cite any paywalled papers, then you're in the clear.  This happens a lot in physics, where the most relevant papers are often free.  If you have read a paywalled paper and it helped you in any way with the paper you're working on: cite it.
On a side note, if you're at a university, corporation, or research facility, they usually provide free access to a majority of the reputable journals out there.

It would be fine not to cite paywalled articles.  You just have to make sure that for readers to understand the context of your work the paywalled articles are all completely and totally irrelevant.
If on the other hand the work is relevant and you don't cite it, then I (and most reviewers) would advise the editor to reject your article.
Translation - if being paywalled is the basis for not citing the paper then most reviewers would recommend rejection.

Note - since I've gotten a surprising number of downvotes, I'm curious for anyone else downvoting - do you disagree with my answer that you have to cite all relevant work whether paywalled or not?  Or do you think I've somehow failed to answer the question?

I did not downvote, but downvoting signifies "This answer is not useful." If people find this answer not useful for whatever reason, downvoting is warranted. If an "answer" fails to answer the question, then flagging is warranted instead.

@MichaelHoffman - I recognize what downvoting is supposed to signify (I've got 5000ish reputation across stack exchange).  But I recognize that people might find this "not useful" because they disagree with my answer or they feel I didn't answer the question.  Whether/how I should edit the answer is very different depending on why they feel it is not useful.  So I am asking anyone else downvoting if they would explain which it is.

I mostly only get downvoted when I don't give knee-jerk support to charging authors for writing.

Are you aware that the decision of the international community not to cite research done on Jewish prisoners by Nazis was considered highly controversial?  There was no question that the knowledge had come by unethical means, but the question was whether it is right to flush away any human knowledge?  Given the arguments over that, it's pretty unlikely that an academic community would back you shunning those who prefer the traditional strategy of charging readers over the new strategy of charging the authors.

authors: Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні

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


text:
Can one article be published in two different language journals?
Is it possible to publish the same article in multiple journals published in different languages? For instance, I have a published SCI journal article, but I want to publish the same article in a domestic journal for a local research community as well and vice versa.
Will it be consider self-plagiarism?
How do I deal with the copyright issue, considering the publishers of the journals are different?

Regardless of if this is or not a thing to do, self-plagiarism only exist if you do not state that you have published this before. If the local journal accepts a translation of the paper, as long as you do say that the original work is somewhere else, then it can not be plagiarism. Plagiarism implies knowledgeably hiding that part of what you publish is not original at the time of publishing.

@ander what about the copy right which belongs to the international journal? Also what about other way round if I publish a domesticly published article in an international venue, usually the copy right agreement state that article is not published before.

@AnderBiguri: You should turn your excellent comment into an answer.

@MBK: If you're also asking about copyrights, you may want to edit your question so that it becomes clear that your concerns aren't just about self-plagiarism (Ander's comment addresses that aspect).

Is a translation also covered by the copyright to the original.

See here http://bookwormtranslations.com/copyright-law-and-translation-what-you-need-to-know/

As a point of precedence there have been whole journals dedicated  to publishing English translations of papers.

@Antony Not a duplicate, I think. That question seems quite focused on simultaneous submission, which isn't the case here.

As I suggested in the comments:
Regardless of whether or not this is an ethical thing to do, self-plagiarism only exists if you do not state that you have published this before.
If the local journal accepts a translation of the paper as a submission and you do not break any copyright agreement with the original journal, as long as you do say that the original work is somewhere else, then it can not be plagiarism.
Plagiarism implies intentionally hiding that part of what you publish is not original at the time of publishing.

Both journals have to agree to it, since the first journal (most probably) owns the copyright to the original article.

@Sverre Sure! I will update the answer to make it clearer

Self-plagiarism is not a kind of plagiarism, and neither of them has anything to do with copyright.

@Arno Regardless of plagiarism, copyright is relevant to mention because OP wants to publish the same article in a different place. My academic education has always taught me that self-plagiarism is exactly what wikipedia describes: The reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one's own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or citing the original work is sometimes described as "self-plagiarism"

@AnderBiguri I agree that copyright is relevant for the overall "is this ok?" question. It is not relevant for the "is it self-plagiarism?" question. Since plagiarism is about other peoples' work, self-plagiarism is not a special case, but just an analogous concept. There are important differences, eg when it comes to acknowledging unpublished material.

@Arno Well, I just disagree with your definition. Plagiarism is claiming that some work you are presenting is original, but it is not. A special case of that is when it is not original because you did it before.

@Ander: Arno is using the word "plagiarism" in the standard way.  See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism and http://www.dictionary.com/browse/plagiarism.  The key point of plagiarism is that you are claiming work as your own that is actually someone else's.  It is a form of intellectual theft.  You cannot steal from yourself, so indeed "self plagiarism" is not a form of plagiarism as the concept is generally defined and understood.  (It is still an academic crime, but a different one.)

