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Determining common knowledge in an unfamiliar field
What is the best strategy to determine common knowledge in an unfamiliar field? I have provided an example below, but I am not looking for an answer specific to that example.
We have an answered question that addresses whether and how common knowledge should be cited. A more difficult problem is determining what is common knowledge in an unfamiliar field. In my answer to the question linked, I provide one strategy, examining introductory textbooks in that field. However, as was mentioned in the comments, not all fields have introductory texts.
As an example, I am working on an institutional grant proposal. The proposed activities have to do with increasing retention rates of freshmen students, particularly in the sciences. We are looking at targeting pedagogical reform in introductory classes and increasing engagement through more and better co-curricular experiences.
My background is in chemistry. I do not know what is common knowledge in the worlds of pedagogy and student engagement/retention. I have been reading books and articles on the subjects, and citation practices have been inconsistent. Some authors provide citations for everything, including broad generalizations and common sense, like:

There are many reasons why an undergraduate student may choose to leave college.

And then others provide very few citations, including for statements that seem like they should have been based on a study:

More than half of all students who withdraw from college are freshmen.
Less than half of the students who declare science majors will graduate with a degree in a science field.

I realize that the former case may be from overzealous paranoia about plagiarism, and the latter case may be an example of poor scholarship, but this is difficult to assess as an outsider.
EDIT: For clarification, I am asking about determining when something requires a citation if I am writing in a field that I do not normally participate in. I know that I should always cite things that are new, obscure, or counter to prevailing thought. I wouldn't necessarily need to cite things that are "well-established" or "agreed-upon". After a certain point, if enough studies have reaffirmed the same result, or if the result has been so widely cited that it becomes well-known, it is pointless to cite it. It is currently silly to provide a citation for "The structure of DNA is a double helix formed by two complimentary strands held together by hydrogen-bonding between the base pairs." At one point, however, it was not silly, because this idea was new.
How can I quickly determine where a finding is on the continuum between new/obscure and well established?

My interpretation of the first sort of citation isn't that it is providing evidence that there are many reasons, but that it is pointing the readers towards further reading on this topic if they are interested.

I would recommend placing citations even for "common sense statements" especially for fields that are in the "soft sciences."  For example, statements such as "smoking can lead to lung cancer" and "proportional reasoning skills are not dependent on gender" would require citations to actual studies.

By far the simplest way to get around this problem is to simply give it to a colleague who is more well-versed in the field and have them judge which statements need to be backed up by citations and which don't.
The next simplest way is to read papers on a very similar topic to yours (which, no doubt, do exist) and see what they cite.
On a related note, my advisor gave me the advice of "when in doubt, cite." His point was that the only real downside of an unnecessary reference is added length to the paper. If you get to that point, and the only thing left to cut is citations, then you can start to worry.

So maybe "common knowledge" in not the best term for what I am asking about. Your answer seems to be more about "best practices". I am certainly interested in "best practices" insofar as the example I gave is concerned. My question is really more about what needs a citation, and what doesn't. I can answer that very clearly for chemistry because I have a decade of experience in the field.

@BenNorris - Sorry, I didn't read the context. Answer completely revised.

There is no easy criterium saying where you should cite, when - a review article or a book, and when - you can safely skip citing anything.
Anyway, ask 2-3 guys within that field. If for any of them it's not 'obvious' - you should cite. If it is old enough that there is a book on it - it's fine to cite it. (Alternatively, you can try asking on a respective StackExchange site.)
Moreover, if for you something is not obvious, you should cite it as well (the chances are a reader of you paper won't know more than you). Note that many well-known results (e.g. results of integration or summation) are referenced for the reader's convenience (and to make it obvious that it is not a novel discovery).
Also, one sanity-check may be if there is a well-written Wikipedia page on the subject. If there is, perhaps you don't need to cite it.


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Shoud I accept an offer as editor of a journal as an undergraduate?
I’ve recently received an offer from a reputable (but not top-tier) journal in my field asking if I would like to serve on the editorial board. I believe they reached out to me based on my publications in the area.
Although this would be great experience and a way to get more involved in the community, I’m not certain if I’m qualified for the role. What would you consider while making this decision?

Welcome to Academia SE. Can you please [edit] your question to add a bit about your academic experience? For example, you mention that you already have publications in the area. How many and how well received are they?

Agree, please include the details asked by Wzrlprmft, and also consider if your work so far has been better received than say, that of your teachers/supervisor. Are ant of them on the board for this or other journals?

No, you should not accept an editorial position as an undergraduate, or as a graduate student.  It probably will not be good for the academic community, and it almost certainly won't be good for you.  There are multiple clear reasons:

Editorial work is service to the professional community.  To be done well, it requires a significant time investment.  Early in your career (meaning: until you get tenure), your time should be focused as much as possible on research.  Senior people in your field usually recognize this and editorial positions are usually offered to people at the associate professor level or higher.
The journal is probably not reputable.  I know I'm contradicting your claim, and I may be wrong in your particular case, but I will be right in saying this at least 99% of the time.  Very few undergrads know what journals are reputable.  I received a few invitations to editorial boards as a student, but not from any reputable journals.  No reputable journal in my field has a student (undergraduate or graduate) on their board.  Even if the student were brilliant (or especially in that case) point #1 above would dictate that they avoid this.
You aren't qualified.  Again, you may be the most brilliant person in your field, but that's not the main requisite for editorial work.  To be a good editor you need extensive experience in reading and writing papers.  You need a network of colleagues you know well whose expertise covers a broad swath of your field, who you can invite to review papers.  I've never met a graduate or undergraduate student who had both of these things already.

For context, I can think of a brilliant friend who published a lot of papers as a student, won prizes for some of them, and even skipped the postdoc phase, going straight into an assistant professorship at a top-notch research university.  He certainly wasn't qualified to be an editor when he was a grad student, and accepting an editorial position before he became an associate professor would have been a mistake, for all the reasons above.
Note also that if the journal invites you to apply for an editorial position (i.e., if you need to send them a CV) then the journal is not reputable and you should stay far away.  Respected journals will know who you are and have already considered carefully before inviting you to the editorial board.
You probably should not accept an editorial position when you are a postdoc, and you should perhaps think twice about it as an assistant professor.

Excellent answer, very balanced in taking both editor and community into account.

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Which is more important in determining author order: time spent or results obtained?
This is in the field of life sciences, i.e. a field in which the order of authors is not determined randomly but reflects author contributions (whatever that means); in other words, being first author is better than being second, which is better than third etc - except for the very last authors, who are generally the lab heads.
We're publishing a paper and two teammates have a disagreement on the order in which their names should be listed. We basically explored several strategies that were at the time all quite reasonable, so there was really no way to determine if one made more sense than another. We found that testing strategies one by one rigorously (one person per hypothesis to validate/debunk) was the most productive way to move forward. Our paper describes several mechanisms that we demonstrated could work for a certain problem.
Team member A tested several hypotheses, including one of the four that made it to the final paper.
Team member B tested more hypotheses (they were working on the project full-time, as opposed to A), and demonstrated that they were not scalable / valid strategies for our purposes. Interesting, useful for us, but not paper-worthy.
Each one of them has a pretty strong claim for having a better authorship position:
Teammate A designed and 100% tested one of the strategies that did work and that we chose to report in the paper, so their contribution is quite obvious. On the other hand teammate B spent more time on the project, debunked working hypotheses (not publishable but it had to be done at some point) and helped with the validation of other designs that worked - a contribution of 40-50% of the work on two different parts of the project.
Obviously results include a part of chance (picking the correct hypothesis/molecule/group/dataset), but time spent on the project is not a perfect metric either (working smart matters more than working long hours).
Without asking for a definite answer, how do you generally weight the importance of "what the paper shows in the end" vs. "the important but not article-worthy preliminary work"? In other words, how do you measure "contribution"? I would like to come up with a rational and objective way to determine who contributed more significantly - at least by the journal's standards.

I feel your question is off-topic, because answers will be "primarily opinion-based: Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise." I haven't voted to close. Perhaps you can edit your question to avoid subjectivity?

