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Do résumés written in LaTeX show more promise when applying to graduate schools?
I am a computer science student from India. I noticed that most of the résumés and thesis papers etc. I see are written in LaTeX.
If I write my résumé in Word (say) rather than LaTeX, will it have a negative affect when I apply to graduate schools in the U.S.?
If not, then should I even learn LaTeX for my future academic prospects?

I certainly recommend learning LaTeX at some point. I don't know the answer to your first question, but why not start learning LaTeX while you have the chance? You can google "latex resume template" to get started.

If you just submit the PDF, how would anyone even know?

@AustinHenley the default Word document appearance and the default LaTeX appearance are quite distinctive. It's true that you can tweak settings in both so that only the trained eye will notice, but it's hard not to notice a defaultish Word document.

@Anonymous I totally agree with you. In fact I would learn it someday. But is learning LaTeX just a skill? Or is it a necessity?

@NajibIdrissi if you really believe that, then crayon is just about as good as latex or word

Using the document class moderncv you get a nice CV with little more skill than installing LaTeX, working from a template and compiling the result.

@AustinHenley Of course they would know! At least if they know LaTeX. It is quite easy to distinguish a PDF created by Word or LaTeX.

@NajibIdrissi if the OP has no latex experience then it will take some time to learn.  If content is "orders of magnitude" more important than appearance this time would be better spent elsewhere.  However, since in many departments latex is a standard, latex skill might be properly classified as "content".

I used Word for my CV for many years after grad school, just because I had started with Word for whatever reason I now forget, and was too lazy to reformat everything in TeX for a long time.  So I imagine quite a few people in math/CS still have CVs in Word for possibly similar reasons.

If you're looking to apply to graduate school it's not going to worry anyone what you use to write your CV (AKA resume, but I'm in the UK). The time spent learning would be better spent on refining and proofreading the content.  But, as soon as you have a need, learn it.  That might be for assessed work as an undergrad or internal reports etc. once you're in grad school.  There are many tools of use to CS authors, even if you don't write much maths, and when it comes down to it, it's just a markup language, which shouldn't be too hard for someone from a CS background to pick up.

This is much more minor, but I love having a LaTeX resumé, because it lets me write a huge, annotated resumé, and then comment out the parts not relevant to the job to which I"m applying.

@JerrySchirmer exactly; I maintain a single CV.tex file with internal switches for specialty_A, specialty_B, etc. Best thing I ever did to make sure I don't send out something accidentally outdated.

@emory. Didn't Feynman write a letter of recommendation on a napkin with a crayon one time? Content matters more than medium.

@MadPhysicist It would not surprise me.  I remember as a graduate student buying a box of crayons after reading about something Feynman did.

In a math-heavy area the ability to use LaTeX certainly matters, yet it's just another skill. In other words, if your resume says that you are familiar with LaTeX, then you don't need to prove it by typesetting your document in it.
However, for two candidates that are equivalent but for LaTeX familiarity, in a math-heavy area I would certainly pick the one with the skill. Working with the other on a paper will probably be a nuisance at first, wasting valuable time. Moreover, how in the world he/she survived with no familiarity of LaTeX until now? It's a bit like being a programmer and not using a version control.
Edit:
Just to make it clear (your friends do use LaTeX, so I'm assuming math-heavy field):

If it is a big burden, then don't sweat it, the possible advantage will be small, other factors will matter much more.
Nice resume from Word is better that an ugly resume from LaTeX (in particular if it screams "I can't use LaTeX").
Having a nice resume in LaTeX won't hurt, so if it is not a big issue, why not? You could ask your friends to help you (it shouldn't take more than ~2h).

I hope this helps :-)

Anyone who is capable of doing graduate work in a math-heavy area is capable of learning LaTeX. And perhaps they don't already know it because they've not had any need to write large, math-heavy documents as an undergrad: that seems like a pretty normal situation, to me.

@DavidRicherby well, plausible, but unusual. I would be surprised to hear of someone who got through an undergrad curriculum in math or physics without ever having the motivation to learn LaTeX, but not so surprised as not to believe it.

@DavidZ Not unusual at all in my experience.  Even if one has to write up one or two undergrad projects, getting by with Word often outweights the cost of learning TeX.

@DavidZ FWIW, as a physics undergraduate about ten-fifteen years ago, I don't think there was any point at which anyone even suggested I might want/need to consider learning LaTeX...

@DavidRicherby There is a difference between capable and took time to do it. Such a student surely is capable of doing an internship with some company, but I would prefer one that did (all other things being equal). If I'm hiring for a discrete-maths position, then surely such a student is capable of learning relevant material, but I would prefer one who took time to attend some extra courses in that area. Learning LaTeX takes only two-three days, I would say it is relevant if someone was unwilling to take that time to learn useful tool.

Cont. There surely are other factors, but I strongly disagree with "No. Almost no one cares." And even if people say that it doesn't matter, just as with good looks, it takes conscious effort to enforce that policy on oneself. It's just too easy to take it subconsciously into account. Even if we were to agree that it should not matter, it does matter today.

@Andrew well, I suppose I can't claim my experience is representative, but I was an undergraduate only slightly more recently, and LaTeX was used extensively by all the students (and, of course, faculty) in my program. There was an implicit understanding that anyone who was serious about it would learn how to create basic documents in LaTeX.

"It's a bit like being a programmer and not using a version control."  This is extremely common in undergrad.  Generally the situations where it is really needed tend not to occur.

@Lawtonfogle The exact issue is hard to describe exactly, but it circles around being curious or serious enough or putting enough effort and interest in your studies. If you don't know revision control, then perhaps your hard disk broke too few times, or you never removed a crucial file or didn't collaborate with someone else long enough, etc. If you did all that, if you are curious and serious and put a lot of effort in your studies and still don't know version control, then there should be something else, something extraordinary you did in that time, that trumps all the other disadvantages.

@dtldarek I don't think many students are running their own servers.  Setting up versioning control doesn't help when it is on the same spot as your hard disk.  For most college use, just copying files over to a backup drive provides better availability.  Combined with most projects being short term individuals (and rarely going beyond a small team in size), there just isn't as much need.  In the same was, there isn't as much need for LaTeX for most undergrads except those already involved in research, and that is a far better selling point than their use of LaTeX.

There are templates, I don't think it is difficult to use them, so I am not sure if using LaTeX shows some skill...

@DavidRicherby Anyone who is capable of doing graduate work in a math-heavy area has already learned LaTeX.

@Lawtonfogle I don't think we understand each other. Why do people experiment with new or esoteric languages, even if their usefulness right now is null? I care if the student did such things, because it signals certain curiosity, interest, seriousness, effort, whatever. Lack of any experience with version control is a strong negative signal independent of whether such a tool is actually useful in undergrad (I would argue it is, but that's not my point). Lack of LaTeX familiarity is very small negative signal (almost anything else will take priority), but is not negligible.

dtldarek: You say that you strongly disagree that almost no one cares about latexed CV's and also "However, for two candidates that are equivalent but for LaTeX, in a math-heavy area I would certainly pick the one with the skill." Could you clarify whether you have ever made a graduate admissions decision in this way?

@PeteL.Clark Not LaTeXed CV, but LaTeX familiarity. I've never had an occasion to make such decision, moreover, I will take my time before I will allow myself to have such a big impact on someone's else life with so little information (I take such matters very seriously). Yet, it is not so hard to ask (hence my disagreement with "no one cares"), and I have enough personal experience to have at least rough ideas on whom I would like to work with. I dislike putting this in black-and-white terms (surely there are exceptions, right?), but my anecdotal data confirms in 100% what JeffE said.

@Lawtonfogle: "Setting up versioning control doesn't help when it is on the same spot as your hard disk." I have used version control on several occasions and can recall a couple more in which I would have used it had I known git back then. None of them involves setting up my own server (which I don't know how to do). Basic git skills are sufficient to contribute to any project on github or host one's own project there, and for most academic uses github is a perfectly good place.

@PeteL.Clark True, I suspect that one would have to review hundreds or tousands of resumes to have a case where such a detail would matter. Still, even if you haven't ever seen such case (thus never acted on the detail), that doesn't mean you don't care. If vote counts were some weak proxy on how many people might care, or even assuming ratios like 1 in 10 or 1 in 20, it is enough to have an incentive to learn LaTeX (assuming no clear better avenues).

@darijgrinberg  A public github to put your school work on?  Could be risky.  Pay for a private?  Once again the cost vs. risk benefit.  As for working on open source projects, that falls into the same category of 'not that many students actually do that'.  It is a nice bonus, just like having uses a source control tool, but not something that is demanded to graduate (though you could argue it would improve things if it was).

There is very little risk to a public github. Thieves tend to steal from places that don't have a public history. And I don't merely mean FOSS programming projects; papers and books can be written on github too (e.g., the Stacks project).

@DavidZ, I completed an undergraduate degree in physics without ever learning LaTeX. Turns out that you can get by with a mix of Word and LibreOffice and various export-to-pdf functionality. I did learn LaTeX eventually, but it's actually because of working with matplotlib of all things.

No. Almost no one cares. You should learn LaTeX if you intend to work mathematics and will need to write up your work. It's much simpler to typeset formulas in LaTeX than MS Word, and it's also free.

Note that for basic formulas, Word 2007 or later lets you use syntax nearly identical to LaTeX.

