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Is there a website where people around the world can discuss research during writing?
Authors and readers can discuss about the writing of authors including ideas, experience design, hypothesis etc., like what people discuss at stackoverflow, rather than authors only get feedbacks until publishing the paper after all work done.
I am wondering if there is any website for researchers around the world to discuss about their research.  (Thanks for Buffy.)
I know researchgate but it seems not for the purpose.
Thank you.

Updated. Thank you.

This sort of thing is normally done in research seminars. They can be local or distributed. But the people participating need to be both informed and interested. Many large universities have a number of such specialized seminars for faculty and advanced students.

I doubt that a general one would do anyone any good. It needs to be specialized to be valuable. This implies that there are several of them, but they are only known to the participants. You may need to create one around a circle of collaborators. These have gone on for more than fifty years, originally just by mailing (not emailing) papers in progress to colleagues around the world.

If it's a physics paper, or closely related to physics, you could try sending it to https://arxiv.org/. Not sure it's what you are looking for, but it's one way to let people look and get feedback without sending it to a journal. I don't know what's available like this for other than physics.

On what scientific domain? History is not the same as artificial intelligence or quantum chemistry !

I wish there is a place to discuss manuscripts decisions. Sometimes you wonder who is wrong (editor or yourself)

Jun, I concur with @BasileStarynkevitch that this question would be more answerable if you specify the discipline you're interested in.

In the 20th century newsgroups like, e.g.,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sci.physics
were perfect for this, they still exist and you can narrow down the scope and audience of such a group by creating one on your own. Nowadays probably more scientists in such a field post and read on bulletin boards like
https://www.physicsforums.com/
or
https://physics.stackexchange.com.
But, professional scientists don't have much time for long discussions. I think this is also the reason the Q&A format attracts much more then bulletin boards or formerly newsgroups. Academia is about asking the right questions, if you have the question, you have to work on it based on scientific rigor and methodology. There is not so much to discuss publicly before or during doing this work or writing papers and hypothesis. Science is about coming up with a way to solve or answer a question and comparing/commenting on that. The aftermath, discussions come afterwards, when work and answers have been published. So my experience is with disccusion formats you attract in best case undergraduates and early PhD students still learning. Professional scientists mostly have private or public discussions on conferences.
So the best option you might have to discuss with experts on your topics online are virtual conferences where maybe a chat or comment app is attached to each talk. I'm wondering myself how easy and cheap web-technology has become here as I'm now registered for a big conference in my field which will not be canceled with respect to corona virus due to organization cost but many presentations will be shown online after remote registration.
Researchgate I think also can work for this if you have enough followers reading your posted questions. Online, the question is always how do you advertise your post to readers and commenters you are looking for.

There may be no exact answer to your question, but below I list a couple of sites that purport to do what you are referring to:

Paperhive: Paperhive is a co-working hub for researchers and allows one to upload your article and open it up for other researchers to discuss. You may need to upload your article to arXiv or a similar preprint archive to use PaperHive. It definitely seems (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvGG_KOCcJc) that the articles are open to the scientific community to discuss.
Morressier: It seems as though Morressier allows you to upload conference posters and shorter-form findings and reveal it to the global community. I do not know it they allow you to discuss the work.
Figshare: Figshare is a site that allows you to upload shorter form research findings and share it with the research community. I do not know if they allow you to discuss your results.
Pubpeer: Is an online journal club that is really popular in the biological sciences. It seems that you can discuss any published research as well as preprints. It is, therefore, possible to get feedback prior to publishing with a large publisher.
Orvium: Orvium is a startup that aims to radically change the way peer review is done. It seems as though their platform can be used to upload your research and get reviews outside of the traditional publishing cycle.
Researchgate: As you have mentioned, Researchgate has a question board where you can ask anything. It is, therefore, a platform where researchers may discuss their research. Apart from the questions board, I now see that you can formally request feedback on an article from anyone. It, therefore, seems to be an ideal place to get feedback if you can convince people to spend time on your article.

I also suggest listening to Episode 76 of Everything Hertz (https://everythinghertz.com/). I recall them discussing Open review.

Authors and readers can discuss about the writing of authors including ideas, experience design, hypothesis etc.,

Consider also participating to face to face meetings and research seminars.
(Since you are located near Paris, France and seems interested in PHP)
If you are near Paris and interested in information technology, INRIA, ENS Ulm, LIP6, Collège de France, CNRS, CEA LIST  have many research seminars that you can attend freely, and ask questions about your ideas. Also AFIA. I gave there a talk yesterday related to http://refpersys.org/ at a seminar in honor of the late Jacques Pitrat.
On a more industrial mode near Paris, consider attending Systematic or CapDigital or Syntec meetings.
Or many meetups.
Most French universities and Grandes Écoles (e.g. Telecom Paris but also EPITA or Centrale) organize regular research seminars that anyone can attend. You may need to subscribe to mailing lists or perhaps pay a small fee (a few dozens of euros) to attend them.
Use google to find seminar close to your research interests.
The LIP6 computer science university research library is helpful too. You'll find names of computer scientists easily there.

I am wondering if there is any 'online' seminar site for researchers around the world? Researchers can discuss about their research.

You should consider meeting researchers face to face.
In the Paris region there are many of them in information technology (including at CEA LIST where I work, or Université Paris Saclay, ENS Paris Saclay, Ecole Polytechnique, ....). Since face to face communication is giving more bandwidth (non-verbal communication) than most electronic media. See also séminaire codes sources.
Notice that Google and Facebook have research labs in Paris and they also sometimes organize seminars.
In 2020, research ideas related to software are practically using open source or free software proof-of-concept prototypes (read about TRL and attend Horizon2020 or HorizonEurope meetings; you might meet me there). Perhaps organizations like APRIL or AFUL or IRILL might be a good way to meet persons.
computer science research site
Obviously cs.stackexchange comes to mind
practical advice
If you are excessively scared to meet people in person (and I am also very shy), consider using the help of some psychotherapist. My wife happens to be one.
PS. You could also send me an email (in English or French) to basile@starynkevitch.net mentioning the URL of your question, your actual research interests in computer science, etc...


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How to choose a proper research topic potential and/or having no strong competition
Background
Nowadays, academic research has been becoming an arms race and there are millions of paper published every year. Besides, a potential research topic/area means the research group is eager to know and answer it. Therefore, researchers are facing strong competition in most potential research topics and areas (e.g. deep learning today).
Question
How do researchers choose the proper research topics and areas to avoid strong competition, especially when their research interest is becoming popular?

Choosing an another research topic, but less interested in that.
Keeping the strong competition.
Quitting academic career.
Others.

Thank you for your suggestion.

@Younes, because the comment didn't answer the question. I hope I've fixed that now.

My suggestion about choosing a research area and topic is to choose something that interests you personally and that you won't mind spending time and effort on. Time and effort for perhaps a significant amount of time. Advisors can be good at suggesting problems worth the effort.
If it isn't fun, it isn't worth doing, personally.
Actually, research in most fields is extremely balkanized. You are likely "competing" with only a few people in a very narrow area no matter what you choose. Math is like that. Better to form collaborative circles and stop thinking about competition. Most of the "millions of papers" are of no interest whatever to nearly everyone else. Some exceptions, obviously.
My own doctoral work was very interesting and significant. But significant and interesting to only about six people world wide, most of them at my own institution. It took years for anyone to decide to follow up on it and more years to find an application. But it was interesting enough that it was remarked upon immediately on publication. So, extreme balkanization.
Moreover, if you do wind up with competitors you are likely to be surprised when it happens and surprised too late to take action. Some people work in parallel at different institutions. I know of a fairly public case in which this happened and two people submitted nearly the same paper to a CS conference based on their independent doctoral work. Their advisors were well known to each other, but no one suspected that the students were working on the same problem.

I agree.  If you are always watching your back, you won't get anywhere.  If you are not in a group that is leading a hot area, I reckon it's not a good idea to be directly in the hot area.  For example, you will not have the resources of Google Mind to do what they do.  Lastly, you need to work with someone experienced in the area and who has many research directions .  This person can then give you a direction that is way ahead of the pack.  Otherwise, you do not know where to start 'running', and yup, you have to run, especially if Google Mind is chasing you.

"If it isn't fun, it isn't worth doing, personally.": +1

@Prof.SantaClaus Thank you for your helpful opinion. Do you mean we should choose fun/interesting but not hot areas when not having resources (such as Google Mind in this case), that is the first option in my question?

@Jun ideally, you should always follow what interest you.  Otherwise, you won't have any motivation to pursue a topic.  Also, in my opinion, you shouldn't worry too much about competition or what is hot.  Research is long term, it's not a race but a marathon; for some area it is a race, like finding a vaccine for Covid-19.  It is worth noting that people who contribute to hot areas have ready tools, knowledge and resources to contribute now.   Unless you are in that position, you will lose to the competition.