Thanks for the feedback; I'm not sure why this question calls for opinions though - at least not more than most authorship-related questions. I'm precisely asking for a rational, objective and neutral way to weight contributions. Don't all questions about authorship order fall under the umbrella of "primarily opinion based" then? See eg here  and here

I think you should add your field to the question title; the answer would be totally different for instance if this were mathematics (although in that case it's typical to just use alphabetical order).

@DavidKetcheson I thought the OP said that in the opening sentence.

@scaaahu Yes.  I suggested adding it to the title.  Otherwise, someone could ask the same question for a different field and it would be impossible to distinguish them without clicking on each one.  Notice that the most upvoted answer is (probably) about some field that is not life sciences.

@DavidKetcheson Frankly, this is a tough one (at least for me). If we add the field to the title, it's hard to close as dup of this question if someone asks the same question in some other field. If we leave this question as it is now, the question may be too broad - it could cover all fields similar to life science and others. I don't know. I'll leave it to the OP and the community/mods.

This questions shows beautifully everything wrong with the current system

If you really absolutely positively can't share first authorship, flip a coin and move on with your lives.  There will be more papers.

In my field, this would clearly be shared (first) authorship.
As for the exact positions, in my experience one of A and B would also have been spending a lot of time as a de facto project lead that determines the course of the project and does most of the writing. In fact, in my field this would almost always be B, unless A somehow has the capabilities of effectively leading multiple projects and delegating vast proportions of the work in those projects.
I don't place a lot of value on happening to find the right solution for a problem. The way you describe this, it seems almost stochastic: A proposed four solutions and got lucky, B proposed more solutions but didn't get lucky. Obviously the situation and value of contributions changes if B could not have found the solution, but A (possibly because of greater experience) could have.
Two other considerations: first, exact position on a paper can have very different values for different people. A first first authorship can be absolutely vital for scientists who are rounding off their PhD or postdoc, whereas scientists who aren't rounding off could also obtain this in a next project. Second, maybe there are ways to even out the author contributions? One way would be to do another project together and flip author positions for that one. Another way would be that the person who doesn't get author precedence can present the work at conferences for the first year. And maybe there are better ideas that someone in your lab can come up with.

I agree with this sentiment, but what if one of the potential shared authors objects heavily against this (yes, it happens)?

@BasJansen Then you work it out, like adults.

@BasJansen One thing is clearly missing from my answer and that is the role of the supervisor. I agree with JeffE's suggestion that scientists (and other adults) should be able to work something like this out between themselves. The whole discussion should also be guided and, if push comes to shove, decided, by the supervisor.

I think the explorations that failed can be as valuable as the one that succeeded, and should be reported along with the success.
See What to do when you spend several months working on an idea that fails in a masters thesis?
This argues for B as lead author. which, along with the fact that they worked harder/longer might settle the question.
(I am fortunate that in mathematics the convention is alphabetical order.)

Weighting contributions in a fair way can be all but impossible. As you noticed, contribution is a vector with many dimensions (time, effort, results, novelty, and whatnot). All attempts on sorting complex contributions on a single dimension axis will need agreement

not only about the respective extent (which is difficult to measure),
but also about the weighting of the elements (which needs mutual consent, as there is no "correct" answer).

If the authors disagree about ordering of their names, they are obviously assuming different matrices for projecting the contribution vectors to a one-dimensional value (or are greedy).
To resolve conflicts like these, you can always mention the authors in alphabetical order - maybe including the dept. chair (and add a tiny notice to the paper in order to show you did that).

@GürayHatipoğlu if someone needs to be first author "to make it count" (e.g. for obtaining some degree), obviously this question should have been settled beforehand. The prospective "first author" should have made that claim earlier, and see if the others were still willing to contribute on that condition.If he didn't do that... he'll might have to settle with "less" than first authorship! In the worst case, the other authors still might retract their contribution, leaving the would-be first author with a completely different situation.

If we took a generic view of research, it could be argued that both positive and negative results can be worthy of the top billing. However, each paper usually has a single focus. Whoever's work is most closely associated with that focus would be the lead author; everyone else provides substantiating or supporting material.
From that perspective, Person A sounds like the lead author and Person B is a supporting author - although perhaps worthy of special mention in the acknowledgements, subject to faculty policies on acknowledging authors in papers they authored. It might seem unfair to the work B put in, but if B's contribution is "not publishable" as you put it, it would seem odd to publish the work with B as lead author.

@EthanBolker It was just a light-hearted comment :) , though in an intractable dispute about name order, it would probably determine the outcome. I also acknowledge the benefit of having heavy-weights listed among the authors, especially when one is just starting out.

@EthanBolker It's not central to my answer, so I've deleted the distracting introduction.

OK I'll delete my comment.

Who actually wrote more of the paper?  If there's a measurable difference in terms of who put how much down on the page, then the person who wrote more gets authorship priority.  Nothing gets published until the paper is written, so this can be a good and equitable tie-breaker in this kind of scenario.

Nothing gets published until all the experiments are run either...

Not disagreeing with that, but that's why anyone who ran substantive experiments should get authorship.  My point is just that if you perform the task of literally authoring the paper, it gives you a decent claim to first authorship.  I usually look at the author order as mapping to "wrote the manuscript," "did lab work," "ran a fancy instrument," and "paid for it all."
But, like I said, "tie-breaker."  This isn't about phrasing complete, iron-clad rules, but rather looking for the minor factors that tip the scale one way or another.

You have answered your own question: 'working smart matters more than working long hours.' In your example you state one person 'made a contribution of 40-50% of the work on two different parts of the project', presumably less than the other person. This is telling.
The only metric that is accepted is the contribution to published work. This is supported by the fact that we never include all the contributions by people which made a publication possible; if so then your authorship would be several billion names long [reference every paper written since the mid-20th century].

The only metric that is accepted is the contribution to published work. - But what does that mean?  Cf. https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/73480/19607

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Is it normal that a PhD supervisor requires a student to apply for a grant?
I'm a 1st year computer science PhD student in Poland, who started about 6 months ago. I'm working on a nice project towards a publication. My supervisor recently made an ultimatum: either I will apply for a research grant or we stop working together. This came as a surprise and sadness to me, because in the beginning I had no idea that this would be a requirement.
I'm not keen on signing for a grant, because it's binding for a couple of years (if you abort a grant you need to give the money back), you need to have a plan, write reports, it's a lot of work to even write the proposal down (and it can also be not accepted) and the money to my pocket is almost nothing. Most of grant could be spent on computing resources and conferences. But I could pay for conferences even from my own pocket (I work part time to cover my costs). For computing, there are some resources our group has access to that would be sufficient for my research.
I was thinking for a couple of days about this situation. Is it normal that a supervisor would force me to apply for grants? Can he do that? Should I talk to somebody? I'm feeling down and lost. I'm close to giving up the whole PhD. I mean, I give my time for no money. I was hoping that at least I could get an access to the computing resources. He doesn't have time to meet in person, although I have ask several times before. We talk via email. Before PhD studies I moved to live closer to the university, to have more interactions, but that turned out to be futile.

What's going on here? You don't have a stipend, you've never met your supervisor?

Mentioning what country or region you're in may help you get better answers about how normal this is.

@Azor I don't have a stipend. I met my supervisor 4 times.

@Cactus Poland.

@student I suspect some of the European posters will have seen situations like this. In general it's useful to practice applying for grants, even if one may not get them, and it would be a reasonable exercise for a professor to ask one to draft a grant application. You're in a tough situation, since you're not sure about committing to the content of a grant and you and your supervisor are not on the same page.

Is there a signed contract? If not, what’s “binding” you as a PhD student to this professor?

@aeismail No contract is signed between me and supervisor. I have an agreement with university about PhD studies. On 1st year you choose a supervisor. End of 1st year exam is in a couple of months where you present what you've done and your future plan, aligned with a scientific advisor of your choice. This professor seemed like a good choice because the research interests were perfectly aligned. I don't know a prof with better fit in terms of interests or with a bigger research group in our subfield of study.

Our (US) program requires students to apply for a grant as part of the dissertation prep. It is considered an essential skill of professional researchers and a thought-clarifying exercise.

Are you finding the working relationship with this person satisfying in other regards?  It was hard to tell from what you've written so far.

@aparente001 Mixed. I'm satisfied in many regards. Perhaps there are two that I'm not: not much time to meet and this grant requirement (which before didn't manifested).