And to expand on this, when creating larger documents (e.g. research papers, book chapters, dissertations, etc) it makes a lot of things easier (formatting, citations, etc) -- not just typesetting formulas.

This is more of a comment than an answer.

@AaronHall: This is definetely an answer, albeit a short one. Comments and answers differ in content, not in length. You may criticise or downvote it for lacking substantiation or being short or similar, if you feel that way, but that does not change that this definetely belongs in the answer domain.

Even less people would care if the resume would be converted to PDF before submission.

@enderland Syntax perhaps.  Output no.

To play devils advocate, let me answer yes. Of course LaTeX knowledge doesn't imply any other kind of skill, but the two do seem to correlate in mathematical fields, because almost all serious research is typeset in LaTeX.
See Scott Aaronson's 10 tips for detecting if a claimed mathematical breakthrough is wrong (in particular, see #1): http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304

Did Perelman use latex to compose his proof?

Do you have any actual evidence or experience that typesetting a resume in LaTeX increases its effectiveness in getting a grad school place? Scott Aaronson's article has nothing at all to say about how you should format your resume.

@DavidRicherby one of my professors once (more-or-less jokingly) remarked "if you typeset your thesis in anything other than LaTeX I will fail you without looking at it" and "if you do not use LaTeX nobody will take you seriously". It is fair to say that to such a professor you would make a bad first impression if your resume is not in LaTeX. Certainly, nobody will care about your resume being in LaTeX, but some people might care about it being in Word.

@TomvanderZanden I said "evidence", not "anecdote".

@SalvadorDali: Yes, he did: http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0303109

I get the feeling that point #1 is somewhat like my own litmus test for the quality of Java code: if you're not using Javadoc, your library almost certainly sucks.  And yet, there are programmers (including a small number of good ones) who disagree as vehemently with my test as I see people disagreeing about the importance of using LaTeX.  I think the ultimate answer is, whether or not using LaTeX is actually important, there are plenty of people who feel very strongly that it is.

I think it does not matter so much but the only thing is that it looks more classy than Word documents. Also, you avoid the possibility of file extension issues as your compiled file is already a PDF. If you use Word, possibly, you should convert your file to PDF.
Not really to answer to your question but you can use LyX or find an already made LaTeX template and do it easily.

I don't care much what application you use for your CV, but if you send me anything other than a PDF I will be slightly annoyed, which is not great for you. When my web site says to send PDF to apply and you send a .docx instead, that's even worse.

Quite sure that I will not send you my CV, don't worry :-)

Bill Barth says that no one cares. And this is true – it doesn't matter what program you use. But I should elaborate that presentation does still matter – you should take care in preparing the document.
Simply using the default layout of any typesetting program is generally a bad idea. The formatting is probably not ideal for the purpose, and I have no great love for Calibri and Computer Modern. Sloppy, default formatting may give a bad impression.
Just take the time to carefully design your document layout, and if you want to look a little more distinctive, pick a sensible font such as Palatino or Latin Modern Sans.
If you put a little care into presenting your CV, it should be virtually impossible (without looking at the PDF metadata) to tell which program you used for typesetting. The unique features of LaTeX like microtype are not something that people will notice or care about when reading a CV. The moderncv package for LaTeX provides some good CV templates, and I suspect there are plenty available for Word as well that look just as good.

This is the right answer. I think that when I see an academic document written in something other than TeX, I get extremely annoyed---but that's chiefly because when I can tell that it was written in Word, it's generally because the author's put little effort into styling the document (i.e., being nice to the reader). Default vs default, TeX looks better than word; so when I see a well-styled document, I know that the author either (a) cares about the styling (hence my well-being), or (b) knows TeX, and has at least some technical curiosity.

I use LaTeX to typeset my resume and my business card. I have typeset it once, and I can go back and modify the content, and as long as I like the overall shape of the document, and I don't have any spelling errors, I know my document is completely free of formatting consistency problems.
Any small change will be immediately applied to all of the appropriate content.
It also allows me to comment out sections and make comments in the source of the document that I use to tell years-older me why I did what I did.
To me, as a LaTeX user, meeting another such user immediately puts them at a higher level than a non-user. To contrast with Barth's answer, with a flat-out, "No." I would say it's a positive signal consistent with the idea  that you can make an investment in learning something, even if not directly related to your discipline, with clear long-run payoffs, and ceteris paribus, I'd rather work with you than someone else with otherwise identical attributes.
But I personally value diversity in learning, whereas PhD programs prefer focus.
Overall, it would be a weak signal and I would not do it simply because you think it makes you look good. Rather, do it because of all the payoffs I mentioned above.

My math prof typesets all formulas using \begin{center}$...$\end{center}, and she's a renowned scientist in her field. Please do not judge people by technical and non-crucial skills.

A renowned scientist is also miles beyond someone in Word. Sounds like you're agreeing with me?

No, I don't really agree with you. I'm actually maybe lost in what you state.

Avoid transmitting either of the following messages;

"This is my first LaTeX document ever"
"This is my first Word document ever"

... or the morally equivalent "This isn't my first (X) document ever, but I have not improved (much) since then".
Other than that, a matter of taste.
This may seem like a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the other answers here fail to address the very real possibility that if you suddenly switch to LaTeX, the outcome will be catastrophic not because of LaTeX, but because you need to learn it before you try to use it.  The same holds for Word, and some people seem never to learn.  Once you're past the "I almost managed to hurt myself with my typesetting software" stage, whatever you use is probably good enough.  (There's "probably" because we cannot predict what sort of nut will be on the reading end.  There will be people who care more than they should.)

I'm an Electrical Engineer that left academia for industry, and typeset my resume in LaTeX. Other than the ease of getting the formatting exactly as you want, there is another benefit: version control. I keep it in Git. All changes are committed no matter how minor. Since .tex files are ASCII, I can diff any two versions I choose. I also have different branches, for example, a grad school application version, and an industry job search version.

There's no such generalization that ".tex files are ASCII". I think most people today encode their .tex files with the UTF-8 format.

@Sverre, I couldn't really care much less what the actual format it, as long as I can diff them.

I think you should learn latex, regardless of how you intend to write your résumé. As mentioned in other answers, it makes writing math a lot easier, and a lot faster than anything else I've worked with. For academia, it also facilitates writing indexes, sources and basically everything that gravitates around your main narrative.
I would certainly recommend it.

Welcome to Academia SE, your answer is well-intended advice, but doesn't address OP's original question. Please consider expanding your post.

I feel like my answer addresses this part of OP's question: "If not, then should I even learn LaTeX for my future academic prospects?"

In average, it does not matter if the content is well-formed and understandable. The latter, by far, is more important.
In opposition to the majority of the answers, I find resumes written in LaTeX to be bland. The applicant took a template, wrote the content and printed it out. Please note that I emphasized the "I".
It is strictly a matter of taste of the one who will be at the receiving end. Some people like the standardized, repetitive style (it is often simpler when you go though 1000 resumes) - others are attracted by the slightly more elaborate one which stands out in the heap.
How you present the resume does matter. Since you are just starting I would go for something close to a standard in your field and add some sight deviation so that it catches the eye of the reviewer.

What's important for your CV is that it has an informative layout and that it's easy to read. On top of that, it certainly helps if it looks "nice", whatever that means.
What software you used to create a good-looking CV is entirely irrelevant. I've seen bad-looking CVs and documents written in LaTeX, and I've seen beautiful CVs and documents written in Word. Don't think for a second that an ugly or bland CV in LaTeX will help you in any way.
Focus on creating a good layout for your CV, and use whatever software you think is best suited for you to reach that goal.
As an example from real life, I don't think many people would be able to tell from a print-out of my CV that it was written in LaTeX and not in Word, and I don't think anyone cares either way.

If you're worried simply spend an hour or two playing with Lyx, or one of the other TeX editors. It won't take long to pick up the basics / create a TeX variant of the document.
I suggest starting with a GUI based editor, as I personally found it far easier to play in WYSIWYG mode, and then peek at the resulting markup than: RTFM, play in vi, compile and eventually use a Dvi Viewer of your choice to verify the results.
It's a shame TechWriter was never ported, as 20+ years back it was by far the best TeX based editor around.


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Academic calendar in the USA
How could one characterize the typical academic calendar in the USA? I never managed to understand how it works (from Wikipedia, etc.)! It is so confusing.
In Belgium, you basically have this:

September-December: class + Winter recess (2 weeks in December)
January: Exams
February-May: class + Spring break (2 weeks in April)
June: Exams
July-early August: Summer break (1 month and a half)
Late August: Exams

Having your exams after two weeks off sounds like a pain in the butt.

@Azor-Ahai actually, the winter break is used for studying by students here.   So yeah, people spend Christmas+New Year time studying, then exams in January :p Horrible

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How can I timestamp my paper without violating double-blind review?
I submitted a paper to a top tier conference and it did not get accepted. The paper contains an original idea, and I am afraid that the paper could get plagiarized between the time I send it to another conference after incorporating reviewer's suggestions and making some modifications. Such things have happened in the past to a few students in my department.
I had considered posting the paper on arxiv as a means of timestamping before sending it to the aforementioned conference, but didn't, as this would have violated the double-blind review requirements of the conference. (The conference chair replied to my query as follows:)

The submission of a paper in the arxhiv.org system is not strictly
  speaking a double-submission, but rather a violation of a double-blind
  submission required in this conference, as the reviewers will be able to
  find your name (and those of the coauthors) if they do a simple search
  in Google. Thus, I am quite certain it will be rejected, and I do not
  consider it an acceptable practice in this conference's submission to be
  fair with all the submissions in order to handle them equally during the
  review process by the reviewers.