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In a math PhD statement of purpose, should I use mathematical notation, or English, if math is likely clearer?
I am writing my PhD application statements now. I have sentences such as

The way in which compactness is employed to reason about ℂn using fields of finite characteristic exemplifies much of what has captivated my interest in this area.

and

I am beginning a senior thesis this spring with Dr. Weissman on using the asymptotic reals to better understand representations of SL(n, ℝ) algebraically.

A grad student friend of mine suggested I replace the mathematical notation here with "complex affine space" and "the special linear group over the reals" respectively. Is this a standard convention or substantially preferred? I like the way the math looks more, and its very minimal.
I am not too worried about clarity (in this case), the three instances of formulas appearing in my statement should be readily understood by anyone on the admissions committee. I was told that it is bad form to include the symbols, and I wanted to know if this is true as it seems unbelievable to me. Thanks!

Using mathematical notation is appropriate. This is certainly good advice for common terms such as those employed in the two sentences, which every mathematician will understand. In general, however, these letters are addressed to a committee of people from across mathematical disciplines. As a consequence, you should not expect them to understand technical terms or specific symbols of your subdiscipline. So no sheaves, cohomologies, pseudo-differential operators, or polynomial approximation estimates please without further elaboration at a level understandable to every professional mathematician.

Use both.
Looking at the specific examples given:

The notation $\mathbb{C}^n$ does not necessarily mean a "complex affine space".  Fundamentally, it is just the Cartesian product of n copies of the complex numbers—there are lots of structures which might be placed on top of that set.  My recommendation would be something like

The way in which compactness is employed to reason about the complex affine space $\mathbb{C}^n$ using fields of finite characteristic exemplifies much of what has captivated my interest in this area.

(NB:  I find this sentence somewhat hard to parse—I would recommend rewriting it.)

So far as I know, the notation $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})$ is only used to denote the special linear group.  This notation is, to my knowledge, completely unambiguous, and I wouldn't be worried about using it without further comment.  However, it doesn't hurt to write something like

I am beginning a senior thesis this spring with Dr. Weissman on using the asymptotic reals to better understand representations of the special linear group $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})$ algebraically.

More generally, in an application to a PhD program, you can assume that anyone reading your personal statement is going to have enough background to get the general gist of what you are talking about (pretty much anyone with a PhD in mathematics is going to have some familiarity with pretty much anything that an undergraduate can be expected to produce), but you cannot assume expertise.  Hence I would recommend using both words and notation.  This helps orient the reader your field, and demonstrates that you know standard terms and notation.

I think using both as you've described is good, and for what it's worth, doing this is analogous to how acronyms are often dealt with when writing for a "general audience" -- for its first appearance, follow the acronym with the full name in parentheses. Here, however, parentheses should be omitted. Incidentally, for the first example, the OP might consider beginning with "A special interest of mine is how compactness ..." or "One of my interests is how compactness ...", and maybe replace "employed to reason about" with something less wordy (or something slightly more explicit).

+1. This approach also implicitly shows that you have an important technical writing skill -- defining your notation! (even if it is standard)

Definitely use (standard) mathematical notation: it's easier (for actual mathematicians) to understand your point! :)

Less ambiguous, too.

... and shows that you know about standard notation...

... and can LaTeX it :)

In the few cases you describe, you can use both, write "complex affine space" and "the special linear group over the reals" followed by the mathematical symbol. This combines the advantages of words and symbols.
In longer mathematical texts with many symbols, it would inflate the text. This is no problem in this case.

I don't see the advantage of doing this -- in fact also writing the words "the special linear group over the reals" would make it look more weird and awkward to me.  (Not as much with complex affine space.)  Can you elaborate?

I don't mind the exact words. In my experience, it helps to give some name to help those not familiar with the symbols and it prevents from misinterpreting symbols as different branches use same symbols for other things.

I recommend using English. Using notation may create an  impression that one doesn't know how the things are called... or worse: that the one knows to write formulas but do not really understands them. This might be not a big handicap in math, but in fields like physics it would be seen as a disqualifying factor.
If you feel that the existing terminology is not sufficient or ambiguous, a possible option is to use words and write mathematical notation in parentheses or the other way around.

By this logic, just using words may create the impression that one knows what things are called but doesn't know how to write formulas about them!

@ajd writing a fancy mathematical symbol doesn't prove that one can do math any more than writing words. The problem is that science students spend most of their studies learning advanced math, and often get an impression that math is an objective in itself. In reality, math is basic literacy for a scientist. Knowing to read and write is not a big deal, using words to communicate ideas is another matter.

@ajd I would argue math is more than basic literacy to an aspiring mathematician. it is the ends and the means. thank you

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How do you cite a published book that is a translation of an unpublished diary?
A book (ISBN: 0837156807) with the title 'The Diaries of Tchaikovsky' contains English translation of the un-published personal diaries of the Russian composer - how should this book be cited using APA7?
There are many guides on how to cite translated works, but they all presume that the source was its own published work e.g.

Tchaikovsky, P. (1973). The Diaries of Tchaikovsky (W. Lakond, Trans.). Greenwood Press. (Original work published ????). ISBN 0-8371-5680-7.

To say "Original work published" is not correct, because these are personal diaries that were never published. Does it remain correct to include the translation publishing date next to Tchaikovsky's name, given that his writings were not published? It seems misleading.
What is the correct way to reference, with the APA7 system, a published book that is a translation of an unpublished work, like a diary?

When there is no specific form listed in the style book that you are using, I think you are justified in improvising. So, I'd just change "published" to "written".

In this particular case it seems that the original version may have been published in 1923.


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How do I find funded humanities PhDs in the US or Europe?
I am a final-year Master's student with professional experience of 7 years working in gender and development field. I am liking the subject of study and want to pursue a PhD in gender and development studies in any good US or EU universities.
I can't afford to pursue this without financial assistance/aid so how do I get information about funded PhD programmes?

The question here is perfectly legitimate (how does one find information about funded PhD programmes), but the title might evoke down/close votes for being too specific or shooping like.

I agree with Ian - I tweaked the title as well. khkarthik, this site is very biased toward STEM, especially CS/math and will often reflexively close questions about things that aren't that. However, I would suggest that "finding funded PhDs" in the US or Europe are two different tasks (the systems are very different), and you should ask about only one at once. Although there may be questions about this already.

I could be wrong but my impression is that a large fraction of humanities PhD candidates get their funding through individual fellowships that they apply for with documents typically prepared in collaboration with some academic. The notion of organized departmental or institutional PhD programmes is, in general, not as common in the EU as it is in the US.

(Well, as you can guess I come from a STEM background, but have interacted with humanities PhD students.)
I imagine for humanities sometimes it is also field-dependent, but my impression (I am from the US) is that

Good programs have funding. My alma mater's many PhD programs in humanities primarily offer students TAship (or just offer them to teach classes) to allow them to support themselves. See also these programs that I did not cherry pick that explicitly say that the students are funded.
Funding is more scarce than STEM fields, and teaching load is heavier than STEM fields. The stipend might also be lower.

Or you can just send emails and ask some programs that you are interested in. In general, my impression is that the common saying of "if a PhD program needs you to pay instead of paying you, then don't go" equally goes to the humanities.

There are good number of humanities and social sciences doctorate programs at good schools that aren't funded or are only half funded or something. Several of my friends had to at least partly pay their own way.

As a research administrator in the US, I am biased towards the idea that you can find your own funding.  There aren't a lot of opportunities in the humanities for sure, but also you never know what comes up.  One option is to find NSF funding that is targeted for graduate students, typically in the SBE directorate.  Link
You can also search for "graduate student fellowships" across all federal sponsors on grants.gov Link
The NSF GRFP program is meant to be an example where you "bring your own funding" and you should be able to find resources available on that program if your area of focus qualifies.
Otherwise, you just have to accept that you may have to pay tuition, not have a job, and go out of pocket.  Strictly in terms of finance, I would personally advise against this method.  The cost of the program aside, you have to calculate the opportunity cost of not being able to have a job (money and work experience).
Another thing to consider is that if you get a job at a university in the US, many (most?) have education as one of their benefits.  I got my teaching degree part-time at an R2 institution this way.  The cost to me was in taxes, and I didn't pay out of pocket for any class.  I am currently working on two other Masters this way at an R1.  That university's education program will charge me $480 per degree (12 courses) plus any taxes if I can't prove it's job-related.  I also have a full-time salary and 15 years of work-experience.  However, there are restrictions on which programs I can enroll in.  I can't get an MD this way, e.g. But for humanities courses, this tends not to be an issue.  I have taken classes with very prestigious academics this way (those classes cost more, about $400).  You would want to identify an institution to work at, comply with their policies for hiring and find a staff position.  It doesn't have to be related to the field of study.  You just need to be staff and qualify for a tuition remission program according to their HR documentation to get this benefit.  You also generally don't need to apply to the degree program to take classes; you can apply later if it works out.  That's how I got my teaching degree over 5 years instead of the expected 2 years.