@PeteL.Clark My link to Self-plagiarism is a subsection of the exact same Wikipedia article you linked .... I do understand the differences, but I still think it is essentially the same thing.

Suicide is not murder, masturbation is not intercourse, and self-plagiarism is not plagiarism. SCNR

@Uwe not going to fight again that argument, but if I were to change plagiarism to self-plagiarism in my answer, everything said is still true an valid. If you say that your work has been published somewhere else, it can not be self plagiarism. And self plagiarism implies hiding it.

@Uwe Unfortunately, "self-plagiarism" is the term we're stuck with. It's pointless to argue with the term, now.

@DavidRicherby We're stuck with the term, but we shouldn't read it as a definition. "Suicide" is "Selbstmord" (literally "self-murder") in German, but that doesn't make it a subcase of murder.

When the paper is submitted and accepted you are still the Author, but the copyright may be transferred from you to the publisher, see the copyright details in the contract.
Therefore, your question is not about plagiarism rather about copyright.
You have to have official permision to publish the paper elsewhere from the actual copyright holder(s) and the terms must be approved by the second (third, fourth,...) publisher as well. It is allways good to inform all the groups involved. Asking the owners is a must.
Regarding the self-plagiarism; you have to refer to the first paper. The later one(s) can be referred only as translations of the first one.
There are four options what you can be accused of:

Nothing: All owners and new publishers are informed and granted the permissions and you clearly state that the later papers are just translations of Paper #1;
Self plagiarism: All owners and publishers granted the permissions but you are referring the papers as separate works;
Copyright violation: The owner of the copyright of the original paper is not aware of the translation but you refer to this paper in later papers stating it is translation only;
Self plagiarism and copyright violation: You hide the information that paper #2 is just translation of #1 to all owners, publishers and society.

Not all  academic publishers take the copyright of a paper.

@rhialto I think it is safe to expect that they do and if they do not it is at least polite to let them know. I have changed the statement to address that more correctly.

You should certainly let the original publisher know (and ask for permission if you gave them copyright), and the publisher of the translated article will also want to know what they Are publishing. There is however a growing number of good publishers who leave copyright with the Authors - contrary to the blanket statement in this answer.

@Crowley In any case the author should know, because in order to transfer copyright they will have to sign a contract to that effect. If they haven't, the copyright is still their own. (But they almost certainly had to sign something, since either they had to transfer copyright or they had to give the publisher permission to print the paper!)

Here, self-plagiarism would be to give the impression that you have two articles in a situation where you just have one article in two languages. In order to avoid this, one article should clearly be marked as a translation of the other, probably already in its title (ie something like " (Translated from  in Journal)".)
The journal publishing the translated version obviously needs to be aware that they are dealing with a translation, rather than an original article. Moreover, you need to make sure that you either retained the right to publish a translation in your dealings with the original journal, or receive their permission.

This is exactly what I say in my answer :)

There are three seperate issues, copyright, academic integrity and critera for publication.
First the copyright thing. Traditionally many journals insisted on a copyright transfer. Nowadays some will let you keep the copyright but there is still likely to be an element of exclusivity in your contract with them.
Secondly academic integrity. The default assumption with journal articles is that they represent new work. Publishing work in journals twice without aknowlaging that fact is considered "self plagarism" so you should make sure that the second publication clearly indicates it is a translation of the first.
Thirdly critera for publication, the general policy of journals is usually to publish original work. Some may make an exception for translations others may not.
So IMO if you want to do this you should ideally approach both journals about it as early as possible in the process.


text:
How do I reference the Python programming language in a thesis or a paper?
I'm writing a scientific article and a dissertation in biology, for which I used Python for simulations. Some people in our department, especially the "non-computer-people", don't know what Python is, so I want to reference something helpful. Open-Source scientific tools such as CellProfiler usually tell you how to reference them, but Python doesn't.
How is the Python language properly referenced? Are there any articles in journals available I could link to?

I understand your consternation. Thank you for moving this. FWIW - r has a package to generate citations for each package e.g. citation("rmetadata").
The same format could be used for Python packages.
Van Rossum, G. (2007). Python programming language. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
As per the APA - "Do not cite standard office software (e.g. Word, Excel) or programming languages. Provide references only for specialized software.
Ludwig, T. (2002). PsychInquiry [computer software]. New York: Worth."
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/

Use the biblatex-software's @Software field if you are using Latex. You can include the actual versions or module, as well as the license. Highly recommended to cite software (version, module, fragment).

@Clément Had I only known this 8 years ago when I did my PhD! :-) Thank you, maybe it will help someone.

@Eekhoorn It was released this year, so it would not have changed much 8 years ago!

A common choice I have seen is to cite the software by name and give a link to the website or name the company (for proprietary software) or both. For MATLAB, a mathematical programming language, I have often seen:

...for the simulations we used Matlab (The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, Massachusetts, United States)....