Hence I had not posted it on arxiv. Now this paper has been rejected and I would like to timestamp this paper now, while still being able to send a modified version to some conferences in the future (including those that follow a double-blind review).
Is there a mechanism by which I can timestamp my paper that does not violate the blind review requirements?
Edit: The paper was in computer science, if that matters.
A related question "How can I time-stamp my data without publishing it?" asks about ways to timestamp while keeping the information in the paper private or hidden to avoid plagiarism. However my question is about ways to timestamp such that it is still possible to publish the information while not violating blind review.

Who are you afraid will plagiarize you? The conference organisers can definitely certify you submitted that paper at a certain date.

@Davidmh: I might be a bit too paranoid, but such things happen: see http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3124/what-to-do-if-a-referee-plagiarises-the-result-after-rejecting-a-paper

Most conferences don't make a fuss about posting papers on arxiv, even if they have double-blind review. I think this particular conference's reply is unusual. As others have said already, finding the real authors is easy if you really want to. Some universities, like mine for instance, require posting tech reports on university pages prior to any submission (unless there is an embargo in place for some major journal).

@NehaKaranjkar Since you are probably talking about CS, very few extra-top conference have double bind reviews. This work has already been rejected once. Can't you submit to a lesser (still A) conference that does not require double-bind review?

Peer reviewers in your field generally reject papers if they figure out who the author is? I have never heard of such a practice.

This is still a duplicate. You want to timestamp the paper without making the contents public. Peer review is supposed to be strictly confidential so doesn't count as making the material public.

@Sverre I can attest to the practice of rejecting the paper outright if it is possible to infer authors from the contents of the paper. arXiv is murky area and definitely in spirit against the concept of the double blind review. I think the mistake is in askin - PC probably did not have any other way of replying to a straight answer. Although in practice, reviewers are prohibited from actively searching for the author and reject should follow only if author can be deduced easily from the manuscript (e.g. sloppy self-citation).

@MarcClaesen I would like to add here that the practice of booting the authors that are trying to subvert double blind principle is in fact in favor of less-known or junior authors (that gets overlooked a lot). Conferences actively try to remove the bias that results from having well known name among paper authors, and this is only good for the junior or less known researchers. So the practice is not as controversial as it perhaps sounds to uninitiated. If you follow self citation rules and really do not try to reveal yourself, you'll be fine with arXiv paper too.

The most typical way to time-stamp a piece of work is to place it in a public repository: arXiv is a good example when it applies; many institutions also have a technical memo or technical report system in place.  Although this may technically violate certain interpretations of double-blind submissions, as noted in the comments blinding of authorship is pretty iffy in many cases.  Moreover, in practice this will only be violated if the reviewers actively go looking, particularly if you put it in an institutional repository rather than a global one like arXiv.  I would thus advise that if you are worried about date-stamping, just do it and let the double-blind nitpickers complain if they even notice.
One other consideration: certain publications (particularly certain journals) do have a policy against accepting material that is already available online.  While this is in my view an insane policy, if you find yourself dealing with such, one way to handle with it is to put up a shortened version of the work, i.e., extended abstract, as the date-stamped pre-print.

"The only way to time-stamp a piece of work is to place it in a public repository" I don't have any real life experience here, but I wonder if that is actually true.  The history of mathematics is replete with stories about sealed envelopes in the French Academy of Sciences, for instance.  Or you could electronically publish an encrypted version of the article, if you really wanted to...

@Pete: It is definitely not the only way. Cryptography certainly offers ways to prove that you possess information without revealing, until later, what that information is. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6726382/is-there-a-way-to-digitally-sign-documents-to-prove-they-existed-at-a-certain-po for much more.

@PeteL.Clark Yes, I suppose you are right, and I have adjusted my answer to reflect.  I wouldn't recommend those tactics to anybody just starting out, though.

@Nate: Indeed, I was also thinking of "zero knowledge proofs" and such things.  Whether any of this should be done in this context is of course a different question.

@jakebeal: Thanks for your answer. I think putting up an extended abstract on arxiv is a great suggestion.

@jakebeal why don't you recommend it? If it helps making OP feel safer, I don't see any arguments against using an online timestamping service. There is no need to disclose it to editors/reviewers; it is completely anonymous unless the author decides to disclose it in case of plagiarism.

@FedericoPoloni I don't recommend it in general because it's risky move that may not have strong credibility, doesn't prevent a thief from claiming independent invention of the idea, and may cause people to think you have a bad attitude (unless you're in a field like crypto or security where such puzzles are considered elegant).

@jakebeal: Why would it make people think you have a bad attitude, since you don't even have to tell anyone you're doing it?

@NehaKaranjkar: Note that a reviewer could presumably also recognize your paper from an extended abstract, so that may not solve the present problem.

As Pete said, I would post an encrypted version of the publication with a key you can give out if someone demands proof.  The online encrypted version won't be readable to anyone but yourself so it shouldn't violate any rules.

maybe an out of the box idea, but if he needs the timestamp, can't he upload it to a private repository like github(costs some money, but not that much) in which he can also track his changes, and show when and where it was uploaded to invited people. That way it's online, verified datestamps, and a change history if he needs proofs, without exposing it to the whole wide world.

Are you really afraid that it will be plagiarized? The only people who have seen your work are the programme committee and any reviewers who saw the paper when you first submitted it. It would be very surprising if the programme committee or reviewers of what you describe as a "top-tier conference" rejected a paper and then plagiarized it.
Or are you worried that you'll be scooped, i.e., that somebody else have similar but independent work accepted by another conference or journal before you manage to get your paper published? If so, the fact that you already submitted it to a conference should be enough to demonstrate your priority. It's not just you and your co-authors who are claiming that your paper already existed in October 2014 but also the programme committee of the conference can confirm this.

There are other examples in which people have submitted the paper, only to find a publication, with their verbiage, but different notation, on a different website, journal, or book.  Some have even gone so far as to present other people's material at a conference.  Several "related questions" are on this topic.

@ABrown Yes, it occasionally happens but it is very rare, especially at top-tier conferences. Of all the things to worry about, the referees rejecting the work so they can steal it is very low on the list.

Here's a version that focuses on

making the proof watertight for legal matters
not publicly revealing the content
(which follows from the double-blind requirement)

The  legally provable way of time-stamping something (and also to legally prove the state it was in at that time) is to have a notary attest it, and/or give a copy to the notary for keeping (which allows to prove that the content was not tampered with afterwards). This kind of service is the main business and duty of a notary.
The "poor man's version" of a sealed and unopened post-stamped envelope is much cheaper, but unlike the notary attest there is no legally binding guarantee that a court would accept this.
As has been pointed out, making the content public, preferrably with a time stamp (aka publishing (!)) is the yet cheaper alternative - however IMHO it is not compatible with the double-blind requirement of the question: It is not possible to have the content + your identity + a timestamp publicly (which are the 3 pieces of information you want to connect) available to everyone but the blinded reviewers.

As for cryptographic methods, at the moment I'd consider them at a similar level to the post-stamped envelope. The legal weight of this is quite unclear to me -- if you're really concerned I'd say an encrypted email exchange with someone who states "I got this email at this and that date" is at the same level as having someone testify that they saw or got the content from you at the stated date.
I'd imagine that a notary could do the encrypted signing, but AFAIK this is a techonolgy that yet has to fully emerge:

There has been a project called "Datennotar" (data notary) at the Fraunhofer FOKUS and the University Kiel - final reports in German are available at ISPRAT (funder).
AFAIK there are no data notaries so far in Germany.
Wikipedia says such services exist in the US. A quick search brought up some companies, but the first two web pages I tried at least to me looked incomplete in some important details: one has a contact page without any kind of address, the second has email and phone only. Over here in the EU this wouldn't be legal for any kind of business ...

I think this answer somewhat undersells the cryptographic methods. One avenue is to produce a pdf of the document, take a strong cryptographic hash of the file, and make that hash public in a way that gets timestamped by some trustable third party. The legal weight is probably comparable to a post-stamped envelope, and the academic acceptance will probably increase the closer the field is to CS, but there's plenty of DIY options one can consider that may well be sufficient.

(My apologies for butting into an old thread, though.)

A partial workaround that was often used in the previous lab where I worked was to tamper a bit the article you put on arXiv by changing the title and the abstract, or even publishing an incomplete or old version of the article to also tamper the full-text.
This is surely not foolproof as reviewers can still find the article if they really want to do so, but at least you honestly tried to avoid violating the double blind process while still retaining guarantees of authorship.
And personally, I'm inclined to say that if reviewers still find the article with these precautions, then they are to blame for violating the double-blind process, not you.

People can very easily find articles on ArXiv without actively seeking them out. If you subscribe to the mailing list for a topic, you get notified of all new articles in that area.

@DavidRicherby maybe, but I still think this is unlikely without an active search: first even if you're notified, there are so many papers everyday even within a single topic that it's unlikely anyone read them all, even less probability for one person in thousands (your reviewer). Secondly if you tampered your arXiv article, it still would be pretty hard to establish a connection between the article you're reviewing with this one arXiv paper you glanced in the past, and furthermore, even if you remember some of the text, you certainly won't remember the authors, thus not breaking anonymity.