There is not going to be any "list".
The steps to take would be to go to the website of institutions you may be interested in, find the department/program you are interested in at that institution, and read the information there that describes the application and funding process. Here's one example, where a "frequently asked questions" page has information about funding, because this is likely to be a frequently asked question:
https://gws.wisc.edu/graduate/phd-program-prospective-students/#frequently-asked-questions
For this particular example, the program says it guarantees 5 years of funding for people who are admitted. Other programs may have similar guarantees, others may not. They will not guarantee you can graduate before funding runs out, that'll be up to you. To find out if you specifically will be funded, you would need to apply. I would expect a lot of competition in applications.
Like this particular example, it's likely your funding will come from a variety of sources. When a program says they guarantee funding for some amount of time, they will still likely encourage you heavily to get your "own" money in various ways, and in the end if you're stuck they are promising to find some work for you, likely as a TA.

As an addendum, it may be possible to be funded after 5 years (in your example), but that depends on the context of that year.


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Using first person or third person in papers?
Are there written or unwritten rules for avoiding the use of first-person while writing research papers? I was advised at the beginning of my grad school to avoid use of first person - but I still don't know why I should do this.
I have seen that, at many places, authors refer to themselves are "the authors" and not "we". At the same time, I have also seen use of first-person to a good extent.
Do these things differ in different Journals and Conferences (and in different disciplines as well - mine happens to be CS)?

I think the rule is to avoid the first person.  Personally, I try to violate this rule whenever I can get away with it, because the rule prohibits writing readable English.

I suspect that the answer varies somewhat with the discipline. In mathematics, while 'I' is uncommon, 'we' is widely used. (This is of course an instance of the first person.)

The link provided in the first comment above has a VERY useful answer but I will add a little bit as to the why part of your question.
In writing research papers, the reader's focus should be on the idea, not the author. Yes, you did the research but the point is not "Everyone! Look what I did. I am so great!"
The research paper should be more along the lines of "Everyone! Look what is new and interesting. This information is really great!"
So, the purpose of the research report is not "I did this" but rather "This was done." For this reason, it is quite common to use the passive voice (this was done) rather than the active voice (I did this).
Personally, I disagree that removing the use of the word "I" prevents writing readable English. I do agree that is makes the writing more difficult but lots of things are more difficult when they are done the proper way. That doesn't mean we give up and do it the wrong way because it is easier.

@earthling Oh, get over yourself.  Even in the sciences, not all research is reproducible, even in principle.  Is the discovery of the Higgs boson "anecdote"?

@earthling:  I think that in, for example, literary criticism or philosophy, most research would not be 'reproducible' because it contains quite a lot of the author's own personality.  This doesn't make it 'not research'.

Can it be reproduced? — In principle, maybe; in practice, no.  Even with the billions of dollars required to independently build the necessary equipment, the equipment would be different; reproducing the precise conditions of the experiment is simply impossible.  (And yes, dismissing huge swaths of research as "more of an anecdote" does come off as snobbish.)

I've edited the answer, keeping the point that when writing we should be focusing the reader's mind on the idea, not on how awesome we are.

@earthling's accepted answer -- to use the passive voice -- is perhaps the convention in certain disciplines, but it is crucial to note that the active voice is the convention in others. Using the passive voice will make a paper sound daft and amateurishly pompous in certain communities.
My preference is very much for the active voice, first person (plural in almost all cases). This is also the most prevalent convention in my community (applied CS).

The strongest argument (and it is a very strong one!) against passive voice is that it removes all responsibility from the doer: it leaves ambiguity as to who did what, which is crucial for proper attribution in scientific writing.
For example:

The methods of Franklin et. al. were taken. The software was implemented in Java.

Who implemented the methods? The authors of the current paper or Franklin and his pals? Who should be contacted if there's errors in the software? Who's to credit and who's to blame?
Even aside from ambiguity, in the hands of a deceptive author, the passive voice could be used to subtly claim credit for others' work.

The methods of Franklin et. al. were taken. These methods were extended to incorporate the inputs previously described.

... the authors make it sound a bit like they did the extending, but maybe they didn't?
The second argument against the omnipresent passive voice is more subjective: that for many people (including me), it sucks to read, it sucks all humanity from the writing, any modesty it provides is entirely false, and it just generally sounds pompous.

So if using the active voice, which person to use? Again this is convention, but talking about yourself in the third person is again considered silly in many communities (although mandatory in some journals!). Also using the third-person can introduce the same ambiguities regarding what was your work and what was the work of others:

The methods of Franklin et. al. were taken. The authors extended these methods to incorporate the inputs previously described.

Leaving convention aside, first person is the only voice with a clear objective argument in favour of it: it avoids ambiguity as to who did what!
All arguments for passive voice refer to subjective matters of style or (false) modesty. (Aside from which, I feel that first person active voice is a more natural style!)
However, you should follow the convention of the venue you are submitting the paper to!
See these letters to Nature, for more on the debate.
(The second author sounds ridiculously pompous to me.)

Bleah.  "The authors extended the methods of Franklin et al. to incorporate the inputs described above."

@badroit In a single-author context, would you choose "I extended" or "The author extended" ?

@ybakos, I prefer to use "we" for single author papers: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2945/choice-of-personal-pronoun-in-single-author-papers

If, according to @earthling 's answer, "the reader's focus should be on the idea, not the author.", then I see no difference between "The authors extended the methods of Franklin et al. to incorporate the inputs described above."  and "We  extended the methods of Franklin et al. to incorporate the inputs described above.". What's more I've seen guidelines to use third person and passive voice and then tons of papers using first person and active voice for the same conference, e.g., for International Conference on Data Mining

@dzieciou, both the passive and active voice can express the ideas. With the active voice you additionally get clearer attribution of the ideas. I think that the attribution of ideas is useful to clarify in the context of a research paper. I would be interested to see guidelines for the use of third person in ICML if you can provide a link?

@badroit See rule 16. here. And here's a sample paper that was accepted for this conference despite the fact it does not follow this rule.

In mathematics, we is used in a few subtly different ways:

To mean the author(s): "We are not aware of any previous work on reticulated splines."  (But maybe we just didn't look hard enough.)
To mean the author(s) and the reader: "We see from Theorem 5 that every snark is a boojum."  (You are supposed to be able to see it too.)
To mean the mathematical community: "We lack a complete classification of cromulent blobs."  (No such classification exists, but it sure would be nice if it did.)

Usually it is clear from context which meaning is intended.  But occasionally third-person phrasing like the authors will be used to emphasize or clarify that the sentence is only referring to the authors, and not anyone else.  "We cannot prove Conjecture 6 using these techniques" could be ambiguous: is it an  absolute claim that it is impossible to do so, or merely an admission of failure by the authors?  "The authors cannot prove Conjecture 6 using these techniques" resolves it in one direction.  To make an absolute claim, you might use the passive voice: "Conjecture 6 cannot be proved using these techniques."

The use of "passive voice" started to become common in US journals in the 1920's. The reason for this is that science and the conclusions you draw from your analyses should be objective, which comes across more easily in the passive voice. This is actually a heated debate in many academic circles. Most journals encourage the use of passive voice, and some reviewers may give you a hard time if you use active voice in a paper you're trying to publish.
It's best to target your audience and write for them. For example, if you are writing an article for a science magazine, the active voice might be more suitable. It certainly comes across as more exciting.
Some good reading on this matter can be found here and here.

This timeline ("started to appear ... in the 1920's") is clearly wrong. Michelson and Morley's famous paper, which appeared in 1887 in the American Journal of Science, is almost entirely in the passive voice.

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Can I write my PhD thesis based on another student's paper if I'm a co-author?
My supervisor asked me to write my thesis based upon one paper which I'm co-author on. I was told to take results which were not published and extend the figures. I was also told to include some figures from the paper after I ask the journal for copyright permission, extend the discussion in the paper and insert all of this into my thesis. After all of this, I need to do one more experiment.
Is this usual in science and for a Ph.D.? What precautions should I take in this case?

I've attempted to clean up the question some. Please check to make sure it still follows what you originally asked.

I suppose this is not the only published paper that you will include in your thesis. You have also other papers for which you are the main author, right? The other person is also a PhD student? Should not the paper be included in his thesis?

Are you asking whether it is ok to include in your thesis a paper on which you are co-author (the answer is yes), or whether it is sufficient to have only this paper (the answer is probably no)?

Just to be sure, your thesis will not be based on one paper, right? Thesis usually have a lot more content than one or 2 papers....

@FábioDias I would say that depends on the field.  (And, sadly, some these have less than 1 paper in them.)

@Kimball: That is certainly true, but it is true in part because "one paper's worth of material" varies so much from field to field.