Likewise in citation lists and also in text, you often see something like:

MATLAB and Signal Processing Toolbox Release 2012b, The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, Massachusetts, United States. http://www.mathworks.com/

Note that it is often good to include libraries or toolboxes as well as the languages used. Most computer languages used in academic research are not used alone but depend heavily on add-on components. For these, there may be explicitly given papers to cite or the authors may provide preferred citation rules. The most important component of citing a software package is the website, especially if it is open-source, as that allows others to dig into the details of your work but actually using the same tools!
For open-source software like Python, you could name the organization or give the website:

...for the simulations we used the Python programming language (Python Software Foundation, https://www.python.org/).

Obviously, check your schools formatting demands for dissertations/theses, and note that most style guides have explicit rules for software, and those would apply to computer languages as well.

This is probably a late answer but now Python's official FAQ page has information regarding 'Are there any published articles about Python that I can reference?'.

It’s probably best to cite your favorite book about Python. The very
first article about Python was written in 1991 and is now quite
outdated.
Guido van Rossum and Jelke de Boer, “Interactively Testing Remote Servers Using the Python Programming Language”, CWI Quarterly, Volume 4, Issue 4 (December 1991), Amsterdam, pp 283–303.

I think it should be standard to cite programming language and used libraries. To cite Python you can use this citation:
@book{van1995python,
  title={Python tutorial},
  author={Van Rossum, Guido and Drake Jr, Fred L},
  year={1995},
  publisher={Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica Amsterdam, The Netherlands}
}

This citation can be found also here http://www.citebay.com/how-to-cite/python/. At this website there are citations for many Python libraries, that are widely used (numpy, scipy, etc.).


text:
My advisor rejects my idea, but claims that the modified version is hers. What should I do?
I am a junior PhD student in electrical engineering and I need ideas about how to handle my mentor. Whenever I go to her with an idea she rejects it saying it is wrong or not interesting. But after a few months she comes back with a slightly modified version of my earlier idea and takes credit for the full idea. She asks me to do experiments with her version of my idea. Then when we have results, she publishes them in a conference (includes me as an author), but she gives the talk at the conference saying she came up with the idea and I only did experiments.
I don't want to stop working with her because I have been working with her for two years and leaving will set me back by at least one and a half years. Can you suggest how to avoid this?

Don't walk.  Run.

she might did this because she believe its actually her idea and its different from yours. Have you talked to her about how her idea is actually yours?.. I see nothing major in her behavior if all other things being good.  Wait for another try and it will work most likely.

"nothing major" ? this is quite a problem. An advisor competing with their own student for idea ownership is a bad situation.

We have only one side of the story, so to be the devil's advocate: is it possible that your ideas are rough drafts/more or less random guesses, and the "modified" versions are a workable version, that is more likely to succeed? Anyway, in addition to other answers (it is always safe to protect one's own idea, be it a draft), I would ask to my mentor what in the new version makes the idea operational.

Everybody seems to suggest to cooperative, communicative solution here. However, and unfortunately, my basic advise to you is to hide your ideas, and work on them concealed until you have the first results, or better, the first draft of the publication. Only then present it to your supervisor. Then she can hardly continue her habbit, and if she does, you have a clear argument to contradict.

I suspect the advisor is relative young and probably not fully even aware of the problem. Her perception of events may be completely different. She may feel that she contributed the essential part of the idea to make it valuable. She may not even remember that the idea came from you originally. But that does not mean that she shouldn't be corrected and give credit to you.
This can probably be solved by communicating with her, or by communicating with someone more senior, who could have a talk with her. Are there any annual progress meetings where this could be done?
Not dealing with the problem will only exacerbate it.

Note the word "Whenever" OP used. It indicates to me that it happened more than once. If it happened only once, I would believe it was just an accident or bad memory. If more than once, I think it's delibrate and that's the problem I am having with this answer. Will communication work? Would she admit it? The admission could mean her career is finished.

If she is unaware of the problem, then she may be unaware of it multiple times. Naturally, this will need to be handled delicately. It need not finish her career, just require her to make adaptations to her "working style".

I certainly agree with the words delicately and working style.

"I suspect the advisor is relative young" : +1, otherwise she probably wouldn't so eager to give the talk in the conferences.

I would strongly recommend taking the "communicating with someone more senior" route. As others have stated, this needs to be handled very delicately, or else there will be hard feelings afterwards. I strongly suggest speaking with your department chair or knowledgeable, respected colleague and asking them to help moderate any discussoin.

It is possible that what @Anonymous perceives as slightly modified, the supervisor perceives as an essential difference.

It's a common psychological thing that people treat their own ideas, and others' ideas, on a different grounding. And even there is a strategy of convincing people to make them believe that they genuinely came with the idea. The thing is that in academia, it's not only about "making things work" but tracking who came with the idea first.
So:

I disagree with JeffE's "Don't walk. Run" (perhaps for the first time),
I would talk to her, especially referring to e-mails or something when you explicitly cam with this idea, but starting a discussion, not an attack.