You should never agree to pay conference costs. At least not until you have exhausted all other options and you absolutely need to be there.

Re the rare face to face meetings -- how do you feel about the email communication?  Sometimes this is very effective and one hardly notices that there's little to no face to face time.  Sometimes communication problems crop up when it's just email, email, all the time email.  How's that going for you two? // Do you have a Plan B in case it doesn't work out with this advisor?

@aparente I feel like the more you write, the more things are left untold and it accumulates over time. Many times I also have like small threads that simply die in email talk or are marginalized. Also back and forth exchange is very slow on email. You also can't show or draw stuff so it's frustrating. I really like personal meetings from time to time, because you can get to know each other better, see someone's gestures, voice tone, it's always relaxed and nice. So I would love to meet more often.

@aparente Yes, I have many options. I can just not pass the 1st year and apply again, I will probably be admitted. I can try to pass it, with the same supervisor (without a grant, but after first year would need to change supervisor) or a different one. Or I can just resign from PhD programme.

So, first of all, in Europe the relation PhD sutudent–supervisor can be detached from the relation employee–employer.
While it is possible to obtain a PhD sitting on a different job all the time, I can only support the urge to move to a grant-funded position. You would have much more time for your research when compared to part-timing for money. I am speaking out of experience.
So, the first conclusion is: you probably need a grant.
Now, for application. Typical funding bodies I know, require the applicant to hold a PhD already. So, it's your supervisor, who needs to apply. Contrarily, a stipend can be granted for a student. I heavily suggest talking in person about this issue.
The second conclusion is: you need to clarify, what kind of funding it is and who would do most of the writing. Talk with your supervisor.
The general rule of thumb is: agree with your supervisor, as he/she has much more experience in the academic questions than you do. There are some common pitfalls and non-obvious issues. For example: where to publish, what kind of a position is better, etc.

Thank you for sharing your experience. To make some facts straight: this is not a typical grant, this one is for beginners, pre-PhD. I would be the person to apply. I could give myself a stipend from this grant (as principal investigator) but it's tiny, I can't live out of that. I would do most of the writing.

I thought the relation will be more like student-advisor (it was most of the time).

@student - What would happen if your grant application were unsuccessful? If it were successful, what other sources of funding would there be, if any?  Have you talked to a department administrator?

@aparente If unsuccessful - nothing happens. I will probably need to apply every year or to other funding bodies. If successful - I don't think there will be other funding sources. I haven't talked to a department administrator... I'm not sure to which person you refer to... I'm also not sure that this will help.

What I had in mind was for you to understand the flow chart as well as you can, so that you can make an informed decision.  A department typically has some sort of director and some other administrators, such as a dean or director of graduate studies.  Your university might identify the administrators in the department on its website, or you might just need to ask around.  There are several different types of people you can ask: students (at various levels), professors (young / more senior), secretaries.  You can choose who you feel comfortable asking.


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If co-instructors gave different syllabi with different grading schemes, is this generally considered a valid reason to challenge grade?
Summary: I am a STEM graduate student taking a soon-ending class that was divided into 3 parts each under different professors, Alice, Bob and Carol.
There is a conflict in the grading schemes set forth by the different professors' syllabuses (plural).  Omitting most of the details as being too specific, the result is that one syllabus will grade more harshly than the other, and that is the syllabus that they are proposing to use for the final grades.
Given my current grade, I will pass the course either way. That said, I believe I can make a case that the professors should follow the more generous grading scheme, which would benefit me significantly. Is conflicting grading schemes across different syllabi generally considered a valid reason to challenge a grade?

I have edited to try to get to the heart of the question, removing most extraneous detail, and voted to reopen.

@jakebeal Did you have to? This was asked and answered quite a while ago already

@Jack It had been closed due to the detail, and was likely on its way to deletion; editing and reopening means that the question and its answers will be preserved for the benefit of others facing similar situations in the future.

The majority of the question's text concerns minutiae about syllabi and percentages that are unlikely to be of interest to anyone except the OP.  The question would be significantly improved by eliding / summarizing this information and concentrating on the core question:

What happens when multiple, conflicting syllabi are given out for the same course?  Does the student have a legitimate grievance when one syllabus is being followed but not the other, at the expense of his grade?

I think these are reasonable questions for our site.
My answer to the first question is: yikes.  Three different instructors for the same course, three different syllabi, and one of the instructors (the chair!) does not even know about both of the other syllabi?  What a mess.  In general having courses taught by more than one faculty member makes things harder and necessitates much more explicit, advanced planning.  This course does not sound well-planned.  As soon as you get talk about which syllabus is more "official" than the others, things are not going well.  I don't think there is a standard, easy answer to this question, and I don't see any coherent answer which does not admit mistakes on the part of the faculty.  On the other hand I wonder why this issue did not come up earlier in the course: on the first day of class every student was in possession of two contradictory syllabi and no one noticed?  I find that curious and am not sure what to make of it.
My answer to the second question is: yes, I think so.  If you show up to some higher administrative official with two syllabi in hand and say that you want to be held to the standard of the syllabus you were given first, you have a good shot at getting some traction on this.  However I would encourage you to try to resolve the matter as non-combatively as possible: if you are a graduate student in the program, getting the chair chewed out by (say) her dean is likely to have some effect on your course grade, but it may have other, less pleasant effects down the line.  I would begin by doing what you have already done: clearly pointing out the discrepancy between the two syllabi and the significant effect it may/will have on your course grade.  You should indicate that you proceeded in the course with an understanding based on the first syllabus that you received and that you would like this to be taken into account in the course grade.  Give them a chance to do this for you before you escalate the situation.
Finally, the business about the 75 belonging to two grade ranges: in my opinion you look petty by bringing that up at all (look at the reaction your question has received).  The purpose of the grading system being spelled out in advance is for students to be sure they are treated fairly and to be able to have some rough means of predicting what kind of performance will lead to what kind of grade.  There is nothing that you or any student would have done differently if 75 belongs to one grade range rather than the other.  I agree with other commenters who said that the time you spent complaining about that would be better spent learning the material and improving your performance in the course.  Mixing legitimate, serious grading concerns with "grade-grubbing" is not a good strategy.

Regarding the last part, the fact that 75 was in both grade ranges suggests that it was a mistake and that the passing is 60 instead of 65 as it was last year, and I was right. Is it not right to clarify the difference between 60 and 65 BEFORE I end up with, say, a 64 for a final grade and failing mark in my transcript (which would lead me to a long appeal grade change process)? Anyway, thanks for the question title edit and simplifying my question. I'll talk to chair Carol again. Btw, it's not 3 different syllabi/syllabuses. Bob followed Carol. Alice had her own syllabus.

Mr/Ms Clark, how do you find this?: goes to office "Hello again ma'am. About the two syllabuses thing...actually I would like to the point out that the syllabus of Dr Alice was given to us a week before the other syllabus. I proceeded in the course based on the first syllabus. Given that, are we still following the other syllabus?" If Chair Carol insists, I'll give it up. I think I can pass if I give it my all this week.

Ms. Clark?!?  Your response seems broadly reasonable.  As I said, removing all the information about grade cutoffs would probably improve the reception of your question.  In any case, I am not involved in teaching the class so such finely detailed discussion of the course grade is neither appropriate nor of interest to me.  I will reiterate that -- from a strategic perspective, in particular -- your time is better spent learning the course material than deconstructing the syllabi.  Good luck.

Pete could be short for Petra. Sorry for choosing to be safe rather than sorry by being politically correct. http://shingekinokyojin.wikia.com/wiki/Petra_Ral lol thanks so much for the answer and support Mr Pete. I am studying and will spend merely 2 minutes asking about the syllabus after a long consultation regarding the actual exam material. Again, thanks :)

Kind of a late update, but I passed. Hahaha. Chair Carol gave us a problem set that replaced 20 points in the exam. I learned my lesson and consider myself very lucky. Thanks again so much.

@Jack: Regarding honorifics: the nice thing about talking to academics is you have a convenient gender-neutral choice: Dr.  And in the case of Pete L. Clark it happens to also be correct.  :-)

@NateEldredge Thanks. A good portion of stackex is anonymous peeps so I have no idea if they are male or female, if they have PhDs or what. I don't feel like checking for each time. This isn't my first account, btw.