@Kimball Really? I mean, even a 30-page article, which is pretty big for my CS standards, should have less content than the average 100 page thesis. (I'm not challenging the affirmation, I just want more information, this is pretty weird considering the fields I'm used to)

@FábioDias I would say in most areas of pure math, a good thesis should give 1-2 papers.  Theses are generally written with a lot more introduction and background (and may also contain minor things not worth stand-alone publications).  Also, the formatting is very different expanding theses page counts.  My thesis (which I think was decent, not spectacular, and I believe around 80-90 pages) resulted in 2 short publications totalling < 15-20 journal pages.  Of course there was more background and related material in the thesis than the papers.

@ Alexandros I don't have a paper which Im the first author in.This Ph.D. student which I'm a coauthor of his paper will not write a thesis as a book but a list of his publication.Also, this procedure requested by my supervisor and I think he knows that such situation in write thesis is acceptable.

"Can I write my PhD thesis based on another student's paper if I'm a co-author?"
I feel a difference between the question title and the question content. It boils down, to me, to "were you a notably active contributor to this paper"?
If the answer is yes, and you take care about rephrasing published text, re-drawing figures, you can reuse the results. A thesis should be personal, and show your personal contributions. A PhD thesis based on only one paper is not uncommon in mathematics, yielding short theses. In other domains, you can expect to write one or two chapters for a published paper, by extending results, adding experiments. Not a whole thesis.
If the other student's contribution is significant enough, he should be acknowledged in the chapter introduction for instance: "this chapter is based on a joint work..."
If the answer is no, I am afraid it could be a case of plagiarism, and loose ethical behavior.

I'm active contributor to this paper, and this was of writing my thesis was  requested  by acceptance and advice of my supervisor and the main author of the paper!!

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


text:
Refuted papers: do they belong in a literature review?
I'm writing a detailed review article (for submission for publication) that aims to survey the various proposed explanations for a particular biological phenomenon. I'm aware of one explanation (that was proposed 20+ years ago), but a number of papers since then have pointed out fatal flaws in its logic. The original paper was published in a respectable journal and has been relatively well cited, since many papers on this phenomenon include some form of survey of the proposed hypotheses. However, it has not received any (published) support, experimental or otherwise.
At what point can we, as researchers in the field, consider the matter closed, and cease to refer to the refuted hypothesis? It seems a waste of space to spend a paragraph detailing one argument, only to spend the next paragraph explaining why it is flawed, and then not referring to it again. On the other hand, does it damage the credibility of my review if I omit one of the hypotheses without any justification?

You're writing the review, know the details and their history, and are in the position to decide wether you are at a point where this old fallacy can be left out.

At what point can we...cease to refer to the refuted hypothesis? -- When it can no longer be found in the library.

Based on the background you gave, particularly that you are writing a detailed review article, then I think you should definitely include this article.
Part of the function of a good review article is that it documents the history of scholarly thinking on the topic of question. From your explanation, this article presented an idea so apparently true that not only did some intelligent researchers study it and present it as fact, but it even passed peer review in a high-quality journal and was cited by subsequent researchers (though, of course, many people might have cited it to contradict its results). This indicates that it has played an important role in the evolution of knowledge in the area.
Think of it this way: suppose some researchers read your review article that omits this idea, and then they independently get that same idea as their own original idea. Without knowing that it has already been refuted, they waste their time conducting a study based on their ideas, and probably get negative results, to their disappointment. (Or worse, they get positive results, submit them for publication, and then get slammed in peer review for not knowing the literature.) By documenting the full body of knowledge, you can spare these hypothetical researchers all that pain.
Although my area has nothing to do with biology, I still remember in secondary school biology class learning about spontaneous generation as an early theory of genetics. I was deeply impressed by the explanation of how such a popular theory was eventually refuted by better science. That case was an important educational milestone in developing my scientific thinking. By including the refuted work in some detail (in correspondance with the amount of scholarly work spent developping and then refuting it), you could help your readers in a similar way.

Given that you are writing a review it is probably better to mention the old paper: if it was so well cited, readers of your review are likely to come across it and it will help them greatly if your review says they are better off looking at more recent theories.
With that being said: it is your review so you can write it in the way you like. If reviewers think you should have mentioned the older paper they will let you know and you can still include it in a revised version.

I agree. The scientific community does not document negative results not as well as it should. Mentioning an old paper and why it should be treated with care is in my opinion a good idea.


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I need to write papers and publish but my supervisor wants me to do lab duties
I am doing my PhD since 2019 in the subject of molecular biology.
I am at the end stage of my PhD.
Despite the harsh beginning, I put really a lot of effort to become very good in laboratory work and I started spending a lot of time within the lab working at the bench within the 1st year of my PhD until now.
My supervisor was saying from the beginning that he wants us to release between 2-3 research articles + 1 review. And that he will help us with that.
Throughout my PhD, I was involved in 3-4 different projects.
Although, it was hard, I was really engaged in all of them because I remembered his words about the publications.
In addition to this, because we had no post-docs, I was responsible for the preparation of buffers and reagents, as well as the management of the stock in my lab.
Throughout my PhD there were another 3 students who were very negligible about the "condition" of our lab, thus whenever something was finished, they weren't bothered and I had to take care of that. In addition to this, many of them come very spontaneously to the lab, and sometimes they can come to the lab only  2-3 times throughout the whole week
Now, roughly 6 months before the finish of my stipend, during the lab meeting, he pointed out that the "lab members" have to start attending the lab regularly. His statement was a bit more elaborate, however, it made me feel like I am the one being targeted. In addition to this, I was then asked to come to the lab on some specific day to take care of the master's student and do the experiment. I said that "I cannot, because I want to focus on writing my thesis this week". He was all surprised and repeated to me I need to come to the lab.
I explained to him again that "at the beginning of the PhD I was told that there is a benchwork period and writing period, and now I want to focus on writing because I am lagging behind with that" (especially compared to the PhD students who haven't been coming to the lab that often).
Also meantime I was preparing some review articles. I sent it to him for some feedback, however, feedback wasn't very helpful, and usually was saying to add something more. Now I ended up with a big chunk of text, that I do not really know how to handle. I believe I need more help with that, but it is not coming.
I talked with him again recently, and I said that I am happy to still sacrifice some time for my "main" lab project because I hope to have it published. The supervisor said that the process is not that simple and it might take another 3-6 months before we manage to publish it.
I am not familiar with publication process or how to assemble a good "paper", because it is my first time doing it. And since I am a PhD student, I require some help with that.
On the end it seems like I spent 3 years, gathering data for my boss for different projects, while, he did not help me to publish anything not even a review paper which would make me more employable.
I will add that my supervisor had some conflicts with his employees which made them quit.
What should I do about this, should I forward an official complaint on him to the University. Or maybe I just complain too much?

In my opinion, from what you've written, an official complaint would not be justified (except there are more severe misconducts that you omitted?). However, you are justified in being dissatisfied with the poor supervision. You seem to be a diligent and mature person, but unfortunately your research group is not the best environment to thrive in.

Thank you very much for your kind word. I feel so deceived and manipulated. I am so worried that without any paper I will not get any job or that my personal "impact factor" is very low...

What country? .

I'm worried that stress has you overreacting. Note that fighting with your supervisor is usually counterproductive.
If you have been faithful about the lab then I'd guess that the criticism is directed at the others - or just general. He may feel that you have "taken charge" of the lab and so the words were directed at you. It would be fair if you were formally the lab manager, of course, but an overreaction otherwise.
But the big issue is your graduation. He says you have 3-6 months of work to go and you have 6 months of funding. So, it seems to fit.
Rather than make a complaint, I'd rather suggest that you seek his assurance that you will finish in a timely manner or have funding extended. If I read it more or less correctly then he is depending on you and that gives you the opportunity to get good recommendations if you don't poison the atmosphere.
But the bigger issue may well be stress. You've been at it hard for quite a while. If you can find a way to reduce that it might be made more comfortable, even though it remains hard.
Another big issue is the feedback on your writing and publications. You may need to meet with him more often with questions to make that go more smoothly. Just waiting for feedback (from a busy person) isn't going to improve it. One question you could ask, given that you aren't getting a lot of feedback, is whether he feels that feedback isn't really necessary and you are doing fine.
But, explore these things before you consider any formal complaints. That is likely to turn out badly.

Thank you. This is a valid point. Definitely, stress plays a big part in it, I do agree.
6 months of work might feet. However, It is another 6 months within the lab, in the time period when I should be writing. Of course, I will be still coming to the lab but more of in the ratio 40% - lab work 60% - office work/writing. But the supervisors still want me to look after the lab and students and take new projects "constantly".
About the feedback, yes maybe I should be more engaged. I just know that he is busy, and I hope that he remembers about me as well.