Surely, there are chances that:

the idea was different (seemingly subtle differences are actually big), at least in her eyes,
she honestly forgot that she came with this idea (but it is also not that impossible, that she got rather inspired and not only you, but a number of guys),
she actively wants to get all/most of the credit (perhaps not that uncommon for a group leader, but definitely bad for you).

I would approach this the same way I would have done in any workplace:

In future, all proposals from you to her would be initiated by an email, with explicit copies to an external, personal email account of yours.
In the event of any offline conversations, write a summary of your discussion and send it to her (and yourself) in the form of an email - end the email on a note that this is a formal "notes of the meeting minutes", and that she should reply if there are any discrepancies in it.
In the extreme case, if all of the above do not work, write your idea in the form of a draft paper, submit it to arxiv, wait for it to get accepted (takes a couple of days I think), and then initiate the proposal (through an email, of course!)

To clarify, I wholeheartedly agree with JeffE - an adviser is your mentor for life, and if this is the foundation of your relationship, you should break it off ASAP (no matter how many years you lose - your peace of mind isn't worth it!). Also, note that while the above steps may stop her from plagiarizing your ideas, she would still be in a position of power and can screw you over in n different ways (your defense, recommendation letters, feedback on faculty hiring committees etc). So, use my suggestions in the short-term till you find a different mentor!

She included the OP as a coauthor, so it is not plagiarism per se. She did give him credit!

But as a co-author, not as the first author (as is my impression from the question. In CS (especially in TCS), I've been led to believe that the first author is the originator of the idea - I maybe wrong on that, but if not, then is that not plagiarism (perhaps on a different level)?

I wouldn't call this plagiarism. Sure, it is not giving the credit that is due, but credit is given. And the reading of the order of authors depends on a lot of factors. It may not be the originator of the idea, but the one who did the work. Or the student. What about alphabetical order?

Well, maybe plagiarism isn't the correct term to use after all - but even then, I believe the title and the body of the question differ significantly (while the title is benign and suggests a general approach to authorship, the body makes it clear that a degree of malpractice is involved)... Maybe you can suggest a better edit to reconcile the difference, which would make the question more Google-able?

@TCSGrad actually it is TCS in particular that author order is irrelevant, since we usually do alphabetical ordering.

@Suresh Thanks for correcting my understanding! Btw, I'm curious to know if that's the same in the set CS \ TCS?

@TCSGrad it varies greatly. Loosely speaking, the closer to TCS, the more likely you are to see alphabetical ordering.

Continue working with her until the end without giving too much ideas. In the meantime, work on your own ideas, but wait the end of your PhD to publish them.

I understand the good intention behind this suggestion. However, what if the advisor takes the idea the OP has for the PhD dissertation, how would the OP finish his PhD?

Maybe it's not the same in all fields, but a PhD dissertation contains mostly joint work. The OP mentions that he co-authored the papers with his advisor, the only bad point is that the advisor is telling everybody that the ideas are her ideas, but 1) if the OP publishes a lot of his ideas after the PhD, that will not be a problem, and 2) generally, somebody with this behaviour has been exposed a long time ago (even if nobody is doing something about it).

If the advisor goes around telling everyone that the ideas were hers, the OP won't get a job doing research, and won't get the chance to "publish a lot of ideas after Ph.D"

@Suresh You assume that the advisor is already well respected. But in this case this is likely that the problem is not on the advisor side. And (but maybe this is not the case in the US) here in France, we lack postdoc candidates (we still have fundings).

Actually I made no such assumption. It doesn't really matter whether the advisor is well-respected or not.

I saw the case that the OP presents here twice. In one case the advisor was known for this kind of behaviour and it did not preclude the PhD student to find a very good postdoc. In the other case, the problem was on the student side (he did not understand the difference between his ideas and the ones of his supervisor), and even with a bad letter from the supervisor, he found a pretty good research position.

@SylvainPeyronnet Would you clarify? The OP in your comment is the same person as the OP of this question? If a different person, it's a good news for the OP of this question. If they are the same person, ...

in the past, in 2 committees where I was, I saw the exact same situation : a student stating that his supervisor takes his ideas. In one case the problem was really the supervisor, in the other it was the student. In both cases the situation was harmless for the student.

@Anonymous I would like to call for your attention for the comments above Sylvain made. It's important for you to know that there are cases like yours and they are okay now.


text:
How to write a postdoc research proposal in mathematics?
I have to write a research proposal for some (post doctoral) fellowship (for Mathematics/Mathematical Physics). The authority wants me to submit a short research proposal (preferably in two pages which includes bibliography). Can someone suggest what one should consider while writing such a proposal with a length restriction? I believe, I just have to highlight the main points of the the research and give a bibliography with it, but I may be wrong. The idea in my mind contains several steps. Should I give a time frame as well to finish each one? Please help.
Reconsidering once again, can someone tell me how to write good research proposals in areas like pure mathematics (I mean, like Non-commutative geometry, K-Homology etc. where, unlike some other subjects, number of papers, an average researcher can produce at the time of graduation, is less).

