text:
Is it poor grammar to replace normal phrases with mathematical symbols in sentences in a mathematical paper?
English is not my native language and when I read mathematical papers, sometimes I saw sentences such as

The matrix A has rank ≥ n.

I am wondering if this sentence should be considered as grammatically wrong. I think the correct expression should be

The rank of the matrix A is greater than or equal to n.

Are expressions such as "The matrix A has rank ≥ n" considered as acceptable in mathematical papers/theses/textbooks?

I've never seen an argument against it, @Zuriel. On the other hand, I don't read mathematical papers. My main disagreement with your both of your examples is the phrase the matrix A. I would say either the matrix or matrix A. (The A is used to specify the matrix in question; the the is used to indicate that you are talking about a previously specified matrix. Combining the two seems clumsy.)

@TRiG, I see! Many thanks for the clarification! It is now very clear to me.

@TRiG I disagree. Your example without "the" would be grammatically incorrect. In the example at hand I would write "at least" rather than either suggestion.

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about [english.se], not academia

I don't think this is a good fit for English Language & Usage (it's more about academic writing conventions than the English language).  One could debate whether it fits better here or on math.stackexchange.com, but I think it's fine here (and indeed this issue comes up in more fields than just mathematics).

@TRiG I would say 'the matrix A' is correct (and frequently used). I wouldn't say 'Matrix A' is incorrect, but I think it's less common. On the otherhand, there definitely is an argument against using the ≥ sign, namely that it is not formal English, rather a form of short-hand.

The first of your two sentences looks fine to me. The second seems long-winded; I'd replace "greater than or equal to n" with "at least n" or with "n or more".

What makes you consider the first sentence ungrammatical?  It seems fine to me.

This question seems off-topic for Academia, because it is about the content of a particular field, rather than the process.  This question belongs on Math.SE (if it belongs anywhere), where those who are expert on Mathematics can judge the stylistic issue. 2. The question does not show any evidence of prior research. We expect people to do a significant amount of research before asking, and to show us in the question where they've looked. There are plenty of math style guides that provide guidance on this; the author should have searched for them before asking.

@D.W.: This question is about mathematical equations in academic writing: the scope of that is beyond one academic field.  "We expect people to do a significant amount of research before asking, and to show us in the question where they've looked."  I don't think that the majority of questions asked here meet that standard.  You are right though that the issue is covered in math style guides; an answer which includes a reference to one would be helpful.

@PeteL.Clark, doing research before asking is a StackExchange expectation: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/261592/781723.

I agree that doing some research makes a question better, and the site FAQ includes this information.  What you wrote is significantly stronger than this.  Well over half of all questions asked here do not show "evidence of prior research", so that is evidently not the community standard for closing a question.  We also clearly do not close questions because an answer has been written down somewhere.  If you feel that an obvious internet search should answer the question, could you include a link which demonstrates this?

@D.W. Mathematics is far from being the only science where you can choose between written and symbolic form of something, physics, chemistry, biology and probably others can face the problem as well. And for "not showing research effort" -- IMHO, this is applicable only in cases where it's simple to show research effort, e.g., when the answer is plain in the corresponding wikipedia page. I'm not keen on seeing in every question a proof of research effort, or do you want everywhere something like: "I have tried the following 178 Google search terms and I didn't fin anything?"

Are expressions such as "The matrix A has rank ≥ n" considered as acceptable in mathematical papers/theses/textbooks?

No, it's often considered poor style to incorporate fragments of equations like this into text.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's ungrammatical, but many people consider it bad writing.  Some others don't care about this issue, which is why you sometimes see it done, but this is more common in informal or unedited writing.
The issue is that "rank ≥ n" is mixing together English and mathematics within the same construction.  If this doesn't bother you, imagine a more dramatic case like "n + five".  (By contrast, when someone writes "if x ≥ y", the inequality "x ≥ y" is a self-contained unit within the sentence.)  There's no logical reason why mathematical writing conventions couldn't allow this sort of mixing, but they don't.
Saying "The matrix A has rank at least n" is shorter and cleaner than "The rank of the matrix A is greater than or equal to n", but they are both acceptable.  I'd recommend avoiding "The matrix A has rank ≥ n" (I can't think of a good reason to prefer it, and avoiding looking bad is a reason not to use it).

At least here, you could write "For matrix A, rank(A) > n," and avoid the issue altogether.

@aeismail: not the best choice: you have then two equations seperated only by a comma.  It would be better to write e.g. "For matrix A, the inequality rank(A)>n holds." or something like that.

@aeismail Eeeew. That's just awful.  I vote for "Matrix A has rank at least n."

@mbork: What is the other equation?

@aeismail Having only a comma separating the two mathematical expressions $A$ and $rank(A)>n$ is at issue.  I agree with mbork.

@aeismail: "expression" or "formula" would probably a better word, sorry.

I would say that "matrix" needs an article: "for the/a matrix $A$...". That said, my suggestion is "We have $\operatorname{rank} A \geq n$.", or "It holds that $\operatorname{rank} A \geq n$.". The formula alone would be enough, but another common style rule is 'never start a sentence with a symbol'.

@FedericoPoloni Not necessarily. I'm not an expert, but when the name is given (A in this case), you don't need the article. At least that's what one Language Editor told me.

@yo': It's more of a style issue than a language issue.  Starting a sentence with a mathematical expression is discouraged.  Starting with "The matrix $A$" instead of just "$A$" fixes that.

@MatthewLeingang However, it doesn't say you can start the sentence with: "Matrix $A$".

@yo': I agree..

@yo': To my ear, "Matrix $A$ has rank..." sounds like it was written by a non-native English speaker (despite the fact that at least one native speaker supports it).  It's a subtle issue: the name of the matrix is not "Matrix $A$", it's "$A$".  The word "matrix" has been added so as not to begin a sentence, clause or phrase with a mathematical symbol.  Saying "Matrix $A$" instead of "The matrix $A$"  carries a whiff of anthropomorphism.  I guess I am also a little annoyed at the amount of "article dropping" that takes place in math papers, so I would not want to sound like an article-dropper.