I want to focus on the parts where you mention (fruitlessly) seeking advice.
First off, how independent PhD students are supposed to be is heavily country-dependent. In places where MSc is a requirement for PhD, the students are commonly assumed to have developed some writing skills already.
Most of the PhD students seem to get stuck at more or less the same things, which usually gets resolved by reviewing the work as if it's already being presented to the thesis committee or a harsh reviewer. Overall, be more proactive and specific when making arrangements and setting deadlines. "I ended up with a big chunk of text, that I do not really know how to handle" is not very helpful for them to diagnose possible issues. It is like
- Dear prof., I didn't understand, could you explain it a bit more, please?
- Sure, which part did you not understand?
- Could you, um, explain the entire thing?
It might be still on them to sort it out but you might be making it very complicated for them. Again, be specific: instead of "I don't know what to do with this" go for "I want to publish this, what are the obstacles preventing me from doing so?". With your supervisor put to the "reviewer" mode you might find their comments a lot more helpful (e.g. "The introductory section is absurdly short, a whole body of relevant work exists but only 5 articles are considered" instead of "please add more articles to the review part").
Unfortunately, no matter how hard you work it would not get you closer to even a single publication on its own. You must set it as a goal and work towards it.

The supervisor said that the process is not that simple and it might take another 3-6 months before we manage to publicate it.

Depending on the exact meaning of this, it's either very quick or very slow: if you're only to submit it in half an year, that is slow, but you then need to work out what's lacking if you want it included in your thesis. You don't sound very involved with this project at the level above that of a lab technician at the moment - otherwise you would know the project scope and be able to reason about its current status: "we wanted to test X, we did, we have derived some conclusions from the data, I have prepared plots for publication and did the writing etc".
PhD supervisors LOVE to repeatedly tell students to not take their time with publishing because it takes a good while for the article to appear in print. What is barely covered, however, is how long does it take to prepare the article for submission - many researchers would do it under a week or even under a day. Supervisors absolutely don't get how clueless their students are about what makes it publishable in the first place. To that end...

at the beginning of the PhD I was told that there is a benchwork period and writing period

This is not entirely a big fat lie, but something you almost surely misinterpreted. Yes, you will need some time at the end to assemble things together, tidy it up and do a bunch of writing. Given you're in a field with lots of lab work, setting aside 60% of the time to writing now is almost surely wasting most of that time. You would be much better off writing in short bursts, stumbling upon issues which would take you back to the lab anyway. Some people do need more time for writing, it's true, but you are presently doing this for the same reason you feel clueless about your review texts. This reason is that your writing is not really aligned with your goals, and probably a bit misaligned with the goals of your research for a good measure.
One more thing you might find helpful: every bit of your PhD is an answer to some question. Formulate these questions, they will help you structure your writing. Most general of them are:

What problem are you trying to solve and why? (Thesis introduction, possible review article). Example: people love their grass green, but it is bleak.
What has been done to solve this problem before? (Another part of introduction, review article). Example: Smith et al. tried to paint it, J. Doe used another cultivar of grass...
What is your idea/approach? (First part of the main body of the thesis). Example: We've used autonomous hydroponic farming to control irrigation and nutrients supply.
How did it turn out? What were the problems with this approach? (Results, Discussion, combined with the previous bit - an article or a few)
How could your results be used/improved upon? (Conclusion)

This is still not specific at all. Suppose you've been working on molecular markers X for diagnosing Y. Why is diagnosing Y important? Currently, a completely different method Z is used to diagnose that, how does yours compare to it? How do you prove that? Why are your statistical tests valid? Are there other complications from using/creating X?
Go over existing articles in your field and mark every single paragraph with some question it attempts to answer. Do the same with your own writing. Devise more questions which need to be answered but are not.
Not knowing what to write or why, I would spend unlimited time with next to zero productivity. Don't get trapped in that, and good luck!


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Why the submitted paper remains "With Editor" or "Editor Assigned" for more than 1 months?
We had submitted a research article to one of the journals in the field of Computer Science one(1) months back. Within 2 days of submission, the status changed from Submitted to journal to With Editor.
However, it has been more than 1 months that the paper has been showing this status as With Editor.
I do understand that majority of CS journals paper quickly can not find a suitable reviewer for review. However, I don't think it is justified to wait for more than 1 months for the same to go for Review.
Should I send a gentle reminder to the editorial board? Or, is it too early.
We are worried because the if the results of the paper gets accepted, then we can progress our work to another level.
N.B. I don't think it is decent to Withdraw the manuscript.
I did search previous question, but could not find it useful.

Seems strange to me.  But what do I know?  I was in a different field.  For a mathematics paper, you would not send a query until 6 months have passed.  Some would say, a year.  It seems strange that you have to wait for publication before you can continue your work.

Likely the editor is in the process of lining up reviewers who agree to review the paper. Or, it is under discussion by the editors if it should even go out for review. These things all take time, and should not prevent you from continuing to make progress.

I did not downvote, but one reason for the downvote may be that you ask totally different questions in the title (Why is that?) and in the body (What should I do?).

@Dirk I have both the things listed because in some journals it shows "With Editor" and in some journals it shows "Editor Assigned". So, to make it a general question, I have listed. However, you could edit for clarity. Thanks for the comment.

Sorry, but I do not see how I could edit. I don't know which of the two questions you want to have answered. But for the "Why" question: Can be many reasons (editor did not find a reviewer, editor is away from mail, editor did forget to click "in review" button, editor is lazy…). As for the "What to do" question: Ask your advisor what a typical time for a query for this particular field is.

In some submission systems, when an editor sends an email to a potential reviewer, the reviewer needs to click on a link to either accept or decline to review. If the invited reviewer neither accepts nor declines to review, the submission system remains 'stuck' until the invitation times out (usually 2-4 weeks). Then only after the timeout can the editor invite a different reviewer. This could delay the 'under review' phase.

By the way, waiting for an acceptance to progress with your work is not a good thing to do. Publication in a journal might take a long time (more than 12 months). If your later work needs to cite your previous work that is not published yet, you could create a technical report out of the previous work and cite that report.

But, why is this question getting negative vote? I don't find any sufficient/necessary reason to justify the same.

I'm in a different field.
Best source to answer your question is unlikely to be on this site.
Do you know anybody personally who's published in that journal and who would be able to answer your question from experience?
Next, check the instructions to authors on the journal publisher's website, where the publication work-flow might be explained, including any slowdown in the process.
Once you've checked this, if you cannot find any specific information that would answer your question, send an email to the journal editor you're meant to have as your main contact.
Assuming you get an answer, you'll be clearer on the publication schedule for your article.
Agreeing with your N.B. If you're currently not clear about the situation, withdrawing the article without further update might be a waste of time, for all involved, and you could alienate the editor of a journal you're potentially interested in publishing in further.


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Google Scholar not listing articles that were first posted to medRxiv
I have found that when I post a preprint to medRxiv it appears on Google Scholar soon afterwards. But when the article is accepted after peer review by a journal, the journal article is not detected by Google Scholar - it only finds the original medRxiv article. On the other hand, if an article is accepted without a preprint on medRxiv, then Google Scholar detects it soon after publication with no problem.
It is possible to manually edit the medRxiv entry to reflect the published version, but this doesn't link to the published version in the same way that automatically listed entries do. For instance, users cannot click directly to the article, and the number of citations it has is always listed as zero.
Anyone has encountered this problem also?


text:
Changing university after one year in another university (PhD level)
I am a second-year Master student and will finish in 2022. Next fall, I am going to start a PhD in physics at my current university. The research topic will be the same as well as the supervisor. I like this topic and find it prospective. My supervisor is fantastic, and I like him as a human and professor.
However, I feel like I can get a better future if I finish PhD abroad (e.g. Europe or the USA). But I don't want to change topics. Honestly, I want to settle down in a foreign country, and PhD seems a good step. I should mention that I want to stay in academia, do research and become a professor one day. But scientific degrees obtained in my home country are not commonly accepted and regarded in other countries. I intend to reapply to foreign universities while being a first-year PhD student.
Moreover, I think that an additional year of research will benefit me in terms of experience and publications.
Another decision is to go to the industry for a year and then reapply for a PhD. The problem is to get a position in the industry and not stick too much to money. The latter will be a downside of getting out of the industry.
I should indeed talk to my current supervisor and ask him for a piece of advice. I am afraid that this conversation will not be pleasant for both of us. I don't want to burn bridges either. What reaction should I expect from him?
Is it morally OK to reapply to other PhD programmes while being a PhD student? Will admission offices (and professors) be sceptical about my application? What is better:

Finish PhD in my home country and then do my best to get a postdoc position abroad
Reapply to PhD abroad while being enrolled in another PhD
Go to industry and apply to PhD after several years

The third option seems the worst. It can be hard to return for lots of reasons. Especially after "several" years.

I cannot tell you which of your options is better, that is for you to decide. However, the second option is one I would definitely not recommend. You talk about burning bridges, well this would be one way to burn them.
You should talk to your advisor. Be open about your ambitions, it is only fair to them and to you. You respect him as a human and a professor, so don't 'use' him for one year and then leave. If you are honest it will not be an uncomfortable talk, since he doesn't want a demotivated PhD student. They can offer advice and help you more with your options, they can talk about possible exchange programs. After this discussion, you can decide which options is the best for you.