I apologize for necro posting, but this matter of honorifics intrigues me. I have avoided using Dr unless I was completely certain that the academic in question has a doctorate, which while often the case is not always so (many academics coming from industry do not, instead carrying great research experience considered equivalent to a doctorate). Would it be considered offencive or patronizing to call someone Dr if they turn out not to have a doctorate or is it still polite if perhaps ignorant sounding?

@Vality I wouldn't say it's impolite, offensive or patronizing, but I think it would be weird on Academia SE if you just assumed everyone replying had a doctorate. As for real life, I think it's best to assume faculty members have doctorates if speaking personally. If you are contacting a faculty member by e-mail or text, there's linkedin and other stuff so I don't think you will be confused if you do your research unless say said faculty member is currently ABD yet states a year graduated from PhD, which is what happened to me hahahaha
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/offencive

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Can my Specialist degree be equalized to Bachelor degree?
I have graduated from Russian university after 5 years of education and got a Specialist degree (Engineer in Computer Science). According to Wikipedia, Specialist is a four-tier degree and stands right above Master degree in some specialities. But despite graduation requirements and due to the duration, I suggest, it can only be put right above Bachelor degree. So the next step I should take is to continue my education to then get Master degree. Is my suggestion right? Or do I think about it wrong way?
If it helps or is necessary, I'm planning to continue education in Canadian university.

What level do you want to enrol at the Canadian university? They are the ones who have to decide if your title is enough requirement or you need to upgrade it.

I want to earn a M.Sc. degree. After all, I understand that the only way to get most reliable answer is to ask a university representative. But I believe I could get useful advice or even direct answer from community, too.

Sorry, but indeed the university folks are the only ones who can answer this question.

There are services, such as WES (www.wes.org), that will evaluate your foreign credentials into US equivalent. I am not sure, if Canadian institutions accept it.

You would need something in the lines of : http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/assessment.asp to be sure

Since 1997, having a Russian (or rather "Soviet"-style) 5-year Specialist (специалист) degree is formally recognized as the equivalent of holding a Master's degree (cf. Mutual Recognition of Qualifications: the Russian Federation and the Other European Countries); Judging by the fact that, in Canada, one can typically directly enter a PhD program without e.g. doing a Master's degree course beforehand (as is typical in e.g. the USA), you should have no problems fulfilling the formal requirements to enter a PhD program there.

I am in a German masters program, and one of my Russian classmates has a specialist degree (in applied mathematics). I cannot say in generality (i.e. Canada), but it was taken as equivalent to a Bachelor's Degree around here.

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


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Grading system: Why A-F and not E?
Why do we use F for failing on an otherwise arbitrary alphabetic grading scale? Isn't E just as meaningful for failing as A is for excellent?
I'm more interested in a response on the history of how the current scale came to be.
(Edit: prompted from the comments below, I am asking about this situation within the context of the American grading system.)

This linked document might be of interest

I taught at a high school that used grades A-E, with E being a failing grade.  I would suggest that the obvious reason for using F is because it stands for "Fail."

@PeterJansson That is a great resource on the history but from what I read it is still missing the topic of interest, why F instead of E?

At our university, E is the failing grade.

As Suresh indicates in his answer, the grading scale varies with locale; some regions do use A-E.

Indeed, this is by no means universal.  At my undergraduate university in New Zealand, the grades were A-D with D being a fail (there were also + and - versions of every grade including D).  At my PhD university in the UK, there were no letter grades.

Okay, maybe I should have more specifically asked "Why, in the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States), is the letter F used rather than the logical succession E? It's been suggested that F represents the first letter of Failing, but neither A, B, C, or D have these connections to specific words.

My university is in the US :)

I heard once that "E" was historically associated with "excellent", in the sense more than was even required and was a grade better than "A". On the other hand, I was never graded with letter-grades in my life, and I can't quote a reliable source on this so I might be wrong.

@penelope:  That's interesting.  In the current NZ school system E is the best grade and stands for excellent.  I think the next is M for 'merit' and then A for 'achieved'.

For what it's worth, I'm more surprised by the choice of letters over numbers itself.

I don't know the history of the US system (in the UK 'E' is generally used), but if the non-usage has progressed from elementary/high school upwards, one might conjecture that it's to prevent students being able to easily convert an 'F' into an 'E' on a report card.

@AnthonyLabarre agreed! It makes no sense, as one already has to count points anyhow, just give a ratio of acquired pts/ total available pts.

@PeterJansson referenced a great article. This one also discusses the history of grades in the US. Basically, there was an E (A-F) but it was dropped and F retained (likely because it's normal mental connection the Fail).

Sometimes we say "E for effort", meaning good try, still fail. I don't think it's official anywhere.

Just a guess: some courses are on a Pass (P) or Fail (F) system. You may want to have the same letter for failure in the two systems.

Europe has E for barely passed.

I think, and this is really only conjecture since I don't know the history, is the potential conflict with the ESNU system where E stands for excellent. The ESNU was (and potentially still is) used in US based elementary education.

My US high school had a grading scheme where A-D were all passing grades, and E and F were both failing grades (E is between 50 and 60, F is less than 50).  I believe the difference was that an E class could be retaken, whereas an F could not.

Since it seems we have trouble finding a true history of the A-F my guess would be the following. Many scales rely oon an odd number scale because then something can be in the middle. It is also then possible to think of C as the center of a normal distribution, if that is how grades should be distributed. We used to have a grading system from 1-5 with no intermdiate steps in schools in Sweden where 3 was considered an ok grade and 1 and 2 were poor. There was also a fail whioch was a dash instead of a number.
By accident or by construction, F became Fail. It is possible that a five grade scale was chosen to make F Fail but my guess is that it was more a fotunate coincidence rather than deliberate choice.


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Guidelines to follow if my adviser suggests that I work on dead-end projects
I generally chase after whatever my adviser/supervisor tells me to do, although I know that it's sometimes a project that they don't want to spend their time on. I know that I can learn a lot even when I go after such "wild goose chases".
I recently talked to a PhD student though, and he advised me that I should learn when to say "no" to an adviser, to recognize that sometimes those suggestions can lead to "wild goose chases" that aren't worth the time.
What are some guidelines when an adviser wants you to chase a problem that might not be worth its time investment?

I modified the question slightly; please verify.

Yes - that's perfect - thanks! Though I should modify it a bit since I'm not in the situation right now and don't want to give the impression of being in that situation (and certainly don't want to be embarrassed if my advisers find my posts here).

 Please do not use comments to post answers. Comments are here specifically to help improve the content of the post; not to answer questions. Thanks.

This will depend upon your relationship with your advisor.  Does your advisor solicit your opinions on projects?  Does he/she project openness about projects?  Does he/she give you several options of projects?  Does he/she ask for your suggestions?
If yes, then I think you can have a frank conversation with your advisor.  Mention your concerns politely, and ask your advisor for their thoughts on those issues.  Maybe your advisor has already given them thought and has some reasons to think it's a better project than you realize, and can explain to you.  Maybe your advisor thinks highly of you and has handed you a long-shot high-risk high-reward problem, on the idea that you might just solve it, and if you do, you'll hit a home run.  Or, maybe the concerns haven't occurred to your advisor and that might lead to a fruitful discussion about how to deal with the challenges, or might lead to a change in your project.  It's also possible your advisor might have good advice about how to mitigate the risks you are most concerned about.
For instance, one piece of advice I got from my advisor was: be ambitious, reach high, but also design your research to "fail fast".  Think proactively about what are the most likely ways that the research might fail, and then try to order your work so that if the project is going to fail, you discover that fact as quickly as possible.  That's not always easy to arrange, but your advisor might have helpful suggestions for you.
If your advisor doesn't seem likely to welcome discussion about which project to work on, you can still raise these issues, but you may need to be even more deferential and careful about how you raise them.
Some things to avoid: Be very careful to avoid sounding like you are whining.  Faculty put a lot of effort and thought into trying to find good projects for their students, and it can be very challenging (you want to find something that they have the skills to succeed at and that they have a chance of completing successfully; but on the other hand, you want to choose an ambitious project which if successful will lead to a good publication, which often means it is hard to  know in advance whether the project will succeed or not).  My experience is that many students tend to be a bit critical and "picky" about projects, so be careful not to sound ungrateful.
Also be careful not to be too arrogant.  Your advisor probably has a lot of experience with research, whereas you are just learning.  Therefore, your judgement may be a bit off.
Also, keep in mind that it is expected that many research projects fail.  Therefore, you have to be willing to take risks and take on research projects where you're not sure whether you will succeed, and you have to give 'em a good try.  You should expect that perhaps 50% of your research projects will be failures, or at least will succeed in the way you initially envisioned.  If all of your research projects are a success, either you should maybe consider taking on harder problems, or else you are very lucky to have an amazing advisor.
Moreover, remember that it is important that any research project you take on relate to shared interests.  You want the project to be something your advisor is excited about; if your advisor is unenthused, nothing good can come of it.  So if you've noticed that your interests seem to be a different than the things your advisor is excited about, your advisor may be trying to thread the needle of finding something of mutual interest.
One last thought: if you think your project sucks, one constructive way to move forward is to try to identify a better research project and propose it to your advisor.  If it is truly promising, and if it is in an area of interest to your advisor, he/she might get excited by your idea and encourage you to run with it.  Just be careful: since you don't have as much experience as your advisor, you don't have as reliable a judgement about what constitutes a promising project and what doesn't.