@Pete To me the phrase "Matrix A..." sounds a bit like "Door 2..." (or at least that is the closest I can get to making it not sound like something is missing). But then again, I am not a native speaker.

@TobiasKildetoft I'd like it if all the native speakers specified US or UK (which may or may not be different; I don't know).  For example, I'm a native speaker from the US and "Matrix A" sounds more natural to me than "The matrix A"

If I read a sentence starting "For matrix A..." instead of "For the matrix A" I would definitely assume the speaker was not a native American English speaker.  Sesame Street doesn't say "This episode was brought to you by letter A and number 5."

I definitely wouldn't say "matrix A" with no article.  Typically the article is dropped for titles but not descriptions.  You say "Professor Smith" (not "the Professor Smith") or "Theorem 1.2", but "the mathematician Smith" or "the matrix A".  Here A is the full and complete name of the matrix, and adding "the matrix" is just to clarify (in particular, it doesn't have the title "Matrix A").  I'd bet this is why "Matrix A" comes across as anthropomorphism to Pete Clark, although there are non-anthropomorphic examples like "Chapter 2" or, in a Monty Hall-style game show, "Door 2".

I think the distinction is that titles function as part of names, and names don't get articles.  So from this perspective, the article is either mandatory or not allowed, depending on how you interpret the role of "matrix".  At least in my experience in pure mathematics, labels for parts of the paper (sections, equations, etc.) have the relevant noun as part of their name, but mathematical objects such as matrices do not.

@NoahSnyder That's not a good comparison though, because there is only one "letter A" and one "number 5".  To borrow AnonymousMathematician's words, "matrix A" is a description, not a title, because "matrix A" is different in different equations - that's why dropping the article makes sense.

If it's a description, that's exactly when you can't drop the article.  In the alphabet, "A" is the name of the letter, not "Letter A" (and if you want to clarify that you're talking about a letter, you need to say "the letter A").  Similarly, in the mathematical example A is the name of the matrix, not "Matrix A".

@Pete L. Clark (and others stumbling upon these comments): This question was recently bumped to the front page of Academia (why I'm commenting nearly 7 years later), and to me a much more crucial issue with "The matrix A has rank ≥ n" is that 'A' is the name of a matrix but '≥ n' is not the name of a rank. When I first read this sentence in the question I was confused for a moment because I was expecting a number ("numeral", if we're going to nitpick) and had to go back and begin reading again before I realized that ≥ wasn't a stray symbol. It only took 2-3 seconds, but I found it irritating.

(Copy Editor and mathematician speaking)
I, for one, allow these mixed constructions when editing the articles. I do know that it is not the best grammatical style, but not everything in math is easy to put down in proper English grammar. The two rules of thumb I use for these boundary cases is: Is the text clear to the reader? Can you easily make it grammatically correct?
For instance, the sentence "For matrix A, the equation rank(A) ≥ 5 holds." is cryptic and long. A better option might be "For matrix A, we have rank(A) ≥ 5." or "Matrix A satisfies rank(A) ≥ 5." I would be fine with "Matrix A has rank at least 5." However, this gets complicated if you have more such expressions in a row, like in:

... which is defined as a non-real algebraic integer in modulus >1 whose Galois conjugates except its complex conjugate are in modulus <1.

vs.

... which is defined as a non-real algebraic integer in modulus greater than 1 whose Galois conjugates except its complex conjugate are in modulus less than 1.

I prefer the first option. This went through the AMS language editorial, as far as I remember, without any problem.

I let it pass if the sentence is unambiguous and can be pronounced normally when reading without any special effort like in "If $A$ is $\ge B+C$ and $f:[0,A]\to\mathbb Z$, then... (If the quantity/parameter/number $A$ is larger than the sum $B+C$ and the function $f$ maps the interval $[0,A]$ to the set $\mathbb Z$, then...) because in this case the extra words just slow the reader down. However, when seeing any ambiguity like "If A, B, C." (which comma is "and", and which is "then" here?) or something that, if attempted to be read as a sentence, violates not only the rules of the grammar, but also those of common sense as far as structuring sentences is concerned and which, if one needs it to be said at the board in a classroom, will have to be split into separate sentences and totally restructured to be comprehended by ear, I usually object.
Side note: what's the point of not enabling mathjax on Academia?

I love your side note!

upvoting the side note, but I can guess the limited audience (within academia.SX) needing it works against it.

The nice thing about mathjax, however, is that if there is no LaTeX code in the post, it is not even invoked, so what is there to lose? Anyway, that should rather be discussed on Meta from this point on :-)

If you support adding mathjax to the site, please weigh in at http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/740/mathjax-on-academia.  Apparently the point of not having it is that it one has to petition the SE administration to get it and there is concern that it will happen more often that people who don't know about mathjax will want to include two dollar signs on the same line more often than people will want to include mathematical equations.  This is basically an argument from ignorance...

In principle, it is generally acceptable to mix together mathematical and prose statements, as in your example: either construction would be technically be grammatically correct.
In practice, which to choose depends on how you want your reader to think about the statement that you have written.  Prose emphasizes the relationship, in your example focusing the reader on "greater than."  A mathematical statement tends to instead be thought of as a unit, in your example focusing the reader on "rank."  You should thus choose accordingly.
One exception: small integers referring to counting within a small range should always be written as prose.  Some examples of this distinction:

We selected eight conditions to test.
We found that 8 of the 73 samples were positive.

The boundary of "small" is a bit hazy: certainly less than 10, usually less than 20.

it is generally acceptable — [citation needed]

@JeffE My reviewers don't seem to complain when I do it in good taste.

@jakebeal Reviewers rarely, in my experience, comment on writing style, except for egregious errors. All the advice I've seen on mathematican writing recommends not mixing words and symbols as in "the rank is >2".