Remember the conference chair argument: "The submission of a paper in arxiv.org [...] is a violation of a double-blind submission required in this conference, as the reviewers will be able to find your name (and those of the coauthors) if they do a simple search in Google.". It seems that the concern here is about easy access to authors names for a given paper. It doesn't matter that they've read some version of it in the past as long as they can't easily find the authors names of the article they're reviewing. A tampered article probably clears most of the concern for the reasons above.

One major problem with this is that it compromises the usefulness of the arXiv.  I would be angry if I read a paper on the arXiv and later learned that the author had deliberately posted an incomplete or out of date version, and even deliberately changing the title would really annoy me.

You can make a copy of your paper, seal it in a brown envelope and go to the post office, have the envelope hand stamped and mailed back to you. Do NOT open your the envelope but keep it in a safe place. Then if you ever need it, you can bring the sealed envelope that has been postmarked with the earlier date which is your proof the original material was yours.

While this is certainly an interesting idea, I doubt that it would be reliable or convenient in any potential legal scenario.

@cbeleites I think your comment above (notary attest the paper (and maybe keep it) is worth an answer. Why not post it as such? I think it's better than putting the paper on arXiv. Because putting it on arXiv risk violating the double Blind process.

@scaaahu: done.

The informatics way to do that would either be a digital signature with a timestamp. Such a thing exists e.g. for PDF files, but there are some disadvantages:

you need to obtain a digital certificate, which is expensive
you need to know how to digitally sign the document
you need to understand how timestamping works and enable it

A simpler approach is a cryptographically secure hash of your paper. If you don't exactly know, which one to choose, simple choose all of them. There are free tools to calculate the hashes. On Windows, try HashCheck.
In the next step you publish those hashes on a website. Twitter is quite common, Pastebin should work as well, maybe also a website of your university. After that, you archive that website, e.g. on Archive.org.
Whenever someone wants to verify whether you wrote the article first, you can proof by letting him recalculate the hash on (a copy of) your file and compare to the hash you published earlier.
Make sure you never modify that version of the paper. Not a single byte.

Check out this paper:
B. Gipp, C. Breitinger, N. Meuschke, and J. Beel, “CryptSubmit: Introducing Securely Timestamped Manuscript Submission and Peer Review Feedback using the Blockchain,” in Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Toronto, Canada, 2017.
https://www.gipp.com/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/gipp2017b.pdf

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text:
I am able to self-fund a PhD, how can I use this when applying?
Some candidates have the personal or family resources to self-fund their graduate studies, or already know that they are willing to take on debt for them (disregard whether this is a good idea, which has been addressed before). They still, however, need to actually be admitted to a graduate school, and having funding doesn't guarantee admission.
The ability to self-fund obviously makes it possible to take unfunded offers, but are there any other ways to actively leverage this funding situation during the application process? Should the applicant inform schools that they would take an unfunded offer, and, if so, when should they (e.g. when applying, after being put on a waitlist)? Are there specific strategies that a candidate might be able to use when choosing schools to apply to?
I suspect that answers to this question might be field-specific, so I won't necessarily specify a field. Answers discussing the differences between fields might also be interesting.
Note that I am not in this situation, so I won't really be able to answer those kinds of clarifying questions. I just thought it was an interesting question that was inspired by but not directly addressed in this question.

Are you talking about graduate studies in the US? In the UK, I get the impression that if you're good enough (good grades in first degree or relevant industrial experience), then it's quite easy to get accepted but funding is quite competitive. A number of people self fund, it's not really taboo.

@Rikki I was mostly thinking about US programs, but I think the question still stands for other countries. Since it's less taboo to self-fund, does that mean that it is more beneficial to mention self-funding in the application?

"or already know that they are willing to take on debt for them (disregard whether this is a good idea)." It is pretty hard to do that.  Should we really advise people to do things that in our expert opinion could cause them long-term financial hardship?

@PeteL.Clark I just wanted this question to be more about how self-funding is viewed by adcoms and how it might benefit (or not) your application. Whether self-funding is a good idea is a separate question that has been addressed many times on this site already (e.g. here, here, and here).

@PeteL.Clark I guess it might be worth putting pointers to some of those answers in the question though.

@Roger: But as you can see from Anonymous Mathematician and me, many adcoms are very concerned about putting naive young people in a situation of financial hardship, and some people (like me) think that some adcoms should be more concerned about this than they are.  I'm not criticizing your question in any way (I upvoted it, BTW): I'm just saying that certain issues are hard not to consider.

I may have an unusual perspective on this, since many mathematics Ph.D. programs in the U.S. fund all their students (at least through teaching).  In this context, I'd recommend against even mentioning the possibility of self-funding:

It sounds unconfident, like you don't expect to receive funding, and this is not a positive impression to convey.  You don't want to give the impression that you feel your own application is subpar, and that you're bargaining to try to turn a rejection into an unfunded acceptance.  This might be a reasonable approach at the end of the process, if you're stuck on a waiting list, but it's a problematic way to begin.
Letting Ph.D. students go into debt feels exploitative, especially in a program in which most or all of the other students are funded, and letting wealthy people buy their way into graduate school is also troubling.
There will be worries about how sustainable your self-funding is.  In a year or two, your money or willingness to go into debt may run out, and the department would have to choose whether to come up with money for you or kick you out.  That's an unpleasant choice, and the admissions committee may even worry that you are deliberately aiming for this situation (in the hope that they won't be willing to kick you out once you've joined the department).

In the sort of programs I'm familiar with, announcing in advance that you would be willing to self-fund a Ph.D. won't increase your chances of admission.  I've only seen this come up very rarely, and the admissions committee has simply ignored the offer of self-funding and made a decision of acceptance with funding or rejection.  I can easily imagine that it could decrease the chances of admission a little, although I haven't seen a clear-cut case of that.
By contrast, if you are awarded a prestigious fellowship with guaranteed funding for a certain number of years, you should certainly make sure admissions committees know about it.  That doesn't have any of these disadvantages.  However, it's not in your best interests to offer to pay your own way unless that's a common and respected approach in your field.

The prevalence of unfunded offers definitely seems like it would be a factor. Would you recommend that a waitlisted candidate inform the school that they would take an unfunded offer?

I probably wouldn't, but this would be safer than announcing it earlier in the process.

+1 for "your money or willingness to go into debt may run out". (Young) people may change their mind, especially when the PhD has stuck or does not go as planned.

I did my PhD after my industry career, so I could self-fund. My instinct was to not mention it at all during the application process - it just didn't feel right.

I'd agree with the thrust of this answer, but say that it might be a tad overstated. I.e., I don't see it as likely to really hurt your chances, but it is also unlikely to help. I was willing to self-fund my masters in physics/astronomy, but the department really wanted me to TA because they were lacking in native English speakers. Note that this request was made after they'd accepted me, so I was under no obligation to accept, even though I did.

I disagree with these. 1) Confidence doesn't seem to big factor in PhD interviews. 2) Exploitative or not, it's modus operandi in many fields (PhD students being exploited? Who would have thought!). 3) There exist sources of funds that are very secure, for instance student loans as I understand once granted are not withdrawn unless you get kicked out of the program. Either you have the loan or not, there is no worry about it being sustainable (that is, excluding things like all student loans being legislated out of existence overnight, with no grandfathering).

This is definitely dependent on the department. We have a number of self-funded PhD students in our mathematics department. Indeed, the number of people we admit to our program far exceeds the number of GTA positions we offer. Most students turn these unfunded admissions down, but many do not. I'm not saying this is a good thing.

@Superbest: though my personal experience is that external money sources don't necessarily reduce the exploitation: When I was offered a part time industry job that I'd have exchanged for the part time TA job, my professor told me that he'd be perfectly happy. But as the teaching needs to be done, and all PhD students have to do their share, from the university perspective I'd then do the teaching without the part time TA wage...

What is your motivation for graduate study? If you want to learn you can learn independently.  If you want a degree, diploma mills are cheaper.

To add to Anonymous Mathematician's answer (I'm also in math), if you get  an external fellowship, this can certainly increase your chance of admission.  When I applied, I initially got waitlisted by one top univerisity, then accepted when they heard I got an NSF Graduate Fellowship (in fact, the way I learned I got the NSF fellowship was from my acceptance letter from this university, which incidentally I didn't go to).
In the cases of self-funding, sometimes it does help, if you're strong enough to warrant acceptance with funding, but the department is low on funding that year.  However, in most cases, I agree it is not so helpful to advertise this up front, particularly with top programs, but if you get waitlisted and seem to be a borderline case, then letting the admissions committee know you would be interested in admission even without funding may help.
Where I think it will be more helpful is, if you have trouble getting into a good PhD program, you can use self-funding to help get yourself into a masters program first (after which, if you do well, will have better chances for a good PhD program).  Some departments will fund masters students, and some not.  Ours typically does, but definitely accept some applicants we would not otherwise, just because the have self-funding.  My guess is this may be rather common, as master's degrees are not as serious commitments as PhD's, and one worries less about the quality of grad students getting watered down in this way.

In the US, having a master's degree can get your chances of getting into to PhD programs as they can't give toy that gown parachute. A master's is generally required for admission into European PhD programs.