This question is a possible duplicate of this and this

I think this might be useful as complementary to the questions mentioned by Suresh. I heard for the first time about Heilmeier Catechism in one of the grant writing workshops. Since then I always think to Heilmeier questions while writing a proposal or paper.
I copy Heilmeier questions from DARPA website, however another version is available from Wikipedia.

What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. What is the problem?  Why is it hard?
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What's new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares?
If you're successful, what difference will it make?   What impact will success have?  How will it be measured?
What are the risks and the payoffs?
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success?  How will progress be measured?

You forgot "And why are you the right person to do this?"  And with all due respect to Heilmeier, if you can answer all of those questions accurately (especially #8), it isn't really research.

@JeffE: On the other hand, if you can't come up with partial answers to some of these questions, then you probably haven't formulated the problem well enough. . . .

I'm sure this depends wildly from area to area, and while I work in the theoretical side of CS, I claim no expertise on math research proposals. Having said that, there are some general guidelines.
Since you're applying for a fellowship, it's competitive. So you have to make a few points in your proposal:

[WHY] that the problem you're studying is interesting and worthwhile
[HOW] that your line of attack (briefly sketched) is plausible
[WHO] and that you have the right skills to execute this plan

and all of this in 2 pages !
Unless specifically asked for, I'd be surprised to see a timeline, especially with open-ended research. However, if the postdoc is for a fixed time, then the work being proposed should expect to produce some tangible results in that time frame if the plan works.

"I'd be surprised to see a timeline": Depends very much on location. Here in Germany it's unusual not to have a very detailed breakdown—even timelines and work plans for individual tasks!

We see that in DARPA proposals here too. But not in NSF proposals, and usually not in a postdoc research statement.


text:
Just received a great recommendation letter with one incident of a different student name
In reviewing graduate school applications, I have a letter of recommendation that consists of two paragraphs. The first one is very detailed and personalised. The second one I think is standard and used for all students. The problem is that on the second paragraph, another name is used. I guess the professor copied and pasted it from another letter of recommendation and forgot to correct the name.
How do I ask the professor, politely, to change that name?

Why do you need the professor to change the name? I would have thought communication from the professor would be sufficient.

It's good to know that while prospective graduate students often mess up the school name, this problem cuts both ways.

@MarchHo I'm going to start my own university called [SCHOOL NAME HERE] just to throw everyone off.

@corsiKa: Is that before or after the University of '); DROP TABLE Schools;-- ?

You should extend an invitation to the student named in the second paragraph, as evidently the professor considers him also deserving of a letter of recommendation.

@SteveJessop Sounds like a great place to enroll my nephew, Little Bobby Tables

No need to be anything but simple, polite, and direct:

Dear Professor Careless:
Pardon me, but the second paragraph of your letter has the name of a different student, which I assume to be a mistake.  Would you care to provide a corrected version of your letter?

(Make sure to replace "Professor Careless" with the actual professor's name when copying and pasting this text.)

@DanRomik Actually, it would seem fitting not to.

+1 but I'd be more inclined to write "could you please" or "would you please" rather than "would you care to".

@AndreasBlass Why? Does it sound rude/confrontational in this context?

@user121256 I'd rephrase it too, if only because "would you care to" isn't said very often where I live. It does seem slightly confrontational-ish in the same sense that "do you wanna fix the mistake?" would. "Could you please" sounds more polite to me. I don't think it's a big deal though (source: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1047).

"Pardon me" sounds demeaning. It's like saying "with all due respect" when you are thinking ("I hope this idiot in charge understands me").

I'd simplify and say "the second paragraph of your letter has the name of a different student. Could you provide a corrected version?"  It's just probably just a clerical mistake, not a big issue.

@AndreasBlass related: this, this and this.

Behold, my glorious bikeshed.

Appreciation is magic... Instead of "Pardon me", I suggest starting with "Thank you so very much for the letter of recommendation." and similar wording like, "I noticed the second paragraph of the letter has the name of a different student, which I assume to be an accidental editing error. Could you please provide me a corrected version of the letter?"  and closing with another "thank you" type of sentence, again expressing your appreciation.

and perhaps add "and is likely to cause confusion when other people read the application" after "an accidental editing error", to make it clear that you're not just being pedantic for your own sake.

Or, you know, take the idea expressed here and write it in whatever words work for your own personal dialect and notions of politeness ;-)

@SteveJessop It may be more polite to say: "If inclined, one may take the idea expressed here and write it in whatever words work for your own personal dialect and notions of politeness". It may also be more professional to remove the smiley.

Relevant phd comic


text:
Which arXiv license to use for archiving an ACM CSUR journal?
I would like to submit the preprint version of my ACM CSURjournal (used acmsmall format of acmart latex) to arXiv. As of now, the work is peer-reviewed twice ( passed one major and currently in its minor revision), thus, has not been accepted.
Can anyone suggest an appropriate arXiv license that does not conflict with ACM 2017 authors' policy?