This is a difficult issue to deal with. You are correct in stating that (in some disciplines) this can be a significant problem, but as a graduate student, it may be hard for you to argue your case that the project will lead to a dead end.
I see two possible solutions:

If you have a good relationship with your advisor, speak with him about your concerns. He may admit that he's not sure where the project will lead, but he will likely be willing to give you the background as to why he's interested in the project, and where it will lead you. These types of projects are also good opportunities to ask your advisor to introduce you to collaborators with whom you can complete the project, as he's only tangentially interested.
If your advisor likely won't listen to you, then put in the month or three to do the necessary background research to prove your case. Look up the references, research previous findings, contact others who have worked in the field. One of two things will happen: (1) you will change your mind, or (2) you'll build a strong case to present to your advisor as to why this research is not worth yours or his time. If at that point he still wants you to work on the project, then either he has political motivations or he's just being unreasonable, both of which are indicative of larger problems which you should deal with.

Usually proving that sth is impossible is difficult to... impossible.

The answer is far simpler than these. There is exactly one rule to follow: do what will get you to graduate sooner. If the problem your adviser has asked you to tackle isn't going to become a chapter in your dissertation, say "no". A good adviser will direct you in such a way that you make progress to defending your dissertation. A poor adviser will try to get as much cheap labor out of you as he can before your funding runs out.
Don't let your doctoral adviser take advantage of you.

I completely agree with the last sentence, but not the paragraph before it.  You're assuming that the degree is the goal of a PhD program, but degrees are just administrative trophies.  Focusing on the immediate task (finish the dissertation) instead of the long-term goal (build up experience and reputation as a productive researcher) is short-sighted.


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Should a professor require students to attend classes well past their listed times?
I'm currently in an undergraduate class that is focused on doing group presentations. This class has a total of around 80 students, in groups of 4. Every two to three weeks we are required to present a 10-15 minute slide show on a specific topic to the class. The issue is our professor does not want people going on different days, because he feels it gives an unfair advantage. On the course schedule the class runs from 1810-1930, however on presentation days he expects all students to sign in at the start of class and sign again at the end of presentations (which seem to run until around 2200).
We've tried to talk with the professor about how late classes are running during presentation days and his solution was to move them to Saturdays from 0800-1200 (but keep the normal class times during the week). He is refusing to break presentations up over multiple days and falls back on the fact he let everyone know this would happen during the first week of class and we had ample time to drop the course.
Is this expected behavior for a large class focused on multiple group presentations? It's too late to drop the course (this wasn't really an option from the start since it's one of the few upper level classes offered this semester), so is this a case of just suck it up and deal or should I bring this up to my department?

For clarification: is it true that he notified everyone clearly in the first week of the course? Are the extended times in the course syllabus?

He notified the class during our second lecture. No, it is not in the course syllabus.

The "unfair advantage" argument would apply to his alternative arrangements as well. I would rather not give a presentation at 0800 on a weekend or at 2150 on a weekday. Early on Saturday people may be rushed trying to get to class when roommates are sleeping in. Late on a weekday people may be falling asleep or looking at their watches to see whether they will catch the last bus.

The usual advice is to first try to work things out with the professor. In more extreme cases, if you can't work it out with the professor, you should move to their immediate supervisor, which is often the department head / department chair.
Different universities have different cultures about professors extending class. At some, it would be viewed as normal, while at others it is unheard of. So you should make sure to take into account the culture of your school in that regard.
With that being said, I think you indicated the professor is adding an extra 150-240 minutes per week (if I read the question correctly). That seems unreasonable, in my opinion, and I do think it is reasonable for you to ask for a better way of handling the presentations.  Even if the professor mentioned this in the first week, it is such a large amount to time that it could seem like an unfair imposition.
One option would be to simply email the department chair. Be very brief in your statement: one or two sentences on what is happening, and one or two more explaining how you have tried to discuss the situation with the professor. Phrasing the email to the chair as a request for advice is one polite way to raise a concern: "Here is what the professor is doing, do you have any advice for handling the situation?" That gives the chair a lot of flexibility in responding.


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How do I remove an article from Scopus indexing?
Due to some technical mistakes, I removed my published article from a journal. But the article was already indexed by Scopus. I need to remove the article from Scopus indexing database as well. Could I get some guidance in this regard?

What do you mean technical mistake? Do you mean that a retraction was issued?

I would suggest you contact them directly
And explain why they should remove the article, with actual proof that it's no longer available in the journal in question.


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Grad school in science that takes non-scientific applicants?
If you are going for a humanities grad degree, either scientific or humanities undergrad could get in as long as they get good GRE score (I think.)
Not the case for scientific graduate studies, as the applicant would most likely need to be experienced in lab work and have solid scientific understanding, proven by their undergrad coursework.
Would graduate programs in scientific fields consider a person with no scientific background for even a conditional admission?

I've edited your question slightly: asking if grad schools would consider is on-topic, asking which grad schools would is off-topic.

Speaking for the US and as someone with undergrad degrees in the humanities who is now doing a PhD in the sciences, it is hard, but not impossible to make the transition.
First of all, your best bet is Masters programs. Unless you're somehow exceptional (or maybe just very well connected), you'd be hard pressed to find a PhD program to take you when you're completely unproven in an area. However, to start out, there are transitional programs out there (Boston University's LEAP program for engineering is one) to help students move into a science field. Ask around and search online; I'm sure there are at least a few others.
You can also take non-degree courses at local universities to build up coursework in your desired field. For those, most schools don't much care about your background as long as you're paying them. Once you've built up enough background/understanding in your field, you may have some luck applying to Masters programs. I've seen other questions on this site where folks have posted schools that accept students to Masters programs in the sciences despite non-science backgrounds. I'll edit this answer if I can find some examples.
Additionally, once you've built some classroom credentials, you may have some luck trying to work with a professor in his/her lab. Even if you're not a matriculated student, I know of at least 2 faculty who have taken on lab assistants from outside the university. It's not common, but it is possible.
In summary, it's possible, but it will take time, probably some money, and some dedication to make the change. You'd probably have trouble getting in anywhere with zero background, but with some patience you can build that background and get your foot in the door. Once you have that, it just depends on how far you want to go with it.

Yes. You have to be realistic, though. Making such a transition takes time, as you're starting from square one. It also can be financially challenging, as you progress through the education. You may not find a lot of choices at first, but with effort, you can begin to expand your horizons after building your academic reputation.
I suppose my answer is from personal experience.
Two years ago, I began to pursue a full, rich career in physics. My undergraduate degrees, though, were in business and psychology. I had virtually no experience outside of introductory collegiate physics and some calculus I had taken as an undergrad. My work experience did not exactly apply.
Not unexpectedly, the choices for a program were limited. I found a good State university nearby that accepted me conditionally to its Master's program. There are some other students at this school who have had other backgrounds as well - another I know well was an English major. Some of us started from scratch. As conditional students, we had to more-or-less complete the entire BS curriculum prior starting grad classes. That took about two years. Where I am now, it'll take about two more years for the Master's.
My partner is in the same boat, but with mathematics. She held a liberal arts degree. She was rejected for conditional admission, and so began to take classes to bolster her foundations. After a year of study, she reapplied and was accepted. Again, she is working towards her graduate degree after several semesters of fulfilling undergraduate level material.
I have observed others in the same situation successfully enter industry and PhD programs at all levels of prestige and interest. Regardless, those who excelled only did so through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.
So, yes. It's a long road, but it can be traveled.