@Eric Yes, the system in the US is different from Europe, but if you look at the comments, it appears the OP is primarily asking about the US.  (BTW I have no idea what the end of your first sentence means.)

Auto complete killed the message. A master's degree is considered a golden parachute in many US PhD programs for those who can't pass the qualifying exams. Having a master's degree already means they can't give you that graceful exit so it is a disadvantage when applying to some PhD programs.

Given your position, I would suggest approaching professors directly that you would like to work with to discuss what possibilities there may be.  A student who can fund themselves should have more freedom in terms of choosing what they want their research to focus on.  This may be interesting for professors that have some ideas for projects they have no funding for but would like to investigate.  It may also let you choose your own research program and get a professor to agree to supervise you with it.

From the perspective of someone in public health, I would approach the idea of self-funding with caution, and likely not mention it at all. There are three real reasons for this:

Because there are very few external fellowships available, generally speaking whether or not you have been offered funding is a very strong signaling mechanism for the program's actual interest in you.
The most common paradigm for graduate funding in the field, especially in later stages, is to take a research assistantship that's been written into someone's grant. This is often also the source of your dissertation. While not self-funded, I did have a funding source that institutional rather than tied to a person, and while that gave me somewhat more freedom, it was also considerably harder to get firmly on a project over the long term and to have a PI view me as "theirs".
Keep in mind even if you can self-fund, assuming that money is fungible, there's other things you could do with that money. I wouldn't put forward spending it on tuition etc. unless you have to - and in my experience, if a department wants to admit you but can't assure funding they'll tell you that, rather than outright rejecting you.


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How to address situtations where the effort to avoid plagiarism results in less effective communication?
I have been contemplating this topic because of something that happened a number of years ago. Do you have any suggestions on alternative ways to handle the following case:
A student in one of my community college classes (Introduction to Public Speaking) wrote a moving self-introduction for his “icebreaker” speech.  The student was a homeless person who had resolved to become a college graduate and his brief autobiographic speech offered the class a rather poignant insight into what it actually meant to be homeless.
The following year that same student was in another of my COMM classes and the students were required to deliver a persuasive speech based on one of the three classic rhetorical modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos, or logos. The aforementioned student’s speech topic attempted to persuade his classmates to help the homeless by appealing to their emotions. A great deal of his speech was clearly “lifted” verbatim from his icebreaker text. To his credit his speech introduction did include the following sentence: “Last year I wrote a speech describing what it means to be homeless and today I would like to revisit that topic.” and he also correctly cited his own speech in the written outline.
When a student just re-uses all or most of a speech without acknowledging the prior work I consider that self-plagiarism. When a student copies verbatim text but gives clear attribution I consider that a lazy effort. However, in this case the precise phrasing and constructions used by the student had such strong emotional appeal I would be hard-pressed to find any way to revise the speech without lessening its impact.
Imagine having Martin Luther King in your speech class and requiring him to rewrite his "I Have A Dream" speech without using any repetitive phrases.
In this case his grade was based on the 2nd speech alone without factoring in the 1st speech in any way. However I did follow up and educate the student on the subject of self-plagiarism (amazing how few students are aware of this concept) and cautioned him to be avoid or at the least to be extremely careful when re-using his work.

Considering this particular student's overall performance I am fine with his specific work and the grade he received for this project. However I wonder what I would do if a similar case happened again and felt it would make a good question here. It relates somewhat to the opposite scenario in which a student desperately trying to avoid plagiarism contorts the phrasing of a source into an awkward and ineffective communication.
In the one case the underlying question is:
Do you ignore or mitigate the duplication of the (correctly attributed) source to respect the effectiveness of the wording?
In the other case the question is:
Do you ignore or mitigate the horrible wording in order to respect the avoidance of duplication?

I have never heard the term self-plagiarism for public speeches. Plagiarism mostly refers to copying verbatim portions of WRITTEN text (I may be wrong though). Otherwise, all politicians should be condemned by your definition of self-plagiarism. On the other hand since the student's speech is basically a homework the term pliagarism may be valid, but only within the university context.

@Alexandros: Students are often required to accompany their presentations with written outlines including citations for sources. This practice helps the students to plan and organize the speech and prevents the students from "just winging it".

I am feeling like I am trying to defend the student in my comments below and that case was simply meant to be an example of the bigger problem so I have expanded the question a bit. I hope what I wrote after the horizontal bar adds some clarity for what kind of answer I hope to find here.

"Imagine having Martin Luther King in your speech class and requiring him to rewrite his "I Have A Dream" speech without using any repetitive phrases." I'm trying, but I haven't succeeded yet.  Could you tell me why one of the the leading orators of the 20th century is taking my speech class?  That might help.

Let's split this into two different cases:

Is re-using a speech self-plagiarism?
Is re-using a speech appropriate in that specific classroom context?

Addressing the first question, the reason why self-plagiarism is an issue is that there is an expectation of novelty in scientific communication: re-using text from a previous manuscript is thus "cheating."  There is no such expectation of novelty in speeches.  It is thus just fine to re-use content in a talk, and there is not even any requirement to acknowledge that one has given the same talk elsewhere.  Consider, for example, a person doing faculty interviews and giving the same talk at different places: this is perfectly normal, acceptable, and even desirable.  Now, if you give the same talk to the same audience multiple times, they'll probably get bored and stop inviting you to talk, because you don't have anything new to say.  Similarly, because talks are often tied to manuscripts, e.g., at conferences, it will necessarily be the case that they contain much new material.  Still, these are byproducts of the nature of the communication, not ethical principals.
Now, to the second question: should the student have re-used the same speech in class?  Here, I would say that it depends greatly on the educational goal of the class.  If the goal is to workshop particular aspects of the content or delivery of a speech, then I think that it would be fine, since you can work on new aspects of a speech even if it is not new (or even yours!): for example, you might want to work on delivery and oration, and even just quoting Martin Luther King could be just fine for that.  If, on the other hand, the goal is to learn how to create a speech, then it's failing to satisfy the educational objectives of the class.  To take the analogy: even if Martin Luther King's best speech was "I have a dream," it shouldn't mean it's the only speech he can ever give.  I wouldn't call it self-plagiarism, since novelty is not the default expectation in speeches, but it would be failing to follow instructions.  Not knowing the exact nature and instructions of your class, however, I'm not sure which category it falls into.

for (1): consider also a lecturer giving several talks about the same topic (e.g. each year). (+1) particularly for linking self-plagiarism to the expectation of novelty.

The objective for the particular class was to learn how to build a speech, using one of the classic rhetorical methods, that would effectively persuade the audience to a view and/or action. The speech was effective but it was not original (to the student) thus my dilemma: was the student using the best road or just the easiest road (which happened to be most effective)?

@O.M.Y. If the goal was to learn how to build a speech, then the student should have built a new speech, possibly on a new subject.  Nobody is so poor of spirit as to have only a single speech in them, even if one happens to be their best.

@jakebeal. I agree and disagree. Building a speech involves building blocks and yes the student selected recycled building blocks. However the student also built a completely new product with a completely new focus. Continuing the builder's analogy would you require a contractor to use a different type of brick -- one that he has found to be high quality in the past -- just because the end product is a barbeque instead of a fireplace ?

@O.M.Y. If you found it didn't detract from the educational goals you wanted to achieve, there's no problem with it.  Writers often workshop the same story in multiple contexts, after all.

@jakebeal. Write, rewrite, edit, rewrite, re-edit, rewrite, review, rewrite, throw it away and start from scratch, rewrite... Ah the glamorous life of a writer! :-D


text:
How to avoid "presentism" or "historical transposition" in writing papers?
I am seeking any published writing style guidance or good/best practices to help with writing a paper so as to avoid introducing the taint of what is called "presentism" also known as "historical transposition".
I found this webpage at RationalWiki which gives a good solid definition of the topic, and points out that there are two very different uses of the word, one for historical matters and one for philosophical matters.

Please note: I am NOT interested in the philosophical context of this word (i.e. the contrast to eternalism).

In essence the following excerpt seems most relevant to the topic I am asking about...

presentism is a style of writing or argument that can be fallacious, depending on the circumstances. [...] Another common form of presentism is allowing present-day moral judgments to creep into characterizations of the historical figures. [...] In good scholarly historical work, like in law, it's imperative to separate the consequences of the action from the intent.

Hopefully such guidelines can help writers in two ways:

Show the researcher/writer how to identify subtle forms of presentism and related pitfalls that may creep into the text.
Show how to write a paper in a manner that helps the reader to avoid their own tendencies towards a presentist view.

Presentism is the concept that we as humans have a tendency to interpret history using modern world views by either condemning the past based on modern day societal norms (ex: ridiculing American 19th century indecency laws such as bathing suit requirements) or else discounting the significance of past societal norms that once were but are no longer acceptable (ex: asserting that sending people to debtor's prison can not happen in modern America). There are other more subtle forms however, such as the perception of implicit superiority of the present over the past in general.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about a specific concept in anthropology and history, rather than about academia.

Respectfully @jakebeal, I am asking about how this concept is applied in academic research for any topic (as a writing technique). As I mentioned above this concept is not exclusive to just Anthropology or History. It obviously could be applied to any subject matter with a historical context such as Medicine, Philosophy, and even Pedagogy and Andragogy.