@DavidRicherby Perhaps we have different experiences in our different communities - with some conference and journals, I often receive detailed remarks on wording and grammar.

small integers referring to counting within a small range should always be written as prose. J.E. Littlewood (A mathematician's Miscellany, p. 39) humbly disagrees. I don't know the official position of his long time co-author who left us one of the most exquisite samples of English prose among other works, but I suspect it would not be very different either. The only real rule is that you try to do what does make sense, try not to do what does not, and don't insist that your way to distinguish between the two is the only correct one. Everything else is allowed :).


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What are possible legal ways to obtain a textbook for free?
I'm not sure whether this is such a great question, and I'm not looking at illegal ways, but is there any way to obtain textbooks for free (legally)?
Answers very much appreciated.

You really shouldn't be creating 3+ accounts to ask the same question.

Are down-voters just reacting to the need for a textbook for free in academia? Anyway, the question could be probably improved with a context and motivation.

@Orion I believe the down-voters were responding to the behavior of the poster, who had created 5+ accounts and was posting nonsense answers to duplicates of this question, all now deleted.

@jakebeal I also understand how frustrating this is. But I assume the votes in this community should only reflect the value/importance/significance of questions, and should not be biased by the PO's identity or behaviour outside the question thread. This is not Faebook ;)

@Orion That's an interesting question for meta, i think: I have opened a question on this there.

Please [edit] this to show some evidence of how you have tried to answer this question yourself.

Here are a few ways that you should look into:

Check your university library
If your library doesn't have it, ask them about doing a interlibrary loan
Talk to your professor. They can be insightful and understanding about these things so they might be able to lend you a copy.
Search online for ebook/PDF versions. I found that an old edition of a statistics book was available on the author's website for free.

If you are out of options with obtaining it for free then you can usually find a used copy at your book store or online for cheaper.
Books certainly can be pricey, so in the future it helps if you factor these costs in when you apply for student loans/scholarships.

From the point of view of teaching staff: sure there are, I get them all the time.
If you are the person in charge of a university course, you can often ask the publishers for an instructor's (or evaluation) copy.
Some of them will only give you (time-limited) online access, some will ask you to send the book back if you don't adopt the book officially in your syllabus, but most of the times it's a free copy for good. Sometimes I even had sales reps come to my office, or send new editions to me unsolicited.

Move to Switzerland. It is legal up there in the middle of the Alps to download copyrighted material for private use. The definition of "private use" includes (according to the linked article) "any personal use of a work or use within a circle of persons closely connected to each other, such as relatives or friends" and "any use of a work by a teacher and his class for educational purposes".
It is still illegal to share copyrighted material using Bittorrent, because it works in a peculiar way: it does not simply download the files, but also uploads parts of it for other users of the network.

Is this a "joke answer"? The cost of living in Switzerland is higher than most other countries.

You can also move to Poland, that's way cheaper.

@varun that's not usually a problem if you're earning a Swiss income...

@varun In case it wasn't clear, I don't recommend moving to Switzerland only to get textbooks. I just want to point out that in some countries downloading textbooks for study reasons is legal. (tomasz: I didn't know about Poland, thanks for the information).

@FedericoPoloni, if I understand correctly, your emphasis is on the fact that the practice is legal in some places and not actually on moving. Since your answer had Moving to Switzerland (in bold and at the very beginning of your answer), I misunderstood that the key emphasis was on actually moving, which struck me as strange.

@varun A better joke answer would be "Write the textbook!"

@FedericoPoloni "in some countries downloading textbooks for study reasons is legal" I'm actually very interested in which countries this is allowed in. Do you know where I can find this out from? If that's too general, then what's the UK law on it?

@IrregularUser Not an expert, but the first place I'd check is Wikipedia.

@IrregularUser Spain is another example. The legal term there is "right to private copy".

Search around. There are initiatives distributing free (even open source) textbooks, like Free Tech Books, there are many others. Ask friendly Google.
Some people arranged with their publisher to be able to distribute their books for free, like Anderson's "Security Engineering", I know of several others. (Yes, I own that book in paper too. Two editions, even. Worth every penny.) Sometimes you'll find that the book went out of print, and the author now distributes the last edition in electronic form.
Other than that, looking around you'll find (more or less) complete lecture notes. I'm partial to William Chen's notes on undergraduate mathematics, but there are many others. Quality (and completeness) obviously varies enormously, and sometimes you'll only find incomplete, short documents. Best of all is that rummaging around in the webpages for classes you'll often find homework and exams, likely with solutions.
If there is a (at least vaguely related) SE site, chances are that somebody already asked for free texts, search (or ask) there too.
For any more focused answers, you'll have to ask about precise contents.

source: Stack Exchange

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sort: votes


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Can you do an AND on Google Scholar alerts?
In Google Scholar, you can create an alert, such as "neural networks", which will inform you any time there is an article related to "neural networks". However, suppose I am interested in neural networks applied to robot navigation. Is there a way to create an alert that will only inform you when both "neural networks" and "robot navigation" appear in the paper? Essentially, I want to do a logical AND on the search terms.

Yes, all of the typical operators apply.
AND is implicit so your alert query could be "neural networks" "robot navigation"

You could create an alert for neural networks + robotics this way google will search all the results that have both words, and again if you are more interested in the robotics part you use a quotation mark like neural networks + "robotics" which brings all the results that absolutely have robotics in them.

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What do "AE", "EO", and "PROD" stand for in a journal submission system?
What do "AE", "EO", "PROD" stand for in the manuscript status in journal submission systems like ScholarOne?

What do you mean with "in a research journal"? Where did you read these abbreviations? On a journal website? Or inside an article? Do you have a link? Is there some more context?

AE means Associate Editor: Responsible for communication with reviewers of a research manuscript.
EO means Editorial Office: The formal group/office comprising of Editor-in-Chief (EIC), and Editorial Assistants/Admin Assistants.
PROD means Production Department: Responsible for printing of articles post acceptance.

thank you coder, that is exactly what I was looking for. :)

@Pretty_Girl Welcome. Academia always has answer to such questions. It just depends on how people interpret your question, as the world is diverse with regard to languages, looks, presentations. So, never take any comments personal.(I am writing this w.r.t. your comment on closing this question.) All the best!