Unless you pay for author-pays Open Access, the only license that does not conflict with the ACM authors agreement is the nonexclusive distribution license. Depending on when you signed your copyright forms, submitting to ArXiv may not be allowed at all - it was only allowed starting with the revision in January, 2016.
Assuming you have the new version of the author rights, you will need to add a special text block into the paper that contains a set phrase and the DOI of the full, published article. You can get this version by adding the authorversion flag in LaTeX (\documentclass[acmsmall,authorversion]{acmart}) and adding the DOI to the relevant field of the LaTeX document. If you do not yet have a DOI, the situation is a bit more dicey, and I don't think there is a generally accepted way to upload this to ArXiv - either wait for the DOI, or just upload without it (ACM is not in the habit of suing authors, as far as I know).
Edit: I was just reminded that the paper is not yet accepted. In that case, the situation is both more and less complicated. Since you have not signed anything yet, you can, on principle, upload the paper under whatever license you choose. However, once you do sign the copyright transfer statement, the license compatibility issues above apply, so your best choice is to either budget now for the more than $2000 you usually pay for author-pays open access and submit under a creative commons license, or choose the limited license mentioned above.
The DOI issue does not apply, you can simply upload it as a preprint, with a note that it is under submission. Once the paper is accepted, you can update the preprint with the final version of the paper (the version you submit to ACM for the digital library that incorporates all feedback from the reviewers) and the DOI, as described above. Note that you are not allowed to just download the version from the ACM digital library and upload that PDF, you need to generate the ArXiv version yourself - but since ArXiv prefers it if you upload your LaTeX sources in any case (and will even enforce this as a strong requirement if it can tell that the PDF was generated by LaTeX), this should not be a problem.

If the paper has not been officially accepted by ACM, the OP should not have signed any copyright forms yet. And he shouldn't have to add the text block until he actually has the DOI, which won't happen until after the paper is accepted. (At which point, he needs to submit a revised version of his arXiv paper.) Since he hasn't signed the copyright form, the ACM has no legal rights to the paper yet. Once he signs the copyright form, he legally needs to upload the revised version with the DOI as soon as he can. (Not that the ACM will do anything if he delays for a short time.)

@PeterShor you are, of course, correct - I missed that aspect in my answer, and have updated it. Thanks for the heads up.


text:
What to do on immediate rejection from journal citing "Similarity Score" that is too high, but specific instances are just boilerplate text?
I have received an immediate reject notice from the journal ACM CSUR mentioning that my written survey had 13% similar materials with respect to the online available sources. Passing through the instances one by one, it sounds to me that the majority are just the text of the references to the citations, e.g., "Authors et al. [first_author et al. Year]", some standard terms such as "performance", "tuning", and many standard ACM sections such as the ACM Copyright section, etc.
P.S:
1- To be noted that I am aware of plagiarism policy and I strongly support it. However, the fact that we are dealing with a survey journal instead of a regular computer science experimental research paper made me confused on the outcome of the similarity check and the immediate rejection.
2- The application that does this check is called "iThenticate".
Had anyone experienced the same issue ? Normally what do we do to proceed in this status? Does ACM have a fixed threshold on this similarity score?

13% of a paper is about 3 words for every single line of text. Are you sure it's really just "Authors et al. [...]" and standard terms?

@WolfgangBangerth, My journal has 25608 words and there are 60 sources reported to which I had similar phrases with. My top 6 which are above 1% are the one I mentioned. The other small sources having 20-40 words are taken from papers, mostly having similar clauses of 4-5 compound words. But really, these are standard sentences we use in my field and my written language hasn't changed much from the papers I published at IEEE or ACM before.

I have recently experienced this issue. What did you do in this case?

@user5155835, I revised the whole text by considering the provided similarity document and to avoid any future issues.

@Amir how many months has it been under review?

It took more than 7 months for them to send me the first review, I guess their average time is around 4 months.

I cannot find anything about the use of the ithenticate in the ACM CSUR instructions for authors. The ACM magazine Inroads says:

Please note that ACM Inroads as well as all ACM publications expect new, unpublished material, unless specifically reprinting an item from another publication with attribution. In support of this goal, ACM Inroads uses iThenticate to develop a similarity index for all submissions. As a first step after an initial submission, iThenticate compares the text to published material (at least 43 billion web pages and over 130 million content items). It provides editors with a set of similarity indices and helps them identify original material, including prior publications of authors.

This suggests that there is not a hard cut off, but rather a set of metrics and comparisons that the editors use in making a decision. While it is possible that the ACM system is poorly tuned, this seems unlikely. In my experience, a 13% similarity is quite high and is often indicative of issues.
While it is not cheap, you can purchase a single paper use of iThenticate. It appears that iThenticate is owned by TurnItIn which many universities have access to. It is not clear what the different systems do, but it may help you identify what is being flagged up.