Did you perhaps mean to ask this on [history.se]? I see you're a member there. It might be worth flagging for migration there: I'm not sure if this is the sort of question they answer - it would be worth checking out their help page, and looking for similar reference requests on their site, to see if they accept that sort of question.

Note that I tagged this with writing-style which is my primary interest on the topic. I believe my question fits that tag's description: "Questions about the tones, turns of phrase and other writing patterns that are appropriate for writing in an academic context." (emphasis added).

@O.M.Y. I'm afraid that I'm rather confused now: are you trying to figure out how to write about "historical transposition" or how to avoid "historical transposition" in your own work?  And are you sure you've even got the words right, since Google doesn't seem to turn up anything coherent?

@jakebeal - The latter: how to avoid H.T. in my own work. Looking for any sort of academic essays or guidelines on that topic. I know I can work some of it out for myself but I was advised to do some research on how others have handled the matter. As for Google's not being helpful, that is why I came here. :-) Perhaps this is known by some other term?

So far the only thing I can find that uses this term as defined is this paper on page 10. It is not much help towards my question but it does (loosely) support the actual phrase being used for this concept.

Are you sure it's not "cultural transposition"?

@scaaahu - I don't think the two terms are synonymous but I do think they are quasi-related. The one refers to inevitable changes over time within a given society and the other seems to refer to changes/differences between geographies/cultures and the potential for cross-cultural contamination. Of course these two items can and often are related (culture changes over time) so I think there is some benefit to exploring this concept as well. Thank you.

The reason I ask the question in my previous comment is because your two examples in the question. Indecency laws such as bathing suit requirements is still applicable in some culture. Debtor's prisons still exist in some countries. And they might have little to do with history.

What you say about such cultural norms still being present in some areas of the world is true, but you will also note I mentioned "19th century indecency laws" so there was definitely a historical context to the example I used. There also seems to be a sort of return of the debtors prison in the US. On an OT side note it appears I was being Anglo-centric in my examples and that is a form of viewpoint bias I will need to watch out for apparently.

Is this article A Typology of Derivatives: Translation, Transposition, Adaptation any use to you?

I have reworded the question hopefully to make it more on topic.

I'm not convinced this is something you should avoid.

I don't know any formal guidelines about that but I was always told by senior academics to be aware that technology, general knowledge and methods might have greatly improved since the time a given paper was written. In consequences, the appropriate thing to do was to be descriptive about the shortcomings and avoid harsh judgment (reserve it for the plentiful bad contemporary academic output).

In what areas are you primarily interested? In my areas of interest (math, computer science) it is very rare that you reference papers that are more than, say, 20 years old, and most of those much older that are still relevant aren't that far off in technique/methods that this is a serious problem. True, it is easy to be harsh on the pioneers, as the slick techniques nowadays in vogue are refinements of theirs, but even so I don't see this as very relevant.

@vonbrand I am working on a Philosophy related project. It is a personal project that I hope might lead to a minor publication someday.

I would be interested to see an example of presentism in a literature review/paper. My 2c. In disciplines that view their work as progressing from earlier work, older work may seem simple. One can (and ought), however, to avoid condescending commentary by positioning it as a building block that contributed to the current state of knowledge. Philosophers, though, often structure essays as, "Socrates said X but I think Y". Here the problem is to check one's premises for presentism. I'm not certain that such a process would differ from that of constructing a strong argument in the first place.

A bit late reply but I tend to agree with @jakebeal that this is off topic. Perhaps, you can rephrase and ask in Philosophy or Writers' SE. Why? Because it is not just application of a concpet - in fact, the application itself could be criticized using the concept in question. In short, there is no single answer for this question and I am coming from a historicity perspective. There are various school of thoughts  (within different disciplines) treating these concepts differently. If someone can propose such general guideline, it'd be a philosophical breakthrough :-)

@Parrhesiastes Can you please flag the question for closing, giving this reason? (I would do so myself, but cannot until my old closure flag clears)

Follow links on historiography - there are lots out there.  Historiography is both an academic discipline and a name for a text that outlines and contextualises a question with particular focus on how and why and when and where it was approached by whom.
Reading in this area will help you to understand why 'presentism' is an issue in academic writing and how to spot it in your own thinking and writing.
The other advice I can give is to say that if you pay attention to any good academic writing you will see that there are clear indications of what is intended as empirical and what is inferred.
Proper use of references and citations will help you to avoid accusations of being wholly subjective.  If you want to get across a value statement why not find a quote from someone contemporary to the event whose opinion mirrors your own.  Do not forget to include and consider opinions that contradict your own as well.  You can weigh the merits of an argument voiced by others.  Of course, ultimately, your findings will be influenced by your own background and social context.  Try to be clear and honest with yourself and your audience about when and how this is happening.

bikedragon: First, I appreciate the general academic writing advice you offer, it mirrors advice from colleagues. Second, regrettably I cannot accept your Answer for this Question. The discipline of historiography is too expansive and encompasses far more material than just academic writing styles. While I am certain I (and future readers of this Question) would eventually learn from reviewing the material of the field, suggesting the whole of historiography is akin to handing a doctoral thesis for intercultural communication theory to someone wanting to know how to write a persuasive speech.

All that said, the bounty is yours since you were the only one who even tried to answer the question before or after the bounty was posted.


text:
Wrong font used for statement of purpose and résumé
I used wrong font for my statement of purpose, rather than the one prescribed under the department’s specifications. Will this hamper my chances of admission into that university?

Only the university/department can answer this question.

How "wrong" were you? 12 pt instead of 11? Pacifico instead of Times?

What font did you use?

Did you accidentally used wingdings?

Comic Sans? ;-)

As far as I can tell, the reasons behind font prescriptions are usually:

To avoid silly or unreadable fonts such as Comic Sans or blackletter fonts.
To avoid biases.
To be able to quickly assess the character count of a document.
To prevent the circumvention of page limits or similar by using a narrow font or similar.

(Whether one should care about character counts or page limits to the extent that the last two points matter at all is another discussion.)
Now, the if rules were only made with these purposes in mind, they would be something like:

The statement of purpose must be set in a traditional sans-serif font such as …

or if the restriction is due points 3. or 4.:

The statement of purpose must be set in Arial, Helvetica, Liberation Sans, … or any metrically similar font (in 11 pt with double line spacing …)

Unfortunately, the people making these rules usually do not know sufficiently much about typography or are even aware of that not everybody has Arial and Times New Roman pre-installed on their computers. Similarly, some applicants may be confused by such instructions. Therefore you end up with prescriptions that just require a Arial or Times New Roman, though probably nobody really thinks that you must use those very fonts.

Thus to evaluate the impact of your font choice, you first have to find out for which reason the font prescription was made. To this purpose, ask yourself questions such as the following:

Are other aspects such as font size, linespacing and borders prescribed as well? If yes, the prescription is likely due to point 3 or 4.
Is there any prescription on the length by other means as the word or character count? If yes, it’s almost certainly point 4.
Is a wide variety of fonts offered? If yes, the description is probably due to point 1, perhaps 2.

Finally, you need to consider, how much your actual font choice sabotages this purpose. Some examples:

If Times New Roman was prescribed due to reason 1 and you chose another traditional serif font such as Georgia or Baskerville, it will likely be without consequences. Even, if you used a traditional sans-serif font, you might fare well, as whoever is reading your submission may not even be aware of the prescriptions in this case.
If Times New Roman was prescribed due to reason 4 and you used Liberation Serif, which was designed to be metrically equivalent (i.e., each character takes up the same space), this will likely be without consequences. You need to have a trained eye to even spot the differences between the two, if you are not specifically looking for them:

If you used Comic Sans and it was not the prescribed font, this will likely have disadvantages, no matter what the reasons behind the prescription are and even if there was no font prescription to begin with.

However, at the end of the day, you can only guess the intentions behind the prescriptions and your document may get into the hands of some pedantic who radically enforces for these rules for their own sake (especially, if submissions were to be made in a format that allows to easily control the used font). Thus, if you want to be sure, only time (or asking the university) can tell.

Is there even a possibility for Comic Sans to be the prescribed font? :D

Historically, another reason that particular fonts were required is that these fonts responded better to duplication: photocopying, microfilm, etc.  Some fonts can become unreadable when poorly reproduced.

Yet another reason is that PDF files that use but do not embed nonstandard fonts render very poorly on systems that don't have those fonts installed.

@JeffE: Is this really an issue? I hardly ever see any PDFs without embedded fonts and I am working on a system that does not have some standard fonts (nor automatic substitutes) installed. And even when I do, it often turns out that it’s the creator’s fault for ignoring some in-your-face warning.

@Michael: Maybe applications to Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Clown College?

@Wrzlprmft  It's not really an issue now, but it was (apparently) an issue 10-15 years ago, and institutional policies change slowly.

The short answer is: no, it will probably not hurt you, as long as the font you used is normal-looking and/or similar-looking to the original font.  In that case, few people will even notice the difference.


text:
What if my paper is accepted, but later my institution doesn’t allow me to publish in this journal?
My paper was accepted by a publisher; an acceptance letter was mailed to me.
However, later my institution didn’t allow me to publish there, because it the journal isn’t indexed by Scopus? How can I withdraw the paper; is there any issue if I submit my paper to another publisher?

Can you please add some more details?  What reason might your institution have for allowing you to publish in some venues but not others?  The answer will likely depend on those details.