Thank you very much. Could you please add the meaning of "ED"? I recently came across this abbreviation.

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Undergraduate in Computer science and now graduate in Bioinformatics
I am a computer engineering undergrad (from Asia) and now trying to pursue my graduate studies in bioinformatics (in US). I have quite a strong programming skills and now more than one year of experience too. Since I do not have a strong background of biology, is it good to choose that field? Also, I have been doing some research to get any assistantship (have applied to few colleges) but could not start a communication with the professors. How should I approach?
Any help would be great to me.

Care to explain why the down vote?

If you read my question properly, it is not about what is the procedure  to apply. I have certainly taken TOEFL and GRE which are mandatory for the application in most of the universities.

You need to read the info about the schools/programs you're interested. Random example: Boston University. On their FAQ. Q: What if I don’t have experience in both computational and experimental fields? A: Applicants are not required to be well versed in both fields. Even if you do not have the academic background in both the computational and experimental fields, we are looking for highly motivated students. Disclaimer: I am NOT associated with that school. Choose the schools you like and follow the application procedure. Professors do not have time to reply every e-mail.

Thank you for your downvotes. Just needed some help here.

What's the reason you want to communicate with the professors? Inquire about their program? You'll need to be specific about your subject when communicating. You want to know if you're qualified? They won't know it until they see your application. The bottom line: follow the procedure. If they encourage you to write e-mails to their faculty, please do so. How to communicate with them is a broad question.

There are a number of bioinformatics programs that do not require you to have experience in both programming and biology. For example, the program at BU

What if I don’t have experience in both computational and experimental fields?
Applicants are not required to be well versed in both fields. Even if you do not have the academic background in both the computational and experimental fields, we are looking for highly motivated students

So only having a programming background should not be too much of a problem. You will probably want to have picked up and had a look at some undergraduate biology texts so that you are not completely clueless about the field.
As for approaching professors, it really is no different from other fields. Applicants to graduate school, whether for a PhD or a Masters, don't have all the skills to carry our independent research in the field. To get a research assistantship you need to find professors who are doing research that is interesting to you and send them your CV along with a well written email expressing why you want to work with them, what skills you bring with you, and what you want to learn. There are a number of related question on AC.SE that can help you in this regard.


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What is the difference between letter, communication and journal paper?
Scientific literature has items called letters, communications and journal papers. They all seem quite similar in terms of format and content. What are the differences between them?

This may depend heavily on the specific journal (eg in some 'letters' are a short paper, in others, just an editorial leyter...)

In physics, each category has a different length limit.  Often "paper" has no limit.  Typically the shorter the length limit, the more prestigious it is and the tougher the acceptance criteria.  The subject matter covered by the journal is the same for all categories.  Some journals also have a "review" category which includes papers which are not original research.  Often a review is by invitation only.

short publications such as "letters" are also peer reviewed?

Yes, they are: see for example http://link.springer.com/journal/11005.

This will depend wildly on the field and journal in question. In my experience, the main differentiators are the allowable length and the amount of peer review. For example, in my field (Epidemiology):

Journal Article (of which there are several categories): Word limit in the several thousands of words, full on peer review.
Communication (often also called 'Brief Report'): A smaller <2000 word word limit with further restrictions on the number of tables and figures. Goes out for full peer review. This is intended to report a single, small finding that may not warrant a full publication.
Letters: This is a very ambiguous category, primarily defined by being short, often <1000 words. They may be used to report a single piece of information, often from part of a larger study, or may be used to respond to another paper. These may or may not go out for peer review - for example, I recently had a paper accepted where the decision was made entirely by the editor.


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Are Norwegian advertised salaries net or gross?
Different countries have different ways of giving a salary range, in some countries I have noticed that the job posting explicitly says "estimated net salary". Now I am wondering about academic jobs in Norway, it is never specified in job postings so there must be a social norm I guess.
For example
https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/231207/coordinator-of-community-sampling-for-the-biodiversity-genomics-europe-bge-project
According to some online tax calculator website, a gross salary of 650k NOK per year is about 475k net/year. All the post-docs I have seen are around 500k-600k per year but none of them specify if net or gross. The tax rate seems to be around 30%, are these calculation in a good estimate?

Just guessing here, but if "net" that would probably be stated.

How much taxes you pay usually depends on individual factors (that you do not have to share), therefore the advertised salary is in general gross.
Gross salary depends as well on individual factors, but with respect to individual factors that you do have to share at the interview.

I don't know about Norway in general, but all the adds I have seen from UiO give the gross salary. In addition to online tax calculators (they're usually accurate, you would expect to pay ~25-30% tax with a PhD/postdoc salary), depending on your situation you might also be able to enroll in the PAYE scheme for your first year in Norway (25% flat rate): https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/foreign/are-you-intending-to-work-in-norway/tax-deduction-cards/paye/
This most likely depends on specific department and funding source, but from what I've seen at UiO a postdoc typically earns 32-35.000 NOK a month, net. This seems to be in agreement with the add you linked.

Thank you this is useful.

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Is the rise of pre-prints lowering the quality and credibility of researcher and increasing the pressure to publish?
From what I understand pre-prints have been common in some fields for many years because of some practical obvious reasons, for example very long lag time from submission to publication.
However, it is clear that publishing in pre-prints is becoming more and more popular across many fields with the main reason of calling yourself first to a particular research/method/idea/etc. The only problem is that these pre-prints are not peer-reviewed, and even though they require a certain standard, which is quite low, nobody is really checking the credibility and soundness of any of it. People might rush through the scientific process to publish a pre-print because the scrutiny level is almost non-existent. Some of this has been already observed with pre-prints about COVID https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/02/13/1558235/misleading-viral-claims-show-dangers-of-preprint-servers-researchers-warn, I think there's even no verification on affiliations.
The more pre-print papers are being published, the more these papers are being cited in peer-reviewed papers. They might be correct but nobody might check in detail as a reviewer or could even content since it's not "published". In addition, usually citations such as "in preparation" or "submitted" are not accepted by many journals. It just seems that this could trigger a vicious cycle in which more non-peer reviewed papers are being cited in permanent publications which then remains in print for years to come.
Does the rise of pre-prints make science and publishing less credible?
Does it increase the pressure to publish because it adds an additional tier to the publishing process?