I don't know of any universities in the UK which would allow this. The reason is simple: completing even basic tasks in science involves knowing the language of science (often with a lot of maths).
However, there are 'access courses' in the UK which are 1 year, and have much lower entry requirements. I'm not sure where you are (probably the US?) but I imagine there will be similar things around.

It very much depends on your background - it is possible, for example, to end up with a humanities degree, but having taken a fair bit of math and science as part of an interest, or a liberal arts education.
Fields that don't have a strong undergraduate presence may very well accept you - for example, there are very few students coming in with an undergraduate background in Epidemiology, which means that graduate programs are pretty much expecting to train you from the ground up anyway.


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Can i use the same Method Section for two different papers?
I did a survey on the demand for complementary medicine among patients of the gynaecologcial department here in Munich. We collected a couple of hundred questionnaires and I am currently writing two different papers: one dealing with our findings concerning the cancer patients and another about the results from our patients in pregnancy and after birth. I finished the first one and I am currently sitting on the second one. I am wondering now: obviously, the introduction and discussion sections are completely different, but my method section is more or less the same. Can I simply use my method section verbatim also for the other paper? The papers will be submitted to two different journals in the end.

Copying entire sections verbatim between two papers is generally considered self-plagiarism and/or dual-publication. It's frowned upon academically, and may trigger additional unwanted review by plagiarism-detection software.
However, some disciplines- particularly those in the medical sciences- have come to accept that duplication of text between Methods sections of different papers such as in your situation is inevitable. Check with your adviser to be sure this is OK in your discipline (and potentially the editors of the journals you are submitting to), but copying the core of the methods section should not be objectionable.
Note that there are some good practices to follow when doing so. At a minimum you should provide a citation in the methods section to each companion paper explaining that this survey had multiple objectives when it was designed. You should also be able to provide some text describing why the described methodology is suitable for addressing the central question of this particular paper, and why the results from each of the companion papers don't affect the results of this particular paper.
Please note that duplication of text across other sections, especially results and data sections, is always considered a major academic offense.

Thank you David for your fast reply!  i came up with this now
"At the same time, the survey was conducted with patients in pregnancy and childbed, the objective being the assessment of the demand for integrative medicine among patients pertinent to maternity care.  The report on these findings is subject of another research paper. The conception and design of the questionnaire were such that it was suitable for both patient groups. Due to different clinical profile and situation, we looked at the two groups separately in order to avoid mutual interference."
Do you think this is sufficient?


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What is the normal length for a research paper?
I did a survey on the demand for complementary medicine among patients of the gynaecologcial department here in Munich. We collected a couple of hundred questionnaires and I am currently writing my research paper. Since I do not know yet to which journal I am going to submit it, I wanted to adopt a very normal and standard structure/style. I was wondering now whether there are predefined standards of length concerning research papers, in particular regarding word count. I intuitively try to stay under 3000, but would it be ok to exceed that number? Moreover, is it fine to have, for example, a comparatively brief introduction and method section but a rather extensive discussion section? Or do the different sections have predefined standards too?

One of them asked Lincoln, "How long should a man's legs be in proportion to his body?"  and Lincoln replied" "I have not given the matter much consideration, but on first blush I should judge they ought to be long enough to reach the ground." — Thomas Lawry, Personal Remembrances of Abraham Lincoln (1910)

We cannot answer this without known which specific journal you are trying to publish. Also, most (all most all?) journals list length limits in the authors guidelines section.

My published papers range in length from 3 to 134 pages, and I don't consider any of them abnormal.

If you have a specific journal in mind -- why not just look at the articles in the past couple of years and average their lengths? Such data isn't very hard to find.

If you're trying to get a paper that you can publish in a journal, then it really depends on the journal, and if it has any specific requirements or constraints. There is no "standard" length for a paper. I've had papers that were 15 manuscript pages, and papers that were 50.


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Percentage of waiting-list students offered a PhD position
As a result of comments on my earlier question, I am posting another question.
Is there a rule of thumb for what percentage of waiting-list students is eventually placed, or invited, for a PhD position.

This is far too broad to answer. It depends on where you are applying? Which country, for starters? Which university?

I agree that it's very broad, that's why I am asking for a rule of thumb, or just post ad-hoc answers. I am sure people are interested in this.

Rule of thumb is that the number placed equals the number of positions that come available.

I don't see the point in making a new question, it is very likely if one had the statistics to provide the answer to one of these questions they would have the statistics for the other. The numerator in each percent is the same, it is just the denominator that is different. I'm skeptical any such statistics exist on a widespread basis anyway.

The numerator in the first case is the number of students that accept the position, in this case it is the number of students that are offered the position. The difference is those that are offered a position, but do not accept. I know it would be hard to come up with percentages, that is why I said rule of thumb.

I think it depends a little bit on the status of the department/university. High status universities are more likely to be the first choice, whereas lower status universities are likely to be a second, third, or fourth choice, which means that they are likely to get more rejections in their initial round of offers, and hence make greater use of a reserve list.

@DaveClarke That is tautological. I asked for a percentage of total on the waiting list. Also it should include those that are accepted in e.g. the second round but refuse.

Seconding @JeromyAnglim's comment.  I think the answer is essentially zero for the top 10 (or 20) American computer science departments.  (My department doesn't have a waiting list, for instance.)

No, there really isn't a rule of thumb for this.
For graduate departments that admit on a fixed cycle, they generally have a certain number of places open each year. They admit from their applicant pool a number of applicants that, when all decisions are made, are designed to give them their target number of enrollees. If, for some reason, the number of students who accept is significantly smaller than the target, and there were good students who were wait-listed, they may be offered admission, although this is by no means guaranteed.
For graduate departments that do rolling admissions this is obviously not an issue, as they don't need a wait list.


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What are the restrictions placed by copyright laws on reuse of figures in dissertation defense?
In some sense this question follows the question: Is it necessary to obtain permissions for copying figures from published articles in your proposal/dissertation?
Following F'x's advice and my own university's very stringent requirements, I have applied for permissions for reuse of figures in my dissertation. I plan to drop the figures, the permission for reuse of which has not been provided freely by the respective holder.
I hadn't given this much thought before, but what permissions are necessary for reuse of figures in a dissertation defense? I mean the powerpoint presentation slides. Of course, clear and prominent attribution is the minimum requirement, but is there a clear law on this? It's become reasonably convenient to obtain permissions from US publishers (copyright.com), but what if the publisher in question is based in Europe?

If you aren't planning to publish you slides, I would advise you to not worry about copyright law in this case. Copyright law applies to your use of material in slides just like it does any other medium, but there is more possible latitude for fair use claims. That "possible latitude" means legal grey area and lots of possible time and money that can be sunk into a likely fruitless attempt to achieve clarity, since many edge cases may have no official legal determination yet.
Thus, my real advice is this: worry about communicating, not about copyright. Nobody at your defense will report you for copyright infringements. More care is appropriate when posting online, but it is still the case that a) probably nobody will care and b) if somebody does care, the expected action will be to ask you to remove the image from the posted slide.

I would say you'd have little difficulty convincing nearly anyone that using a properly-attributed figure to improve understanding in an academic presentation should fall under fair use.
Also, the only people with standing to bring any sort of DMCA notice against you probably either aren't going to be present (unaffiliated authors) or would give permission readily (like a committee member).


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How to find the ISBN from the DOI?
My question is inverse of the following question:
How can you find the DOI of an article that doesn't seem to have one?
I am looking for the ISBN number (it's a requirement for getting permissions on copyright.com) for the following paper:
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2000-519
I found its DOI to be doi:10.2514/6.2000-519 from the citation data, however I couldn't find the ISBN. Is this typical? In the sense that can there be a DOI but not an ISBN for a manuscript?