You might also want to say which country you are in. The idea of a university censoring where or what you can publish, for example, would be entirely counter to the US notion of academic freedom.

Thank you.. the reason  is the journal is not Scopus indexed and  my institute doesn't allow me to do so!

Thank  you #electrique it  helps me ur URl!!!! actually they didn't publish  it  so what do I do if I want to publish in other journal? what are the legal issues in such a  process could any one help me?

Have you signed an agreement to transfer the paper's copyright to the publisher, or to grant them a license to publish?  If not, you can withdraw the paper unilaterally.  If yes, then you will need the journal's permission to withdraw - if they won't let you, then you will simply have to deal with the consequences at your institution.

@NateEldredge I am not sure that is true. If the university holds a legal claim that can prevent your from publishing then you could not legally given permission  to the publisher.

@StrongBad: Maybe.  If that's the case, I'd be worried about the fact that OP signed over something that wasn't theirs to transfer.  I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds like fraud, and I'd want to talk to university counsel (and/or my own lawyer).

It's really unimaginable that the journal would take legal action against you.  Suing would cost them money and alienate authors.  I would just inform them that you're required to withdraw the paper, and submit it elsewhere.

Your question is the result of going against the grain. You should have looked first if your university had any rule regarding which journal to publish. This is important even now as you can re-submit to another unwanted journal by the university.
Depending on the limited data given by yourself I suggest you  get a confirmation from the journal that your article will not be published by them. Until that time, do not send your article to another journal for review.
.
Again I assume that perhaps you wanted to fund the article through university and that is why university refuses article. Is this the case? If it is, then you should either publish without any funding from the university or follow above mentioned suggestion.


text:
Could a manuscript be under review even if the AE was not assigned?
There are three things written on the journal’s home page: EIC (editor-in-chief), AE (associate editor) and ADM (administrator). The EIC is assigned, whereas the AE and ADM are not. The status is "Under review". In this situation, what can I expect? Has the EIC invited the reviewers or it is not under review?

I tend to disagree with @Allure.  I have been an EIC, and I'm an associate editor of several IEEE and ACM journals.  The manuscript was submitted only 3 weeks ago.  It is possible that the EIC just hasn't gotten to it yet, or is having trouble finding the right associate editor to handle it.  I think the system will say "under review" as long as it has been submitted and not yet accepted or rejected.
It is possible that the EIC is trying to decide whether to assign the paper or reject it immediately, but I think that's not the conclusion I'd jump to.
OP should simply be patient.

We might be using different editorial management systems then - the system I'm most familiar with has statuses "submitted to journal", "editor assigned", and then only "under review". In other words, it doesn't say "under review" unless a reviewer has been invited.

Could be.... hard to say in isolation....

If it says "under review", it's under review.
My guess is that the EiC decided to handle the paper himself / herself, hence nobody else was assigned.

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


text:
How to cite a specific organization in APA?
I'm citing a quote from an attorney who works for Trial Lawyers for Public Justice in Texas. In APA format, do I italicize, use quotations, or leave it as normal text? Thank you!

In the text:

"This aggression will not stand," confirmed Bob Loblaw, attorney at the Texas non-profit organization Trial Lawyers for Public Justice (Loblaw 2018).

In the references section, you will write up whatever medium you found the quotation in, and TLPJ might or might not be explicitly mentioned.

If it is a blog post or technical report or such authored by Loblaw, hosted on the TLPJ site, you would have Loblaw as author and mention the organization only if it is in the overall blog name or as the distributor/publisher of the report.
If there's an unattributed press release from the organization, within which is Loblaw's statement, Trial Lawyers for Public Justice is the author to list.
But if Loblaw was quoted in a newspaper, say, then you cite the newspaper article in the references, and your text would be something like:

"This aggression will not stand," confirmed Bob Loblaw, attorney at the Texas non-profit organization Trial Lawyers for Public Justice (as quoted in Lane 2018).


text:
I chose wrong license during submission on arXiv, what shall I do?
I am a PhD student from computer science and try to submit a paper to IEEE transactions. In addition, I also submitted it to arXiv under the CC0 license (Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication), where it was already published. This might be unacceptable for IEEE.
My question is: Can I just withdraw the current version, and resubmit it to arXiv under non-exclusive license? It seems like that there will be a record in arXiv. Will it affect my IEEE publication?

Can I just withdraw the current version [...] ? No. As far as I know, it is impossible to withdraw a paper from the arXiv. You can replace it with an empty version, but the earlier version is still accessible. See To withdraw an article in the arXiv FAQ.

Could you solve your problem? I have faced the same problem.

Hi, I cannot withdraw the old version. I just submitted a new version with the correct license. It seems like that it does not affect the paper publication.

There are precedents that suggest this may be unacceptable to the IEEE, although the only way to know for sure is to ask.  They may be more sympathetic if they see it as an unfortunate mistake, rather than an attempt to undermine their copyright policies.  On the other hand, they may still wish to avoid any precedents that could be used to undermine those policies, regardless of whether that was your intent.

Can I just withdraw the current version, and resubmit it to arXiv under non-exclusive license?

If you try to do that, the arXiv's plagiarism/duplicate detection will alert them and they will be upset.  You are definitely not allowed to withdraw and then resubmit independently.
Instead, you should write to them to ask what, if anything, you can do to fix this.
One option is to update the current paper.  I think you are allowed to choose a new license for the update, but I assume it does not change the license for the previous version (which will still be available).  If that's the case, then this will not solve your problem.
Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable, so there is nothing you can do to prevent the article from being distributed under the CC0 license if someone has a CC0-licensed copy and wishes to do that (see this FAQ).  However, the arXiv might be willing to change the license they distribute the article under in the future, especially if your paper was just posted recently and you explain that the license choice was a mistake.  I don't know what the chances are that they would agree, but it can't hurt to ask.
This would not completely solve the problem (anyone who downloaded the paper already under the CC0 license could still do whatever they wanted with it and redistribute it further), but it would mitigate it.  I do not know how the IEEE would react.
Ultimately, there's no perfect solution, since nothing you can do will ever eliminate the possibility of CC0-licensed copies somewhere on the internet.  All you can do is address the issue as best you can and then explain it to the IEEE and hope they feel you have done enough.

Hi, thank you very much for your reply :) Big help!

A licence may be irrevocable, but the question is, if the licence was actually granted. Assume OP would have chosen CC0 without having the necessary rights. Then the licence was never granted, even when he selected CC0. In a similar fashion you can argument that a genuine mistake does not grant a licence. When a webshop had a wrong price (USD price entered as cents) and people bought items, the shop was not obliged to deliver the goods as it was an obvious mistake and the people knew it. So when you instantly notify arxiv, it is clear that you did not grant a licence, but clicked wrong.

Passively play along like a boss.
@AnonymousMathematician's practical suggestion for undoing things on ArXiv may work, but let's suppose it doesn't. What do you do now?
Well, just do exactly what other academics usually do: Sign that IEEE paper!
(Note: This is a variation on the standard trick for circumventing publisher attempts to restrict publication.)
First, regardless of what it says - you have plausible deniability even if it contradicts your having dedicated the paper to the public domain: "Gee, I just signed the form like everybody else, I didn't really read it through. I don't really understand what it says, either. I'm an absent-minded [insert discipline here], not an IP lawyer!"
Even that will likely work just fine.
But, let's look at the actual document:

The undersigned hereby assigns to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Incorporated (the “IEEE”) all rights under copyright that may exist in and to the above Work, and any revised or expanded derivative works submitted to the IEEE by the undersigned based on the Work.

Check. You assign all rights that may exist. It just so happens that these are no relevant rights to assign.

The undersigned hereby warrants that
the Work is original and that he/she is the author of the Work; to the
extent the Work incorporates text passages, figures, data or other material from the works of others, the undersigned has obtained any necessary permissions.

Sure, that's not effected by the work being in the public domain.

Authors  must  ensure  that  their  Work  meets  the  requirements  of  IEEE  Policy  6.4,  including  provisions  covering  originality,  authorship,  author  responsibilities  and  author  misconduct.

It's original, you're the author, you're a responsible person and you're a really nice guy who does no mischief. "Policy 6.4"? What's that?

The undersigned represents that he/she has the power and authority to make and execute this assignment.

I'm not mentally feeble, so sure. This doesn't say the author is the current sole holder of any specific rights.

The  undersigned  agrees  to  indemnify  and  hold  harmless  the  IEEE  from  any  damage  or  expense  that  may  arise  in  the  event  of  a  breach  of  any  of  the
warranties set forth above.

Actually, indemnification clauses are absolutely horrible regardless of anything else. In many countries these are simply considered null and void, at least on standard-form contracts.

In the event the above work is not accepted and published by the IEEE or is
withdrawn by the author(s) before acceptance by the IEEE, the foregoing
copyright transfer shall become null and void and all materials embodying the Work
submitted to the IEEE will be destroyed.

Fine.

For jointly authored Works, all joint authors should sign, or one of the authors should sign as authorized agent for the others.

Sure. (This is another loophole by the way, but never mind.)

RETAINED RIGHTS/TERMS AND CONDITIONS

This only detracts from what you've "given" them in the above.