@Buffy thank you, that's a good example I should have added to substantiate my question.

I think the logical mistake in this post is that you think preprints are replacing peer review, which they are not.

@AnonymousPhysicist I take the point, but the credibility of research is evaluated not just within academia but at broader scales.

Frankly, I do not buy this. I posit that one of the most damaging studies in recent years is this infamous retracted study that linked measles vaccines (more precisely MMR) and autism. It was published in a very high-tier peer-reviewed journal. It may have created enormous but difficult-to-quantify damage to the cause of vaccines. Peer review is not a magic bullet. It has the job of keeping obvious nonsense or shoddy craftsmanship out of journals. But it is more often than not reduced to gatekeeping and typically works best for  solid work not far from the mainstream with moderate originality.

@CaptainEmacs "works best for solid work not far from the mainstream with moderate originality", that's a really nice way of describing it.

I'm not going to make any judgement but I have had annoyances with pre-prints considered at the same level as published papers.
For example, several times reviewers have asked me to acknowledge pre-prints and their claimed results as if they were published research.
And typically results that are partly overlapping with results from some cited pre-print are considered non original by the reviewers.
In my experiences I feel those pre-prints were correct in their claims, but they did not go through peer review.

A preprint is a publication.  You put it somewhere where people can read it: that's literally the definition of publication.  Preprints have not been rigorously peer-reviewed, but that's another issue.

@Pronte that's the kind of issues and doubts I have about this emerging trend, the almost equality between peer-reviewed work and unfiltered publications which are nothing more than a blog post.

"I think there's even no verification on affiliations" > as discussed here, most publishers do not generally ask for verification of affiliations, so this isn't really a preprint-specific issue.

@Andrew that's a good point, although you don't have reviewers or editors who would read your affiliation. Again, there's just less quality control.

When I'm reading papers, the key part of peer review IMHO isn't veriification of quality or correctness (which it does poorly) but filtering for relevance and impact - in essence, if some source has already motivated me to find a paper, I don't care if it's peer reviewed, I won't trust the review but take care myself anyway; but I absolutely need peer review when I'm looking at papers from some topical journal/conference so that someone else has already thrown out all the many papers that aren't even worth the time to skim their abstracts.

One issue with pre-prints is that people who publish in them can purport to be published to people who may not understand academic publishing, like students, non-academics, or newer scholars. Today I saw someone refer to their own pre-published article with the circumlocution "considerable informal peer review." The phrasing was a roundabout way of saying they had consulted colleagues (good) but hadn't undergone an actual peer review. The phrasing raised an immediate red flag for anyone familiar with peer review, but might strike other readers as sufficient or similar to peer review.

Does the rise of pre-prints make science and publishing less credible?

No.  Peer reviewed publications are still peer reviewed.  People who do not know the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed publication are not in a position to judge the credibility of science.

Does it increase the pressure to publish because it adds an additional
tier to the publishing process?

No.  "Pressure to publish" is about competition for jobs and funding.  The number of publication options is not relevant.

@DanielHatton It should be included in any competent science general education.  Also, it is widely mentioned in the more competent news media.

" People who do not know the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed publication are not in a position to judge the credibility of science." So? Plenty of people will judge the credibility of science, with significant, material consequences to scientific activity, whether you (or even, all scientists) deem them worthy to do so.

@Hasse1987 True, but preprints have no effect on those people.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Maybe I'm missing something, but if I understood Hasse1987 correctly, they were referring to people who'd take their knowledge about scientific discoveries from general news media - which, incidentally, regularly present "new discoveries" described in recently published ... not-yet-peer-reviewed preprints.

@O.R.Mapper That's more an issue of news media credibility than preprints.  The news media works off press releases, or if they are better funded, then interviews.  They do not read preprints or journal articles.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Maybe, but my feeling is that coverage like this is common at least on German media (the linked article is a random example, basically the first hit when looking for something mentioning preprints): After a general introduction of the topic, the article states that researchers A, B, and C have examined XYZ. The paragraph ends with one sentence saying "The results have been published as a preprint, i.e. they have ...

... not yet been checked by other researchers." The entire remainder of the news article explains the findings and their implications in detail. I am pretty sure the one brief remark about this being a preprint is pretty much lost on the vast majority of readers.

@O.R.Mapper I don't see what your complaint is.  That's exactly how a preprint should be explained.  But the reality is most media has no coverage of science at all.

@AnonymousPhysicist: "That's exactly how a preprint should be explained." - well, if you say so. I'm not saying I have a complaint. However, I do think that there is a large overlap between the "plenty of people [who cause] significant, material consequences to scientific activity", as described by Hasse1987, and the people who fail to notice or adequately interpret the brief preprint remark. Thus, I strongly disagree with your claim that "preprints have no effect on those people".

The news media regularly report scientific articles and preprints. IIRC, the whole hydroxychloroquine brouhaha early in the pandemic was kicked-off by bad, often contradictory, science and poor reporting (see e.g. this, or this reported by CNN ) Although that's not a preprint issue, per se, as both preprints and peer-reviewed studies contributed to that mess.