Articles don't usually have an ISBN since they are for books. It should be sufficient to give the title of the article you are interested in to copyright.com, which is AIAA's preferred mechanism for copyright license clearance. That being said, searching your article's title on copyright.com gives a null result. As such, you should probably contact AIAA directly, or stick a sequence of zeros into copyright.com's extended request form.

"ISBN" stands for "International Standard Book Number". In such cases, an ISSN may be helpful, which many periodicals have, although it only identifies the periodical, not a particular issue. This particular proceedings series does not seem to have an ISSN, though.

There is an address on the bottom of the page: For permission to republish contact..., so I would do just that.


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Do extracurricular research/activities in graduate school negatively affect your future?
I'm the kind of graduate student that finds many research topics interesting and wants to participate in lots of student organization activities related to science and academia. But recently, one of my professors warned me against "doing too much" beyond my research focus, both in terms of publications and in terms of extra-curricular activities.  As I see it, your goal as an academic is to develop a "specialty", so it is important to focus on one narrow topic and pass over opportunities to research other interesting, but unrelated topics.  But can research outside of your particular focus in graduate school really negatively affect your ability to get hired in an post-doc or tenure track position in the future?  How can "doing more" reflect negatively on one's self?

Bear in mind that you have not guarantee to get a good post-doc (or any tenure track position) in your current field. So even if doing other things decreases you change to get in this field, it can raise in other fields (and then people look look very differently at "I'm interested in Y" vs "I'm interested in Y and I have already published a paper"). Source: I'm a quantum physicist, doing stuff in mathematical psychology. (Sure, in quantum physics they treat my math. psych. as no more than an ambitious hobby.)

Don't worry, the industry will be much happier to embrace your breadth, and appreciate your ability to talk to people who are not at your level in a specialized field. Doing stuff on the side means that your "main" department won't understand the "side" research, and likewise the "side" department won't care about the "main" research. You will simply fall between the cracks.

Read broadly, publish narrowly deeply.
This is roughly what I've been telling my students. Now all of this depends greatly from area to area, but here's what I believe to be true. Having a broad background in your area might slow you down initially when trying to publish. But over the long term (your entire career), a broad base will help you more - it will let you be flexible about topics of interest, it will allow you to see connections where others might not, and it will help you place your work in a larger context.
But from your question, you appear to be referring not just to "exposure to outside topics" but "activities related to the larger enterprise of science and academia". With those activities also, you should be careful. Maybe choose one or two outside activities and devote your extracurricular efforts there. The advantage is that by focusing, you're more likely to be able to do something meaningful, and it also prevents you from frittering away time in busy work.

Shouldn't that be "Read broadly, publish deeply"?

fair enough :)- good point.

In particular, I'm not convinced that having a diverse publication record is a bad thing, as long as the papers are strong.

well that's the problem: it's difficult "on average" to be diverse and strong. Not saying it can't be done, but having that as a target can be dangerous

The issue is fundamentally that of "categorization": people want to have a box to put you in. "Dr. X is an expert in field Y." Early on, if you're all over the map, people don't have a clear sense of what your focus really is. That makes it harder for them to feel that you're going to be focused on their needs in your next position. Instead, the worry is that you'll continue to be all over the map.
This is also a problem for young faculty: they need to have a broad enough profile that they aren't trapped in a particular "niche," but not so broad a profile that they don't have depth in any one specific field. If someone can't be recognized as "the expert in her field," where 'her field' is somewhat arbitrary in scope, that makes for problems when it comes time for promotions and tenure cases.

There's a whole bunch of research in sociology that supports this idea that being categorized is a key to success in labor markets — especially when you're just starting out. An example many people are familiar with is typecasting in films; early on, it's great for a career.

@BenjaminMakoHill This sound very interesting.  Can you provide some references to this research?

In my original comment, I included a link to an AcaWiki summary of "Robust identities or nonentities? Typecasting in the feature-film labor market." You should also check out some of other work of sociologist Ezra Zuckerman whose body of work shows how people/organizations who are hard to categorize are punished and people who are easy to categorized are rewarded.

It's true in an abstract sense that doing more is better than doing less, but there are psychological factors at play here.
Regarding extracurricular activities, hiring committees are unlikely to value them much, and they will come across as a distraction from research.  For each activity mentioned on your CV or website, someone may read it and wonder whether you might have written another paper if you hadn't been doing this instead.  It's not really fair, but you don't want people to be thinking about this.

But can research outside of your particular focus in graduate school really negatively affect your ability to get hired in an post-doc or tenure track position in the future?

Partly it depends on how good it is.  If you add a truly excellent paper to your CV, it should only help.  However, research outside of your specialty or done on the side is probably less likely to be excellent, and someone who looks at just that paper may end up with a lower opinion of you than you would like.

So in this case, quality is much more valued than quantity?

Hmm, both are valued, but you need to meet a quality bar from any given job (in addition to a quantity bar).  If you apply to a fancy department, they'll want to see publications that impress them, and they won't care how many lesser publications you have if you don't have that.  They won't reject you explicitly because of papers that don't impress them, but they might form their opinion of you before they notice there are some gems hidden in your publication record.  Different departments will have different standards and preferences, but it generally plays out roughly along these lines.

So I'd recommend balancing quantity vs. quality by taking this into account.  Figure out what sorts of jobs might be realistic, and then try to maximize the amount you accomplish at that level.  (Of course this is easier said than done.)

I'll echo what the other answer have suggested and add a little more. On the academic job market you want to be able to explain what you do in a way that people can understand in a sentence or two. Your question seems to imply that already understand that having a focus is important and excelling in it is of utmost importance.
There are two ways that work or research outside of this core/focus can hurt:

Peripheral work may leave you with less time to make the core/focus really shine. You may simply have less achievements or publications than you would have if you had focused more on your core research. The issue is not only that people reading your CV might think this. It might really be true!
The second issue is that this peripheral work might be seen as a signal that you are not serious about your core body of research. Do you really care about devoting your life to the field, topic, or question that you are asking someone to hire you to work on? Are you likely to leave your career for this other thing? The core of your work might be seen as less focused than it actually is if it looks like you've got all these others things going on.

This second issue is a real risk, but it's possible to deal with this. Basically, it's your job to convey to people that although your extracurricular work is there — and although it may even constitute some impressive achievements or skills — you don't treat this other work as seriously as you treat your research.
This often means leaving irrelevant stuff off of your CV and website — although there are limits to what you can leave out. It also means organizing your CV so it's clear that the central thrust of your research is your priority. Many people have "selected papers" on your website or other personal materials. You can get to make that selection.
For example, I have written several technical books, served on several non-profits, and given hundreds of talks at (non-academic) technical conferences. I mention these things in brief and in passing at the end of my CV and on other pages on my website reserved for my non-academic work. I don't hide these achievements as I think they speaks to my skills and qualities as a researcher. But I make sure that when speaking to academic audiences, I — quite literally — place the core of my academic work first.


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On the use of grant funds for extracurricular research
While reading the PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH section of some completed NSF award abstracts, I expected to find papers only within the limited scope of the goals of the proposal.  To my surprise, I have found some papers in completely unrelated topics credited to the research grant that funded it.  It doesn't even seem like a serendipitous finding or semi-related tangent either, but rather a complete deviation from the grant's intended purpose.
I'm sure that there are other justifications for attributing research grants for publications as stated in this post, but it made me wonder...
How can one justify using grant money to fund research outside of your intended purpose of the grant?  Is this a common practice?  Are there any negative consequences to using your grant to fund extracurricular research activities?  Under what circumstances is it valid to do so and when is it inappropriate to do so?

I've also been funded by NSF's Division of Mathematical Sciences, so I can respond personally.  To first-order approximation, the only resources that research grants in mathematics (and similar fields, like theoretical computer science) provide is money to buy food to supply brain cells.
If my brain cells (or my students' brain cells) produce research results during the active period of a grant, I always acknowledge the grant in the resulting paper and I always list that publication in my reports to NSF.  It doesn't matter whether the work is directly or even tangentially related to the research outlined in the proposal.
If that seems inappropriate, consider the alternatives: (1) Shut off any part of my brain that is not thinking specifically about the proposed work.  (2) Allow myself to think about other stuff, but don't acknowledge the grant if I actually make progress.  The first alternative requires irreversible  surgery that I am unwilling to perform on myself, and the second is completely unethical.

replace "brain cells" by "CPU cycles".