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

No problem, just information.
... and this concludes the form. There might be other versions of it, but that's the basic idea. No apparent contradiction with the paper being in the public domain. Now, could a lawyer argue that a contradiction does exist? I think not, but even if they could: 1. They won't. 2. You could claim signing based on a good faith reading of the text, which is even stronger than the "Whoops" argument above.

Note that whether this argument is legally solid or not, the publisher would still be entirely free to reject or retract your paper, or ban you from further publication, if they simply don't like what you did.  And that could be an even greater practical risk than losing in court.

@NateEldredge: No, the publisher will not be free to do that. I mean, they might do that anyway, but they're not allowed to, or not clearly allowed to. It is actually extremely unlikely that they will - in my opinion.

"It just so happens that these are no relevant rights to assign."  I am not a lawyer, but I think this is false.  CC0 clearly states the rights are relinquished by the affirmer.  That means they still exist and cannot be assigned by the affirmer.

@AnonymousPhysicist: You are incorrect. In any copyrighted works, there are some rights which third-parties have, such as fair-use. Clearly, the author cannot assign these rights to the publisher (regardless of whether the work has been placed on ArXiv or not). So, the natural and obvious interpretation is that the rights assigned are those rights which the author holds, and are transferrable/assignable.

"In any copyrighted works, there are some rights which third-parties have, such as fair-use. Clearly, the author cannot assign these rights to the publisher"  If the license assigns "all rights under copyright" as you claim, then fair use rights would not be included since that is not a copyright.  The natural and obvious interpretation is that the rights assigned are those that were originally held by the author under copyright.

@AnonymousPhysicist: "Originally" is a vague term. What point in time is the origin?


text:
Confused about bibliography in old books
I’ve been looking at the bibliography of an old book called History Of Burma by G. E. Harvey and am quite confused.
There are abbreviations introduced first like this:

B Bodleian Library
BM British Museum
IO India Office Library

An example for an actual citation is:

John Stevens, The Portuguese Asia, three vols 1695.
B 55.b.59-61.
BM 582.e.6, 8.
IO 300.A.76.H.10-12

I can see the abbreviations refer to respective libraries, but what about the numbers? Are they referring to the book’s location in the library, or pages within the book itself?

Logically, those would have to be the call numbers, since if they were page numbers, why would they be different for each library?

why not get each of the actual references (use an inter-library loan for example) and check for yourself? They probably did not follow APA or Harvard referencing styles then...

In case you've never needed to go to one, academic (and public nonfiction) libraries tend to use classification systems arranged by subject area, modified by by physical necessity if a book happens to be a peculiar size. On public shelves books are likely to be ordered by call number, if it's kept "in the back" all kinds of things are possible.

A quick search of the current Bodleian catalogue turns up this record.
Selecting the 'find & request' tab indicates that the three volumes are still available with call numbers 55.b.59-61. Thus, it would appear that the bibliography is specifying call numbers in the different libraries (much as modern bibliographies list DOIs!).

To expand on @avid's answer: those numbers very likely refer to manuscripts, incunabula, or other rare or unique items.
Specific index references are necessary for a number of reasons, even if a single library may have multiple copies of a work:

Titles get many variations over time, may be spelled multiple ways or in different languages.
Dates are often sketchy at best, but oftentimes may be century estimates (even if there's a date, if it's a manuscript it may be a copy from a different era).
Manuscript tend to have important errors, variations, and marginalia, that distinguish copies, so we need to know exact tomes/scrolls/etc that were used.

As an aside, you will probably not get copies via ILL, but you may be able to get the source library to scan them for a nominal fee (or they may already be scanned and freely available—check online especially for large national libraries).

It looks like the citation is to a set of books published in 1695, so ILL is really unlikely. On the other hand, different call numbers in different libraries is really common, even for widely circulated books by living authors. E.g. "Does God play dice? : the mathematics of chaos by Ian Stewart" is 352:1.c.95.543 at the Cambridge UL (Dewey style) and Q172.5.C45 .S74 at the Betty & Gordon Moore Maths Library (Library of Congress style). These two buildings are ten minutes gentle walk away from each other.

@origimbo call numbers, AFAIK, should be the same only if the same  systems are involved and older libraries often have their own unique systems .  Inventory numbers are definitely unique to each library, and generally (always?) kept separate from the general collection that use the various call number systems that group like texts together.  But now that I look at it more, it looks like the OP did get call numbers and not inventory numbers which are generally integers.

I was hoping those numbers would let me pin down to a specific page of the book. By the way, the cited book was in three volumes and it does not even point to a specific volume. I found an online copy published for free.


text:
If I am "homeless" researcher, where can I get affiliation?
I cannot attend any western university right now. I can relocate in future.
But I already have article which will soon go into publishing process. So affiliation could be useful right now.
I do not like idea of publishing without affiliation or with affiliation to institution which do not work within my field (molecular dynamics).
I don't like idea of putting affiliation with institution which does not pay for my job.
Where and how I can get affiliation for myself? Should I ask for affiliation directly? What if I can possibly work for that institution in future?
PS.
I attended to many universities. Article I have was made while I attended to small one building institution (csu.ru). Institution did not pay for article nor I have any grants. Only payment I received was for teaching junior classes 2 years ago.
PS2.
Ethically I should put ALL contribution to my work.
But I didn't use laboratories, nor computer power, nor payment for last 6 months. The main expenses were computing equipment for about $2000 which I bought with money from my teaching. I was enlisted for some grants, but I already did my "payment" for this with other article, so everybody is with good relations to me.
PS3.
My previous affiliated institution is not involved for 6 months already, during this time I did my work. No, I don't intend to slap my previous institution, but I am looking for new one.
Should I just email people from other institutions with collaboration proposals and publish under their institution?

Do you have any academic affiliation at all right now?

What do you mean by saying you "attended to" the university?  It doesn't make grammatical sense in English.  Were you a student at the university, or an employee?

I don't understand your edit. When you collaborate with someone, you don't adopt their affiliation.

I don't see a big problem with publishing some papers, especially early in academic career, as an independent researcher (that is how I classify myself at this time, BTW). Having an affiliation or not having one doesn't really affect your publication portfolio. If you're concerned about potentially smaller chances for your papers of being accepted, I wouldn't worry about that too much. The main thing is to produce a quality research - if it will be there, I believe that reviewers and editors will have no problem with recommending, accepting and publishing your papers. Just my two cents.

Do you have any degrees?  How have you been "affiliated" in the past?

Possible duplicate: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3010/19607

Nate answered the issue about your previous affiliation.

Where and how I can get affiliation for myself? Should I ask for affiliation directly? What if I can possibly work for that institution in future?

About obtaining affiliations. Many universities have a category of "visiting researcher" for scholars who are neither employees or students but would still like to use the university resources such as the library or collaborate within a lab for a short while. The VR status may allow for a research visa depending on the institution.
These are usually term limited and the university may have a registration/administrative fee. You'd normally apply by finding a PI within a department that would be your university sponsor for the VR status. "Sponsor" does not imply any financial obligation to you, many VRs have to pay their own way.
There may be either an explicit or implicit expectation that you will be in residence for at least part of the term of VR. There is, however, no expectation that you will teach,  mentor, or do any administrative duties. At some universities, VRs are not given any office space and it is up to their sponsor to find work space if needed out of their own allocation.
VRs can lead to being hired but this would not be the norm or the expectation. You are just "visiting" after all.
That being said, it sounds like you would not accept this status as you said, "I don't like idea of putting affiliation with institution which does not pay for my job."
If you won't accept unrenumerated affiliation, the only option left for you is to get a paying job at said institutions.

Good, at least it is some official status unlike my current position.

Don't visiting researchers usually go to the institution they're visiting? OP said he/she is not willing to relocate right now.

Affiliation isn't a commodity to buy and sell.  It is simply a statement that at the time of researching and writing this article, you were affiliated (as a student, employee, or similar) with a particular organization.
From your question, it sounds like at the time of researching and writing the article, you were a student or employee of Chelyabinsk State University, so standard practice would simply be to list your affiliation as "Chelyabinsk State University".  If you are not enrolled or employed there any more, then list a "current address" stating how to contact you.
Ethically, if you feel that CSU contributed nothing to the work, and you did it on your "own time", then you could omit it; in which case, you would list no affiliation at all.  But this would likely be perceived as a petty insult to CSU, to the extent that anyone noticed it at all.
Affiliation should be determined only on the basis of what you were doing while you prepared the article.  Anything that happened after the fact is irrelevant.  You can't "get" a different affiliation for a paper you have already written.

It Is commodity, because people will look into "what institution did this and that".
Musicians are getting paid when they attend some place.

I wonder why this question got so upvoted, and I explain. (i) It doesn't "sound like at the time of etc"; s/he explicitly writes the opposite. (ii) Affiliation is important to some people and journals, maybe a formality, but the OP is well justified in asking. (iii) Your wording sounds deliberately insulting.

@Helen: (i) "Article I have was made while I attended to small one building institution (csu.ru)".  OP says a "previous affiliated institution" was not involved; I read that as referring to a different institution that OP attended before CSU.  (ii)-(iii) I will tone down some of the wording, but I do wish to emphasize that whatever importance affiliation may have to anyone, it is not appropriate to "game" it.

(i) S/he says that "my previous affiliated institution is not involved for 6 months already, during this time I did my work". I agree totally about not gaming it, but I think the OP honestly tried to grasp the situation. (Hopefully useful as reference for future cases, at least.)