I agree with the gist of the other answers, which by and large refute the major concerns postulated in the question (though I can see where those concerns are coming from).
I would add a major benefit coming from the increased prevalence of preprints, that of accelerating the open speedy dissemination of important research results.
I'm old enough to remember when arXiv (the former LANL archive) became more broadly used than in physics. In particular, over my very limited time as a research mathematician, it went from used rarely in (pure) mathematics, by next-generation scholars in physics-adjacent fields, to much broader but not universal applicability. As it hopped from one subfield to the next, it much expanded the speed at which new results were disseminated.
Prior, if you were well-connected in a field, you might hear gossip that so-and-so had achieved such-and-such, and very exceptionally you might receive a pre-publication fragment, which might be anything from a completed draft paper submitted, to a 3rd party's cryptic notes from a talk somewhere. There was generally a caution about over-sharing, to avoid being scooped as well as just for arcane cultural reasons. That also meant there was little incentive, in fact disincentive, to rush the word out about one's own achievements, other than to frankly claim turf. What was shared flowed really only to those well-connected (friend of a friend stuff), and there was no version control: "unpublished results" might float around in various contradictory incomplete versions and it was very hard to know what was accurate and complete.
While in that environment, preprints did technically exist, they were not as prominent part of academic discourse. arXiv and other centralized servers, clearinghouses, etc. played a huge role in encouraging early sharing of results. Rather than scooping, they provided a way to "postmark" your achievements earlier in a long publishing timeline. They allowed a much wider range of scholars to be aware, read, learn, and build on recent research. And via centralized repositories, they provided version control.
Of course, a "preprint infrastructure" like this did not and does not have all the elements of a full peer-reviewed publication pipeline, and is not a substitute. But it is an important, positive complement. Any effect in the direction of "decreasing quality" or "increasing pressure to publish" (as mentioned in the question) must also be complemented with considering the increase in quality (from more eyes, sooner, on important results), decreased pressure to rush out a poorly written paper (the preprint already announces it, so can take time to write "the paper" propertly), and faster and broader research collaboration.

Peer review has never been a 100% reliable gatekeeper and plenty of incorrect results get published anyway. I am sure every scientist is aware of X result that was later shown to be incorrect. Example from The Lancet on Covid.
Science gets bad PR when it turns out to be incorrect. Since peer reviewed articles can also be incorrect, I doubt that the rise of preprints is having much impact. If someone is going to disbelieve science as a whole based on incorrect results, they are probably not going to distinguish between whether the science has been peer reviewed or not.

No, some kind of concept of preprint has existed for a long time and has never devalued the concept of publishing research findings in research journals.  Preprints are what they are.  Perelman published his proof of the Poincaré conjecture in a set of three preprints.  OK, exceptional example, but obviously this is not clear-cut.
It would be like asking ''Are journal articles causing X?' or something like that.
For example, Gödel originally wrote up his incompleteness theorems which we are all now familiar with and sent them to John von Neumann in the form of a preprint prior to publication of his findings in a journal.  It's not a big deal, I think people are just overthinking it.  I read preprints all the time and find a lot of them very useful and interesting.  Some of them are bad, but some journal articles are bad as well.
As another example from pure mathematics, Bhatt and Scholze uploaded a preprint in 2019 which has not yet been accepted for publication due to the length and complexity of the document, but which has received 64 citations.

Preprints serve a very important issue of science, fast dissemination of results.
Peer reviews never guaranteed the correctness of the results. Preprints also never say anything about the correctness. But traditional peer review is slow and sometimes have preconceptions about the research.
First of all, slowness of peer review. Sometimes, your research is good if you are one the first in that area. For example, you applied an algorithm to a domain first time. preprint helps a lot in this case.
This preconceptions about the research is also very important. I put a lot of effort to a review article in my PhD thesis. It was rejected 3 times from different journals. After 3 rejections, I talked with my advisor and put my review article as preprint. After this preprint, it was again reject 3 more times and I decided to not submit it anymore. Well, it is cited 107 times in google scholar as of 2021 February. Most of the citing articles are from journals with impact factor.

A review of KDD99 dataset usage in intrusion detection and machine
learning between 2010 and 2015 Authors Atilla Özgür, Hamit Erdem
Publication date 2016/4/14 Journal PeerJ PrePrints

This means that:

You should never accept that article results are fully true even it is published in a very good journal.
Also, you should never accept that preprint results are fully true too.

My conclusion: preprints are not lowering the quality and credibility of the researchers. It is actually increasing it.

Actually it needs to be emphasised just how slow peer review can be.  Depending on the journal, the peer review process can be excruciatingly slow.

Absolutely! It definitely creates an incentive to rush out papers.
I worked in between applied math and engineering and I have noticed a trend in applied engineering journals in recent decade that these research papers will assume some abstract framework and do a bunch of math derivations and prove some type of convergence results in said abstract framework.
At the end, everyone is left just wondering if there exists a single scenario in the universe that can fall into their framework. Eventually one will be found, in a couple of years, usually not by these authors, but then they get to claim priority because they worked out the theory first, and then they say "oh your example just happens to fall into our abstract framework!"
It used to be, at least in my field, that demonstrating the applicability/usefulness was a priority. And it is usually very hard to show how math can be applied. Now it is about who can churn out proofs more in more and more esoteric setup. While this can be hard, I have noticed that they tend to be excruciatingly incremental.
Of course, you wouldn't expect these papers to go through the review process, so here is what they do: team up with a big name. I suspect these "big names" have never even read the paper they purport to have wrote (given I personally know that many are not even an expert in the subject they are writing in), but as long as their name is on there, no matter how marginal the work is, it will be heavily cited.

This seems to have nothing to do with preprints.


text:
What happens if the grant requirement for open access publications is not respected? [small & short-duration grants]
EDIT: I am referring to short duration (1-2 years) small grants (10k-30k $/euros) usually given to PhD or post-docs. The amount needs to cover material, conferences, publications, etc. Publishers now charge up to 10k for open access, so towards the end of the funding period when most work is being published the grantee might be short of 10k for a publication.
It is becoming increasingly common for research funded with public money to be published as open access with gold (expensive but immediately open access) or green standard ( free self archiving after 6 months). This is part of the grant agreement which is a binding legal contract.
What happens if a researcher publishes not in open access because cannot afford to pay the open access fee? Some publishers are increasing the open access fees and I have discussed with colleagues, particularly junior scientists and postdocs with limited funding, about this dilemma. Careers depend also on publications appearing in certain journals, so choosing a target journal for financial reasons seem to be a great disadvantage for younger scientists.