Thanks for the answer. Yes, I found this link and was looking for more specifics and I couldn't find. So, you think the immediate reject wasn't an automated process but rather a quick evaluation by the editor in chief?

@Amir I would expect some human intervention. Despite tuning the systems, sometimes things sneak through (e.g., block quotes or standard questionnaires).

Turnitin is designed for use on student assignments while iThenticate is designed for use on research papers intended for publication.  Turnitin's database has lots of student papers, while iThenticate checks against published works.  iThenticate frequently gives false alarms for standard phrases like "Without loss of generality, we can assume that."  In my experience, 13% is towards the upper end of what I would expect from a paper that didn't include plagiarized texts, and as an editor I'd be examining it carefully.  An editor really needs to evaluate this carefully.

@Amir I have started to rephrase and rewrite certain blocks of text to reduce the percentage This really sounds an awful lot like you do not fully understand what plagiarism is.

@StrongBad, We are talking about a SURVEY paper here as I mentioned in the question and this is exactly what I have been guided by the email received from the editor in chief.

iThenticate and Turnitin are different services offered by the company iParadigms and they appear to use the same databases. Even a survey paper should quote properly, @Amir. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of iThenticate is that it does not recognize citations properly and will flag references as being text overlap. Did they send you the report? Just rewriting so that iThenticate won't scream will result in an entirely unreadable paper. I would start afresh and be aware when I am summarizing (and making sure I reference) and when I am quoting (and of course reference here, too).

Thanks @DeboraWeber-Wulff. yes, I did that and it has been a months that it's been under review :)

Contact an editor and explain it like you have explained it to us.
Unless this Ithenticate thing is new, it is likely that they have already encountered this problem before and they know what to do.

Thanks for the answer. I have revised the text and took into account each of the match instances. This time I believe I could pass the initial phase as I haven't received any immediate rejection so far.


text:
Etiquette for notifying personal contact on faculty search committee about applying for a position
My question has to do with the proper etiquette for notifying a personal contact on a faculty search committee that I am applying to.  The question is based on the perspective of U.S. institutions.
Background:
I am a doctoral student about to go on the job market.  Several months ago at a conference, a colleague from my master's program introduced me to his boss, for whom he has worked for around 5 years. The boss, it should be noted, used to work at my current institution.  While I am not sure of the circumstances of his departure, it seems he is still friends with some of the professors in my department. Through our conversation, I found out that their department was going to hire several new faculty members sometime in early summer.  I went on their university's HR website about 3 weeks ago and saw the posting.  I reached out to my colleague to reintroduce me to his boss, so that I could ask the boss questions about the faculty search that he (the boss) may be able to answer, i.e. whether the position was "truly open" or if it was only posted as a formality (having been on the other side of the hiring table in my previous life, I knew that sometimes institutions already have an internal candidate, but they have to post the position as a legal requirement, particularly if it is a public institution).  The boss replied to my e-mail and told me that: 1.) the position was truly open, and more importantly, 2.) he is the chair of the search committee.  He also asked me whether I had already submitted my application (I have not).  I am in the process of replying to his e-mail, and would like advice on how I can maximize my connection without sounding desperate or annoying.
Questions:

Is it appropriate for me to tell him that I am putting my packet together and that I will let him know when I submit the application?
Following (1), is it appropriate for me to ask him to be on the lookout for my application when/after I submit it?
Is it appropriate for me to ask follow-up questions about the person they are looking for, for example whether there are specific courses they're trying to develop within their department, whether there are research areas they're specifically looking for, etc. so then I can "tailor" my cover letter/teaching statement/research statement to what they need?
Should I be taking advantage of the fact that the search committee chair is still friendly with several people on my dissertation committee by having them contact him?
The expected start date is sometime in late fall of this year, but the posting shows a closing date sometime in the summer next year.  Can I ask my contact when he expects to start reviewing the applications?

Is it appropriate for me to tell him that I am putting my packet together and that I will let him know when I submit the application?

You most definitely want to respond ASAP and let him know that you are in the process of applying. It is not necessary to follow up further and tell him when you have applied, but nor would a quick email saying something like "Just to let you know, I submitted my application on the HR system today" be out of place.

Following (1), is it appropriate for me to ask him to be on the lookout for my application when/after I submit it?

I would not use this terminology. Your communication with him is implying that he should keep a look out for your application. No reason to be blunt.

Is it appropriate for me to ask follow-up questions about the person they are looking for, for example whether there are specific courses they're trying to develop within their department, whether there are research areas they're specifically looking for, etc. so then I can "tailor" my cover letter/teaching statement/research statement to what they need?

One can always ask a search chair this, but as they are the search chair and do not personally know you, you should expect a non-informative answer. This is a much better question for your personal contact/friend. In your case since the search chair used to work at your current department, someone in your department (possibly your advisor) who knows the chair personally, could also reach out to the chair.