Actually, I think the second option is fine, but it depends on the field, perhaps. Do others depend on your staying? If not, what is the harm of leaving?

The missing option is applying to foreign PhD programs now, and leaving their current program with a Masters in 2022 as planned. I'm not sure where the 'extra' year comes from.

@Buffy If feels (to me) not very ethical to start a PhD when you already know you want to quit after one year. I believe the first year is not the most productive year, so in that sense I think it is not really fair to an advisor.

@JonCuster Yeah that's a fair point, not sure why it's necessary. Perhaps they don't deem it possible get everything arranged before that time?


text:
How is my position named?
My advisor is responsible for assigning teachers to conducting excercises to lectures. Since there is a lot of students (and groups) sometimes last year students help by taking excercises in some groups. For the past 5 months I've been employed by the university and I've worked a couple of hours a week taking classes, without a formal position at the university (and for sure won't have until I finish my masters).
Right now I am writing a CV and I would like to include the last 5 months in my work experience but I don't know how to name my position - is "Math teacher @ university" a good one?

Have you considered reading your contract for these details?

Yes, but the contract is regarding conducting  X classess, there is no formal position named, and "math teacher" sounds a bit high-schoolish.

I'd ask your advisor on this. If you are getting paid then I'm surprised they don't have a title listed somewhere for you, even if it is an internal title.

I'm confused about what you're doing. Are you leading a separate tutorial/exercise session that runs concurrently with lectures? If so, I would say you're a teaching assistant or in the British system a Tutor running a tutorial.

Yes, I lead separate excercise sessions on which I show how to apply what they learned on lectures in practice. THanks for the response i think teaching assistant is suitable here.

Having worked at a university in HR, you are classified as an employee and you definitely have a "job title". Since you're a graduate student, you could be classified as a "Teaching Assistant" or "Graduate Assistant". I would recommend reaching out to your HR department and simply asking them what you your title is in the system.


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What should the purpose of a draft of a research paper be?
When writing a research paper draft, what should be the purpose? Is the goal to write the draft with the aim of producing a finished product but expecting that it may need changes? Or is the draft more of a glorified outline that shows the path in which the author is going to take?
I'm referring to the objective/intent of the draft writing. For example, writing the draft with the goal of creating a near completed product (assuming there will be edits) versus writing the draft as a mere outline of the "plan" you want to take.

It is possible to have 1, 5 or 10 or more drafts before the final version - it depends on what needs correcting...

You have it backwards: How different should the final version be from the first draft? Answer: As different as necessary.

I added some content to help with clarity of my question. Maybe I should have changed the title as well.

@DSVA I know it sounds goofy, but the reason I am asking is because one of my instructors has stated that the draft is basically a glorified outline, ect... This goes against what I thought the objective of a draft to be but I wanted to get a better understanding on the purpose of a draft since this has made me question my previous drafts. The question you asked is the very thing I am wondering as well.

The draft itself is only the term for something that is surely not finished. The purpose depends on what you intend to do with it.

Drafts are often shared with collaborators to have a common ground for further discussion, fixing some notations and in general keeping them up-to-date with the progress.
Drafts can be just for personal use to keep track of ideas and what has already been done.
Draft is also the version of the paper that is 5 pages over the limit and you know you will need to make changes to fit in.

Draft writing is normally not the goal itself, instead it makes sense to think about what the draft will be used for and then write a document that is useful for this.

I would add that it also makes sense to think about how to go about writing the draft so as to minimize the time spent editing, rewriting, and changing things for the final version. Since the draft is not the goal in itself, time spent polishing it should be minimized, and one should focus on certain things first (e.g. solidifying notation, put in a basic outline of the paper); maybe leave the intro, filler text, and conclusions for the end.

It is a good idea to start sketching out the paper before writing it. That way you know what you want to write where. If you want to call that first sketch a draft, then the purpose of that draft should be a "glorified outline". Then you fill it in. If you are very good, or the paper is very simple to write, then you may get it right in one go. Probably, you will have many further drafts, which will (hopefully) gradually become closer to the final product. So, the answer to your question is in one word: both.

The purpose of a draft is to organize your thoughts about what you intend to say and how.  You can continue to fix the language and flesh out the details as you work on it, but your draft should make clear what your paper is about and what it has to say on the topic.  It should organize your ideas, arguments and evidence in a logical and understandable way.


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"Everything in an encyclopedia is Common Knowledge" - actually true?
One "rule of thumb" that is often given out by writing centers and tutors (for example, see the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning) is that anything in a general-reference print encyclopedia (e.g. World Book, Encyclopaedia Britannica, etc.) is "Common Knowledge" and never (or, at least, hardly ever) needs a citation in academic writing as facts do not get added to encyclopedias until they become generally recognized in the scientific community as true. The major exception to this is that one must cite if one quotes the exact text of an encyclopedia.
The Yale link above explains that Common Knowledge "...is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary."
To what extent is this actually true?

Is this mostly true with a few exceptions?
Is it partially true and partially false?
Is it almost entirely false?

To be clear, I am asking about general principles and best practices in citation, not any specific context. Contact your editor or instructor.
The statement can be true even if there are minor exceptions. For example, "This is true, except that orbital periods of celestial bodies must always be cited because SCIENCE!!!11!111!one, even if they were first measured hundreds of years ago and verified hundreds of times to within 0.1% of their accepted value today" or "This is really true 99.9% of the time, but there was that old case where an editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1990 had a momentary lapse of professional judgment and allowed a controversial statement on the mating habits of Bactrian camels to be printed despite the fact that it had been first published in 1988 and lacked consensus in the scientific community at that time" (I'm not saying that this actually happened, it's just a hypothetical example).
This question is about general knowledge that constitutes Common Knowledge across fields. There is a concept of field-specific Common Knowledge, e.g. where Boyle's Law is considered common knowledge in Chemistry and Physics and needs no citation but might require a citation if used, for example, in a Gender Studies paper. This question is not about such domain-specific Common Knowledge.
In response to comments, I am using the term "Common Knowledge" in its sense as a term of art in Academia for knowledge that need not be cited because it is sufficiently old, sufficiently well-reproduced, and/or sufficiently non-controversial that a citation would serve little, if any, practical purpose, not the sense of knowledge that most people on the street have memorized. For example, the fact that the typical habitat for the Venus' Flytrap consists of subtropical marshes of the US East Coast is Common Knowledge - the average person you meet on the subway or at the bar might or might not know this, but any decent encyclopedia will explain it to you, and you would be hard-pressed to find a botanist (or any scientist, for that matter) who would seriously challenge it.

Could you give an example of this rule-of-thumb instruction, i.e. a link or something? Haven't come across that yet, would be happy to see the source.

@user153812 sure, see here : https://ctl.yale.edu/writing/using-sources/understanding-and-avoiding-plagiarism/common-knowledge "...it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary."

Prof Feynman in one of his lectures on thermodynamics said he got most of his material from the encyclopaedia ... but that is high level... good lecture though !!

Is there a difference between "Common knowledge" and being able to understand and apply said knowledge...

@Solar of course there is.

Given that over half of (U.S.) survey respondents couldn't identify which half century the American Civil War occurred in, I'm not sure what is meant by "Common Knowledge".

@RobertColumbia so your question becomes so broad is there a chance of a sensible answer?

@Solar no, why would you say so?

So no chance then....

In addition to the good answers already posted, I would suggest that a better way to interpret the contents of an encyclopedia is not as "common knowledge" but as "generally accepted knowledge."
Under this interpretation, it becomes clear that "if you found a statement in the encyclopedia, you don't have to cite it" is not reasonable, as the encyclopedia can be viewed as a sort of mega-review paper.  Along those same lines, one will generally find that (as one would expect in a review) the encyclopedia itself is likely to be citing sources for the more specific or specialized information that it contains.
However, one can nicely invert the concept as a rule of thumb:
"If you think you don't have to cite a statement, you can confirm by checking an encyclopedia."
In short: if an encyclopedia agrees with you that a citation is no longer necessary, then you should generally feel safe in not adding a citation.

Taking the statement “anything in an encyclopedia is common knowledge” at face value reveals it is obviously false. In the comments it was pointed out that half of Americans don’t know what century their civil war was in, but there’s also the fact that two thirds of people worldwide have either not heard of the holocaust or engage in holocaust denial. I recently was in a regional trivia competition with thousands of contestants where I had to explain to the organizers that one of their questions were wrong because they had confused density and mass. Virtually all of the questions on Jeopardy! are answerable if you knew everything in an encyclopedia, but even the specially trained contestants don’t know all the answers. Based on these examples alone, I think the idea that the majority of people know all the facts in most encyclopedias is nonsense.
I would strongly advocate for the idea that encyclopedias are irrelevant to the question of if something should be cited. Besides the fact that the vast majority of people don’t know most of the facts in an encyclopedia, there are other reasons to cite things, including:

Giving credit to the discoverer
Providing a link between your work and previous work on the subject
Making it easier for readers to find similar relevant articles.
Providing accountability for your positions. Sometimes encyclopediae are wrong, and the process of looking for a source would hopefully reveal your mistake.