Will there be any legal or other potential consequences such as being banned from applying for grants from the same institution?
Will there be any non-written consequences such as being flagged as a
noncomplying grantee?**

PS: I'm not looking for advice on how to find money for paying the open access fees, there are already questions covering that topic.

In what country?

I guess I don't understand why the publishing fee can't be charged to the grant.

Note that some publishers allow delayed open archiving precisely to allow for compliance with funder requirements while maintaining a traditional paid access model for the first N months.

@Buffy, money in US federal grants can have different categories or "colors" and you can't legally use salary money to pay publishing fees. So, you'd need sign off from your Program Officer to move money from one budget category to another to then use grant money to pay publishing fees. Some money can be rebudgeted, and some cannot. This is where a good administrative person in your Sponsored Research Office comes into play to help with such questions between you and your funding agency if you didn't put pub. fees in your original budget.

@Buffy I should have frame the question better, see my edit.

@BasileStarynkevitch mostly curious about EU & North America

@DanielHatton do you more information about this such as a list of publishers with country-specific agreements, I have never heard of that.

In France, you can rent a Linux VPS for about 10€/month. See https://www.ovh.com  https://www.kimsufi.com/ etc.... uploading a PDF file with scp(1) is then easy, if you are allowed to install Debian on your laptop

I'm most familiar with the US NIH.
They write:

Non-compliance will be addressed administratively, and may delay or prevent awarding of funds.

For the most part, NIH seems focused on awareness and trying to encourage compliance, rather than strict enforcement. It seems many are not fully aware of the guidelines, which are quite new for some researchers who have published a different way for decades.
More generally, big funding agencies like to act through the institutions researchers belong to in encouraging compliance, whether for policies like this or for ethical policies like those for human/animal subjects research.
They can threaten to withhold their funds and even government funding more broadly from entire institutions, not just individuals. While cases of this threat actually being carried out are rare, it may mean that researchers find themselves more directly responsible to their institution rather than the funder. The institution has a large incentive to ensure local compliance and likely has more resources than the funding agency to follow up, as well as a broader range of sanctions.
For your particular situation, I have a hard time imagining a funding agency feeling too bad for your circumstance. If they're funding your work and demanding open access, they're implying that they expect you to use their funds towards those costs in addition to all the others (either directly or through the fungibility of money). "I spent my money on other things and now can't afford to comply with your publishing requirements" doesn't seem like a very good argument, since everyone they fund is in the same boat and since you've accepted their terms by accepting their funding.

@Libor Perhaps, though as far as I know funders tend to be punitive in a prospective rather than retrospective way. Even a modest threat to future funding is a scary thing for an institution that relies on it.

In the UK, it depends on the Funder. The biggest non-governmental funder in the UK is the Wellcome Trust, and they will count non-open access publication against you when applying for grants in the future.
Government funding comes primarily from UKRI. It is against the rules to spend UKRI grant money on open-access publication, but all publications arising from UKRI funded work must be at least green open-access. How is this circle squared? Institutions are given block grants proportional to the average amount of UKRI funds they hold to pay for open-access publication. But it is entirely possible for this money to run out in a year before a particular grant holder has had chance to use it.
Protection against this comes via the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF happens every 5 years and the UKRI assess all scholarly output from an institution in the period covered, ranking papers. Top ranking papers win institutions funding that is not tied any particular project (Quality Related or QR money). This is often a univeresity's biggest income stream after undergraduate tuition. In order for a paper to be considered in the REF it must be publish open-access. Thus, paper that might be awarded 4* might cost a uni $5000 to publish, but would get them $140,000 in funding in return via QR, if it is not open access, it gets them nothing. .

I have to admit, this is somewhat of a "folkloric" number. I did a little digging and came up with: 1) The amount money awarded varies from field to field - more expensive fields are awarded more. 2) In e.g. Biological Sciences there £40.3M a year is given in QR due to REF outputs. 3) In submissions form 2373 FTE equivalent staff, 30% of submissions were rated 4* and 49% 3*. 4) 4* papers receive 4 times as much as 3* ones. Its clearly a lot of money, but in e.g. biology, a 4* paper might require £500k in research costs. So you still need the grant to get the paper.

This paper discusses the various issues with trying to figure out properly how QR money is decided: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/berj.3229


text:
What exactly happens in your arXiv account if you no longer have institutional affiliation?
The question is similar to this one but in addition I would like to ask the following:
Don't  I need to change my email address if I am no longer affiliated to an institution?
 Won't a new mail of the form www.someone@hotmail.com  make me lose ownership of all my papers and then need endorsement from another arXiv user?
Thanks in advance!

I'm not prepared to develop this into a proper answer, but the question would seem to turn on convincing arXiv that you're the same person you used to be a someone@podunkstate.edu. Keeping your hepname and/or ORCID up-to-date should go a long way in that direction. Failing that you may need to email the arXiv staff directly. Be prepared to wait for a response in the latter case, as they're fairly heavily loaded.

Log into you arXiv account and change your e-mail address.  You don't need access to your old e-mail to do this, nor will you lose your arXiv account if you don't have an academic e-mail address.  (Having an academic address is not a requirement for arXiv participation, after all.)  Once you have an account, there is nothing (short of administrative action) that would cause you to lose ownership of your papers or your existing endorsements.  It should be no different from changing your e-mail in any other account you have online.

This does not answer the part about the endorsement system. Normally, you never need to deal with the endorsement system if you sign up with a university e-mail, but signing up with a hotmail will often mean that you need others to endorse your submissions. It is not clear to me what happens if you sign up with a university mail and then later change it to e.g. a hotmail.