Should I be taking advantage of the fact that the search committee chair is still friendly with several people on my dissertation committee by having them contact him?

YES! YES! YES! I really cannot say YES enough. As awful as it sounds, this is how you get a job. You want to do this in a coordinated manner. You do not necessarily want every member of your department calling up the chair. You need to sit down with your advisor and discuss this search (but also all the searches you are applying for) and figure out your application strategy.

The expected start date is sometime in late fall of this year, but the posting shows a closing date sometime in the summer next year. Can I ask my contact when he expects to start reviewing the applications?

This falls into one of job postings that is confusing for applicants. Presumably, they want someone to start ASAP, but do not want to lose the position if they do not get a good applicant. They also could have screwed up the deadlines. This is something you could ask the chair. If the posting suggests a person to contact about questions, you could also ask them.

Just to add:
3.) Yes, that is usually one of the chair's tasks. But I think your approach is too passive because you basically let him decide what you will do. It also shows that you have the tendency of not doing your homework. Instead, check their program, study their research profile, and come up with your pitches. For i) it's your five-year investment and you should take the full control of it; and ii) perhaps your new points of view may bring something for the committee to think about. And to be very honest, there are often some courses, some tasks, or some committees a group of faculty are collectively avoiding, you do not want to be the unloading zone of those.
5.) Could be budgetary reason. Usually a hiring lasts for a year after it is approved. They could have applied for a whole year to get this position, but would like to try to get someone in the first half-year. Pretty ambitious.
Good luck!


text:
Can I demand re-submission of a manuscript that has an odd document layout?
I am assigned to review a paper that has an extremely strange page layout (the pages are squares, single column with about 150 characters per line), making it very impractical to print or read. It is for a journal and was submitted via Manuscript Central.
I could of course read it on my screen (which I don’t like at all), or print it with either rotating or stretching the pages (which I tried but it’s very awkward to read and therefore extremely distracting).
Is it okay to write to the ADM and ask them to demand a re-submission in a proper document layout, i.e., A4 or US Letter? Or am I being fussy?

That layout definitely seems strange, but I'm not quite understanding the issue with printing it. Is it simply going to take 30% more paper than you'd prefer to use?

the problem is that, a square page with 150 characters per line printed onto an A4 page is very difficult to read, and makes reviewing unnecessary cumbersome.

Oh, 150 characters per line certainly seems bothersome... I'm still having trouble picturing this format but I can understand your complaint.

I would suspect that the publisher has some computer problem, and write an email to their technical staff if the manuscript is actually supposed to look that way. Depending on their answer, you can still forward it to the editor and ask him to ask for a resubmission.

@Karl I think you should post that as an answer. Journals often have you submit the raw Word or LaTeX document and the system tries to do things like add line numbers and a watermark. I can see stuff getting butchered in the process.

No. It is not your job as a reviewer to demand things. You can inform the editor that given the format of the manuscript that you will not review it. The editor will then likely look at the manuscript and either decide that you are being a pain and find a new reviewer or that the manuscript format is ridiculous. In that case, they will apologize to you and tell you that they are requesting a reformatted version.
Unless the format is really awful (like less than 10 lines a page or greater than 100 characters per line), the editor will probably conclude you are a pain.

maybe i chose the words for the title poorly. suppose i rephrase the title to "can i respectfully request ...". (~150 characters per line by the way)

@thrau yeah, that qualifies as a crazy format.

It's exactly the job of the reviewer to demand things. Always through the editor, of course. :-)

@thrau If the editor decides that you're being a pain and finds a new reviewer, I think there's a good chance the new reviewer will also be a pain for the same reason. After a few iterations, the editor might request a reformatted version and ask you to review it.

@Karl the editor can demand a change in order for them to publish a manuscript, but a reviewer does not have that power. They can only recommend changes.

@StrongBad Demand, ask for, recommend, the differences are subtle. But strictly speaking, yes, you're right. ;-)

Follow up: I wrote the admin an email explaining that I find the format unnecessarily difficult to review, and asked respectfully whether they would request the authors to re-submit the manuscript. The response by the admin was an apology, and that they will contact the authors.

The one column is not ugly for a submission.  It is very normal for the journal to handle that reformatting and for authors not to worry about it.
The square thing IS ugly and a little strange (surprised it won't just print normally in Word?)  But maybe it is a pdf.
I would lean to printing it and reviewing it.  It's a minor imposition.  (Reading poor English is much worse and if you have to handle a paper that needs a translator because of the flawed grammar, than just stop the review on those).  But  let the journal deal with the format peculiarity.

But unless the OP has an A3 (or tabloid) size printer, 150 characters per line will be unreadable without a magnifying glass.

150 characters per line is also unreasonable regardless of the type size.

sorry but this isn't really an answer to my question, which was whether or not it is appropriate for me to contact the admin or editor of the journal.

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