Even if we pretended that it was common knowledge that every triangle-free graph contains an independent set of size Ω(sqrt(n log n)), all the above reasons to cite that fact would apply.

Also, if everyone knew the contents of encyclopedias there would be no need for them to exist in the first place...

I think what is meant by common knowledge isn't something that everyone knows, but I've that researchers in the fields should be reasonably expected to know.

@guifa can you explain how the second half of my answer is unclear in that context? Also, I would also hasten to add that I think that the modified claim you made is also egregiously false.

nitpick: tungsten's only the 5th-densest naturally occurring element, behind rhenium, platinum, iridium, and osmium.

@GeoffreyBrent I’m really confused now, because I thought I learned it was the densest as a kid, but looking it up I’m clearly wrong...

@StellaBiderman the top four are all stupendously expensive, so perhaps it was some variant on "densest practical option for purpose X"?

I feel like I should have known that every triangle-free graph contains an independent set of size Ω(sqrt(n log n)), but then I remembered that I don’t have to because Wikipedia knows it for me.

Tungsten doesn't form a close packed crystal (unlike rhenium, iridium etc), so automatically it's density is lowered; based on that fact alone I doubt any course would refer to it as the densest element. Instead, tungsten has the distinction of having the highest melting point-possibly that got mixed up along the way somewhere?

I'm glad the original poster linked to the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning advice about this, because I could not initially believe this was a standard being put forth.
I might believe that the content of the first paragraph of a general encyclopedia entry might be common knowledge. But the purpose of a citation is to point the user to a source for further knowledge, and/or to allow them to verify that you are reporting accurately. (Stella Biderman's answer is very nice as to the purpose of citing.) Particularly when giving guidance to students, I encourage citing resources that are on the border of being general knowledge, especially if those students are prone to "forget" to cite more generalist sources from which they learned overviews and opinions of a topic, which are sometimes very blatantly echoed in the paper.
Encyclopedias feature useful generalizations, as well as specific facts. I would not require a citation for, "Gold mining is an important part of Mexico's economy," but I would like a citation for, "Mexican mines produce 3.2 billion tons of gold annually." (I completely made up this figure... but it would be nice in such a case to be able to check the source's usage of both "billion" and "ton", whether the measurement is of ore or refined gold, and what year the figure pertains to.)
Why might there be this "encyclopedia" guideline for common knowledge? There are times you don't want writing weighed down by footnotes. In journalism, each claim is (ideally) fact-checked prior to publication. Perhaps in peer-reviewed journals, the theory is that uncited facts are confirmed by the peer reviewers, who would point out that they need a citation if they are not common enough. And perhaps in many rhetoric classes, students appeal to truly common knowledge often enough that instructors do not want them to clutter up their writing with citations for the banal ("America's founding documents proclaim the importance of liberty"; "Facebook is a daily staple for the typical college student").
Finally, I'll argue that the process of confirming "common knowledge" can be generative and improve the paper. When I've sought to use common knowledge in the introduction of my papers, I often looked things up to confirm the key details. (I'm great at trivia, but I "trust, but verify" if I put something in writing.) When I do this, I sometimes stumble across an even more telling anecdote or specific detail that furthers my point, or a helpful resource that explains a core topic in a way students might appreciate. Sometimes I find that the original paper that put forth a now common idea also contains highly relevant extensions that have not been widely developed.

@DSVA Good point! Just imagine how many citations Gauss/Legendre would get if every paper using OLS had to cite them...


text:
Choosing research area
I am considering pursuing a PhD in computer science one day.
I guess specializing in (is that the way to put it)?
What I want to focus my research efforts on.
I am interested in:

Manned/unmanned space exploration (writing guidance/navigation systems for the next Mars rover, etc).
Finding cures for diseases (folding @ home).
Computer models of climate change, as I am very much a person that thinks "Global Warming is real and needs to be dealt with yesterday".

But this questions isn't "what should I do research in" but more of "how can I decide what I should do research in."
I know a lot of people will counter with "if you don't know what you want to research then you shouldn't be considering getting a PhD", but I don't believe in that line of reasoning. I want to do research and to be involved with something that expands the boundaries of Computer Sciences as we know it.  Just because I am not exactly sure what avenue I should go down in doing so, doesn't in any way change how much I know that I do want to do it.
So where do I start with figuring out my specialization?
What are my theoretical options?
Where can I see if "getting my PhD to write software to guide probes to Jupiter" is even a viable option?
Must I choose a area that is currently being researched at the university I attend, or am I free to come up with my own?
Can/should I be reading recently released papers on Computer Science topics for some inspiration, and if so where do I go to find those?

What is "CC program"? What was your 1st degree in?

Related, possible duplicate

You should definitely read literature on a field that you're excited about. You can narrow it down to literature about the questions that excite you. I'm in a similar situation currently and I am working on SLAM papers since that excites me more than other stuff.

This is one of the harder questions you'll have to ponder, and one of the most useful. First off, realize that your choices are not (completely) irrevocable. Many researchers shift areas every 5-7 years or so - the changes are not dramatic, but over time you can make useful contributions in a number of different areas.
Having said that, what you are looking for is a broad topic that will presumably take you through the 5-6 years of a Ph.D. To look at your questions one by one:

Where can I see if "getting my PhD to write software to guide probes
  to Jupiter" is even a viable option?

Do you know of people working on this ? maybe at NASA ? Where did they do their Ph.D ? what kinds of topics do they publish in ? What I mean is that one way to figure out if "Ph.D in X" is viable is to see if there are people doing X, and then figure out what their trajectory was by looking at their publications, CV etc

Must I choose a area that is currently being researched at the
  university I attend, or am I free to come up with my own?

It depends. You're in an MS program, and you haven't mentioned whether you're planning to apply elsewhere for a Ph.D. An MS is a good time to explore your options with people at the university, burnish your research credentials, and build some background in areas of interest. Obviously it helps if your area of interest is covered, but even if it's not, figure out related background that you need, and maybe look for someone doing research in a related area. Also see which places/people you'd like to do a Ph.D at based on the area, and that will give you a sense of what kind of extra reading/prep to do.

Can/should I be reading recently released papers on Computer Science
  topics for some inspiration, and if so where do I go to find those?

But of course ! but you should try to focus your search a bit. There's a large body of work in each of the topics you listed, and google is your friend. Once you find even a few papers, you can figure out where they were published, and then look at other papers in those venues, and repeat.

I know that I'm going to get downvoted for this, given the preponderance of computer-science people here, but my advice is:
Don't do a Computer Science Masters.
Quickly work out which are you want to do programming in, and switch to a Masters in that.
So, in your case, a Masters in Climate Science. Or rocket science.
Domain knowledge is really crucial for building useful models.  Academically pure programming will help you write code to please the computer-science purists.  But if you don't have the domain knowledge, it will be useless.
I've worked on many many dozens of successful applied programming projects. None of the useful models were written by people with postgraduate qualifications in computer science (but several of the useless ones were).
Alternatively, finish your Masters in Computer Science, and then do a Masters in Climatology, or rocket engineering, or whatever.
Then you'll have the best of both worlds: domain knowledge and postgrad-level programming skills.  The best universities are developing in-house Research Software Development capacity, which seek to unit the two, and you could be part of that.

I won't downvote you but would that advice be given to anyone trying to go for a CS major? Domain knowledge is important of course but why would doing a major in CS mean that domain knowledge can't be gained afterwards/in parallel?

I think I've covered that in the last couple of paragraphs. And this is advice specific to the OP, and to anyone else who's more interested in the application of programming to a specific end purpose, rather than just programming per se.

CS in not at all about “pure programming”! Based on OP's question, he might be interested in research in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, or Bioinformatics.

@Yury I mean theoretically pure programming rather than applied (i.e. requiring domain knowledge) programming. i.e. I'm not saying CS is purely programming.

MS degree in Computer Science, in general, is not about programming. Say, as an MS student, the OP may take very useful courses on Machine Learning, Bioinformatics or both. There is no reason why he should quit the program. I strongly disagree with your advice.

I have no idea what "theoretically pure programming" actually is :). MS students don't learn any kind of programming: rather, they learn advanced concepts in different areas of CS (including the ones that Yury lists)

What is this "programming" of which you speak, earthling?