What's a "CPU cycle"?

@VahidShirbisheh Are you aware of any examples of extraneous research outside the theoretical research areas?

The fact that other expenses are directly related to the proposal does not change the fact that the grant pays salaries, which pay for food.  And no, you cannot determine which calories paid for which ideas.

A grant is not exactly the same as a contract. When you propose a set of research tasks, you're basically saying that you hope to make progress on a set of problems with plausible directions. Reviewers fund you AND the work. It's common to hear people say in a panel, "This seems like a hard problem, but good things will come out of funding researcher X".
So at least with the NSF (and I don't have experience with other agencies), there's an understanding that you'll work on topics related to the grant, and that you'll work on other things as well - maybe even to fuel the next grant !


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Why use unique digital researcher ID?
I recently discover the existence of unique digital identifier for researchers (such as the one proposed by ORCID or ResearcherID).
I never really heard about it, maybe because it is not common in my field (biological sciences) and I was wondering about the interest and use of such identifier.
So my question is twofold:

1) What are the interest of using an unique digital identifier as a researcher?
2) Is it commonly used in the scientific community (by publishers, databases, commitees)?

PS: related but not the same question here

ResearcherID started as a noble cause, and while it is still "free" to register, you cannot really link your papers unless you have access to ISI's Web of Knowledge, which is so freaking expensive that even the research university that I am affiliated with does not have full access to it.

Well, search for publications of a John Smith (no middle name), or a Lee Wang, or any common name, and you'll have a hard time identifying them because of the many homonyms… Publishers and database owners are trying hard to help users, by trying to guess who is who (Web of Science calls this “Unique author set”), but their algorithms don't do very well.
As an example, I have a colleague who has a paper completely outside her main field. None of these algorithms pick it up.
Thus, because a researcher’s name is not unique, many people argue that there is need of a unique ID scheme. (Others disagree: “I’m not a number!”). As a researcher, the benefits are:

easier for others to identify your articles in databases
easier to keep track of your citations, especially for items other than conventional journal articles
possibilities for cool web hyperlinks, like DOI has brought

The Orcid registry was launched yesterday, so noöne uses it so far…

My own concern about it is that I don't know in detail on the ORCID consortium will use the data they will be able to mine. In particular, this worries me:

I consent to the privacy policy and terms and conditions of use, including allowing those who access the database to make commercial uses of the public data.

ORCID was just an example. I updated the question by adding ReseacherID. Any information about this one?

I just registered to try it. Everything apart from name and website has a privacy setting that you can set to "private" if that is a concern. The privacy settings are quite explicit that only "public" data is public (duh) and can be used commercially. So to me their privacy settings look ok.

As well, marriages can confuse name based systems, and rob married people (esp. women) of credit and history.

There are several purposes for proper and trustworthy tracking of individual's publications. Whether we as researchers like it or not, we are gradually more and more evaluated on the basis of our publications output. That is, our grant applications/proposals and other means of funds acquisition are rated, at least partly, against our publications track and a future projection thereof. If you want to convince the hiring, or grant committees and other fund holders, you show your list of publications. The more trustworthy, the better. Hence a reason for a centralized trustworthy publication tracking service. Also, people change names (e.g., by marriage), affiliations, sometimes fields. Proper attribution by automatic algorithms, such as those at work at WoS, Scopus, Google Scholar, or Microsoft Academic Search is therefore unreliable. Having a real-world and trusted tag which I could use e.g., on my papers to identify myself among the hundreds of John Smiths is useful.
Therefore:

1) What are the interest of using an unique digital identifier as a researcher?

trustworthy disambiguation
central trustworthy register
semi-automatic tracking of publications, which however should be customisable by the ID owner to fix all the mistakes/misattributions
citation attribution - often e.g., WoS, attributes citations mistakenly to wrong people, because people make mistakes in references/bibliographies, etc. A central register can help with that.

2) Is it commonly used in the scientific community (by publishers, databases, commitees)?

If your name is unique, it's easy for the committees to check your track by simply googling you, then these guys don't care much. If you are John Smith of this world, than they are not able to do that and would ask you to prove your track record. And that can be painstaking. Even with just few dozen papers published, I myself am not able to get my WoS record correct. So to set the answer straight: currently, not many people use it for other than personal purposes, but many (including myself) hope, ORCID will succeed and the academic community will start to use the scheme and life will get a little bit easier.

The biology equivalent is eRa commons. As that system is strongly linked with NIH funding, it provides a robust system to tie a paper with a particular author that is independent of the author's name and the multiple versions that may be associated with the author.
Where it falls short is that eRa commons isn't associated with anything outside of pubmed and NIH.


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Finish previous work during current position
I will soon change of lab, moving from a PhD student position to post-doc position. During the last months of my contract as a PhD student, I tried to finish everything I started but I still have a few projects in progress. These projects include collaborative paper with other groups, so I am not the only one involved.
I was wondering what was the general agreement when changing position with unfinished project.  I see three main possibilities here:

At the beginning of the new contract, I spend all my time finishing the previous project so I do not have to worry about them for too long (but I do not start right away to work for my new boss)
I spend one day per week (for instance) working for the past project and the rest for the current one
I do not work at all on the previous project during office hours, but rather after work and during the week-end (which I would prefer not to do)

I have to precise that my future boss is not involved in the project I would need to finish. I also plan to ask him the question directly when I start the new position, but I thought a little background about what is commonly done could be beneficial before starting this discussion.
NB: this question is different from this one since it does not concern the ownership of the research, but rather on how to spend the time in the lab.

See also this question (not a duplicate, but related): http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/5193/1033

As an academic working with a couple of post-docs, my rule is you can do what you want with your time as long as you do what is required for the project that employs you.
It is also the case that I know (and indeed expect) that post-docs will have work of their own that they'll want to finish up or extend.
I would not be happy with option 1, but option 2 would be good for me. Weekends are your own. If you spend them writing more papers, I will not object. But please do have some rest and relaxation time.
As a post-doc, you are starting to build your own career, so writing independent papers, and thereby forging your own way,  is a good thing. But there are a lot of benefits to be had from integrating yourself in your new working environment, and working too much on your own stuff means that you will miss that opportunity (and possibly make a bad impression).

Besides all the upvotes showing how correct this is, let me stress it even explicitly. What Dave describes is exactly how it should be when the post-doc knows what is expected of her/him, as well as the professor does everything right to train the protege and guide her/him on the path. Thanks Dave.


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Should I include 'future work' in a paper, when I don't intend to do that future work?
I am in the process of writing a paper that I think introduces a novel concept.  There are some related factors (perhaps even foundational factors) that should be worked out in order to perfect my idea.  I plan on putting these ideas in a 'Future Work' section of the paper.  However, I have no interest in actually doing anything I put there.  After this paper, I want to move on to another topic.
Should I include those ideas in 'Future Work'?  Should I state that I have no plan to work on them myself, so as not to leave anyone interested in the work 'hanging'?

Don't say "future work", say "limitations of the current work".

related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23240/how-can-i-signal-that-i-dont-intend-to-follow-up-the-items-in-my-future-work

It depends how you phrase it.  Do not write This will be shown in a subsequent paper.  Do write This and this still needs to be done.
I think it is very informative to inform the audience of the next steps that need to be taken in this research.  For example, shows you are aware of shortcomings of work done so far, and it can be useful to refer to in funding applications.  However, there can be many reasons why next steps are not actually carried out.  It might be your personal interest, but more often than not, project-specific funding runs out, PhD students or postdocs finish and move to new institutes, etcetera.
This is particularly true for PhD theses.  The final chapter may be full of future work, which, in many cases, is never carried out.

Remember that your "Future Research" section might inspire someone else to do the work you have outlined.  It is very much worth including.

I'd add to this answer, with which I agree, that the reviewers might well ask the author to complete the paper with the missing parts, especially if they feel that the effort required to complete it would not be overwhelming (say around a few months).

Instead of having a 'Future work' section, you could, under the 'Conclusion' section, discuss briefly in what ways you believe the current work can be improved. You do not have to state that you have no plan to work on the ideas yourself.