I would like to put in my two cents here. It looks like the type of areas you are interested in are related to Artificial Intelligence. I am not suggesting you jump the AI bandwagon but I do recommend starting to read on this area alongside your normal studies. Find some of the latest AI journals and skim through (at least) the abstracts to see what people are doing nowadays. Global warming and unmanned vehicles are huge issues. You would need to narrow this down to a particular area and make your contribution there. You can't solve world-scale problems all in one MS/PhD.
Read up and make a small contribution to the existing knowledge. Maybe you'll one day make a huge difference but, as the saying goes, even the journal of a hundred miles start with a single step.

Some opportunities that you are likely to have:

Attend seminars, especially those given by outside visitors. Ask "stupid" questions after the talks.
Go to dinner with the speakers after the talk. In math we always take visitors out to dinner, and usually the attendance is quite poor, even when the speaker is famous. Needless to say, this is an opportunity.
Talk to Ph.D. students. Find out what they are doing. Does it sound cool?
Talk to postdocs and junior faculty, who are likely to have recently come from elsewhere. How was their experience? How did their previous departments differ from your current department?
Do an excellent job in your coursework, or whatever other requirements you have now. This will prepare you well for your future, and it will also prod professors to help you out and open doors for you.

Good luck!

One way is to do projects in several different areas.  You'll like some projects better than others, and then you can study the corresponding field.
Alternatively, you can talk to current grad students about their work, and try to get a sense for what their lives are like.  Ask them what projects they're working on and see if you find them interesting.  I would also ask them about the most interesting or fundamental papers in their field, and take a glance at those.


text:
Who should be provided as an academic reference for job applications?
I am instructed by my university to offer 1 academic reference and 1 work reference for industry work (I am doing a year-long placement). However, all attempts to actually get suggestions on who to use from the university have been useless as they appear to be dodging my questions by not responding.
As my course is quite large, I seriously doubt any lecturer or demonstrator will even know my name, let alone me as a person and therefore cannot give a personal reference. But, as we have to give somebody, who should it therefore be?

Your academic reference should be a teacher you have taken a class from or worked with in another academic capacity like a research assistantship, an academic internship, etc.
For students very early in their careers who have only taken large lecture classes, this can be challenging. Some teachers of large lecture classes have concrete guidelines for when they will recommend students in these classes (e.g., I might have a policy of recommending any student who achieves more than a 3.7/4.0). You might look at your professors websites or ask them. The professor will likely review your work in the class before writing a letter so you will be wise to pick a professor of a class you did extremely well in.
Alternatively, you might be able to ask a post-doc or graduate teaching assistant that you worked with more closely with who is familiar with your academic work. I wrote these letters for undergraduates when I was a graduate student. Graduate student letters would be inappropriate for applying to a graduate program but should be just fine for intra-University programs and placements.

I am in the situation where I am early in my career (Only a second year undergraduate). I was concerned about asking any of my lecturers due to the class size and thought it may be unreasonable to ask any for references as they do not know me personally. However, I am a top-performer in pretty much all of my modules (Scoring on average >80% in each one - some last year as high as 95%). You are saying it may be worthwhile to ask the lecturers of my best modules for a reference then? This isn't asking too much of them?

@user23761: Decisions about when a teacher will or will not write a letter are personal ones. I'd say it's totally reasonable to ask if you are in the top 5-10% of your class and you should would mention this fact when you ask. If it's asking too much, they will say no. I don't think it's presumptuous to ask in the first place.

Thank you for your suggestions. I will ask one of my lecturers from last year if they would mind providing a reference if a company requires one. I suppose the worst that can happen is a "No" after all.

@user23761: The worst thing can happen is no answer. Unfortunately, that's probably not particularly unlikely. Try to think of a TA who might be good to ask as well.

Real world employers mostly want to confirm that you have ability to work independently as well as on a team, which is evidence of self-discipline and good communication skills.
For this reason I would suggest, if possible, to ask a lecturer/professor in a class where you did some type of project which required working over a period of time to produce something tangible like a presentation or a paper or a design. Preferably in a team, and ideally where you had some leadership role or were responsible for a good chunk of the work.
Ideally this lecturer would have acknowledged your project as of especially high quality and well done. When you meet to ask them, bring some evidence that will help them remember your work (they deal with hundreds of students and it may be challenging to recall any one individual's accomplishments).
Anecdotal evidence is always great in this case because it gives them something specific to talk about. You can also bring a hard-copy sheet with a bullet list of your accomplishments (grades, projects, extracurricular work) that will give the lecturer some raw material for the reference.
Help them out, and they will help you. Good luck!


text:
Why do graduate programs have comprehensive examinations (comps)?
I'm about to begin studying for the comprehensive examinations (comps) my masters program (Computer Information Systems) requires.  I'm curious as to the point of even having them in the first place.  I'm not concerned about whether or not I'll pass my comps.  I know that I will.  It just seems like a lot of wasted time in both preparation and the fact that I'll have to burn a precious day of vacation to take them.
I could understand if, as stated in another post regarding PhD programs, we were required to take them after our first year of the program as part of a larger weeding out process.  However, that isn't the case.  We're simply required to take them before graduation.
In four separate exams, we're tested on the four core courses for our program.  Didn't I pass those courses already?  Haven't I already earned a satisfactory/passing grade for each course?
Would someone please provide my ignornant mind with some insight into the possible reasons why?  It feels like double jeopardy...  Thanks!
EDIT:
The exams are written by the same instructors who taugh the specific class I took.  For example, both Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith teach CourseX.  However, since I took Dr. Jones for that course, he is the person who wrote the comp for the course.  At least, that's my understanding of how they're written and by whom.  I apologize for leaving this nugget out.  I shouldn't write these questions while I'm sleep deprived...

In mathematics, such things are intended to make people look at things again, for reinforcement, and to possibly reconsider them from a slightly more mature viewpoint. Rehearsals.

"Didn't I pass those courses already?" - Yes, but not all instructors of graduate courses hold the same bar to their students.  A common exam can serve to ensure the quality of the student independently of who taught it, or when/how it was taught.  As you may already know, teaching isn't much of a priority to professors as research is, so just because you passed the class doesn't necessarily mean you've learned enough to delve into the uncertainties of cutting-edge, original research.

@Paul Don't know if that is a duplicate. The prelim/qualifiers and the comprehensive are different in some some places. My graduate program had both. One to show that you were ready for graduate coursework and the other to show what you had learned from your graduate coursework.

"I'll have to burn a precious day of vacation to take them". That seems like a pretty legit reason to abandon comps. Voted to close.

Meh. All the answers to the alleged duplicate address exams that cover undergrad material early in a grad-students tenure, but the question is explicitly about exams that test graduate material later in the students residence.

The question is about exams taken at the end of a master's program. I have given such exams. In my mind, they make the candidate prove that they have mastered the material of the courses, which is a form of quality control. But the exams also have a few secondary goals in my mind:

By studying for the exams, students gain more understanding of the material, and come away better educated. The actual taking of the exam is less important, in a sense, than the time spent studying. If a student studies well, they should pass the exam.
The exams keep the faculty honest when teaching, because the faculty know their students will have to pass exams that will be seen by other faculty. Exams within a course are often not seen by other faculty, so the instructor is not as publicly accountable.
The exams help the faculty see what the students know, all in one setting. We can use this to revise courses at the departmental level if we find that many students have the same gaps in their knowledge.

It was your second and third bullets that provided me with the answers I hadn't considered.  Thanks!


text:
How to acknowledge oneself as the author of materials created in industry research position?
I am an industry-based researcher. As part of my role, I develop various resources for use by our clients. They include manuals, codes, quizzes, factsheets and the like. In all cases, I am the sole author of these resources.
These resources carry the name and logo of my company. However, I also want them to carry my name (and title), so that I can claim authorship. I need to do this for a range of reasons, including demonstrating my research output, as well as ensuring no one else claims credit for them in the future.
Implicitly, my colleagues know I am the author but as many of them are taking better job offers elsewhere or retiring, there may be no one left to 'vouch' for me.
Currently, I put my contact details at the start or end of these documents, which basically says "For more information or clarification, contact [Name]". I want more that this but in a discreet manner i.e. I do not want to put my name on the cover page, as this would be too much in the "face of everyone".
The last point is important because these are industry resources and their "weight" comes from the fact that they have been developed under the auspices of my company. Hence, the copyright is held by the company. I have no issues here. Its the right thing, as I am an employee.
However, it is not the company but me who is developing these resources. My company will have no issue if I put my name somewhere in the documents but it has to be done discretely. The reason I am saying discreetly is because it is the company name and logo, rather than my name, that are important consideration for the end-users (including my CEO!).
I am looking for some strategies to have myself acknowledged in this context? In particular, I want it to be without any dispute that I am the author of these resources.

You should be able to place your authorship somewhere in the front-matter of the document without compromising branding.  I think the magic phrase you need is something along the lines of "Prepared by: [authors]".
To take one of your examples: in a manual, after the cover there is often a set of front-matter with history and disclaimers and such.  You can add "Prepared by" as its own little subsection or insert it into the version and history information.  This makes it absolutely clear that you are the author, without putting yourself in front of the company's brand.