I added a note about that.


text:
How to get access to university resources after graduation?
I'll get a B.S. in math this December and (hopefully) go to graduate school next fall. In the coming spring semester, I will stay around my undergraduate institution (in the U.S.), auditing classes, attending seminars, talking with faculty and so on. But since I will not be enrolled during the spring, I will lose my access to a lot of University resources. Specifically (not limited to),

I will lose access to the secure University Wifi network on campus.

I will not be able to borrow books for free from the University library unless I pay some money to become a member of the alumni association. But more importantly, even if I become a member of the alumni association, I will not have access to any math database (e.g. MathSciNet).

I will not have access to computer labs in my college where I can print 600 pages of papers for free every semester when enrolled.

I can understand University is also a business and I hope I could get used to my situation soon after graduation. But I wonder if there are some ways to improve such an embarrassing situation. What is the best way for me to get access to math databases for instance?

Have you considered doing an internship at a research group? You would get access through them.

I agree with marc classen.  Getting involved in research will definitely help.

@MarcClaesen Thanks for this suggestion. But I'm interested in pure math, and I don't want to spend energy on applied things...

@ZhouFang Sometimes you need to do something you're less interested in for a while :)

Talk to a faculty member about this.  The possibilities and procedures differ between universities, so there's no universal answer, but most universities have some mechanism for providing access to electronic resources for visitors.  With a faculty sponsor you might be able to get the same sort of access.

@AnonymousMathematician Thanks, I have done so. But it turns out a faculty can only sponsor an Internet account but not library access in our University.

Another possibility is working as a TA, if you'd rather teach than take a research internship.

One potential solution: I may register for a one-credit course at the University. It (hopefully) may not cost much and help me get access to standard University resources.
Update: the University library just told me I could get access to math databases through computers on campus libraries by applying for a guest account for free, though I can't get remote access.


text:
Why is personal information (DOB, marital status) listed on CVs in Europe and can it be omitted?
I find it irrelevant to specify personal information on my CV, and frankly I do not see why they should be listed in academic applications. What is the advantage for the hiring committing to know if I am 18 or I have 17 children, aside from creating a chance to bias the hiring process with personal beliefs. Is it because they want to know that I am a prodigy child who got his/her PhD at 18 years old, or because if I am a 28 years old female married without children I will want children soon and so I will have to take maternity leave? Is this just an influence of the age/status discrimination in Europe where I see at times that  job offers are only open to certain categories of people (i.e.,younger than 30 years old) ?
If I omit this information will my CV be frowned upon? Or will they think I am hiding something? I do not know what I would be hiding because age can probably be guessed from the CV anyway.

I believe that this has to with how one defines the word "personal".

In Asia it's worst. You have to include all this info and your picture.

@linuxick information that are irrelevant to your professional profile and skills and that could bias the hiring process, it affords discrimination.

@user4050: Please have a look at my answer. The information retrieved from including certain items is that the candidate knows about the general convention of including those items, and being aware of general conventions is relevant to the candidate's professional profile and skills. Please do note that I am not in favour of divulging so much personal information to prospective employers. On the other hand, in my place, where providing all this personal information is customary, the paranoia about getting discriminated against based ...

... upon these personal details is not widespread. Being shocked at the idea of sending a photo along with an application and fearing to be discriminated against because of it is something I only know from international forums (and I do not classify myself as particularly handsome, so it's not like I could draw a benefit from my photo). It seems what people are (not) used to strongly distorts the perceived risk when it comes to local conventions in job applications.

@user4050 Please note that many hiring processes require an interview, so things like age, gender and appearance would become evident anyway at some point, and if the selection committee really wants to discriminate, they can do it after the interview. Note also that many people who are used to putting these bits of information in their CV, because of local tradition, usually find this natural. For instance, when I tell to students of mine that if they want to apply in the US they shouldn't put a photograph (something I've learnt here), they look astonished.

@MassimoOrtolano I was not necessarily referring to hiring someone, could also be a grant application with no interview, and clearly a lot let changes to guess age, ethnicity, etc. I always found ridiculous the fact that these information are in a CV, I completely disagree with the "is part of the tradition part", many things are part of local customs but are not necessarily good practice.

I've never seen grant applications that require such details. Do you have any example?

@MassimoOrtolano any EU funding application require to fill DOB and you have to include your CV  European-style

@user4050: Note that date of birth is often used as a means to legally establish identity. In formal procedures, you usually have to confirm both your name and your date of birth. Of course, there is still a certain likeliness two persons of the same name were born on the same day, but it serves as a certain obstacle against the attempt to e.g. draw back retroactively by claiming "someone else with the same name made that declaration". This brings us back to linuxick's initial comment, in that in such places, the date of birth is not very "personal", but almost as public as one's name.

@MassimoOrtolano my lab often receive unsolicited CV from European (France) candidates that contain their age, marital status and picture...this is so unconfortable. I'm glad that you are telling your students!

Despite differences in the different EU member states, there were attempts to create a kind of EU standard for CVs. This is called "Europass" and was created together with social partners and national training authorities. According to their website the main scope is:

Ηelp citizens communicate their skills and qualifications effectively when looking for a job or training.
Ηelp employers understand the skills and qualifications of the workforce.
Ηelp education and training authorities define and communicate the content of curricula.

While there might be differences in different industries, in my experience it serves well as a guideline in academia (since you ask on academia SE, I assume this might be your main interest). According to their examples (1, 2) it is perfectly fine to keep personal information like date of birth and sex (and/or gender) out of your CV. Discrimination by age, race and sex/gender is not allowed in the application process. Especially public institutions, such as universities and research institutes have strict rules against discrimination. You shouldn't face any disadvantages by not stating personal information, such as DOB, number of children (...). Besides in most cases it's clearly irrelevant.
Both a friend of mine and I applied in academia in a EU country which wasn't our homecountry relying on the Europass guidelines and both of us got hired. So those guidelines don't appear to be frowned upon.
However: Some years ago it was at least in Germany considered as a standard to include personal information (as already mentioned in another answer*). I think especially people working as a professor for a couple of years simply haven't adapted their CVs to today's standards.
Good luck!
*) On a side note: In school I was thaught, that information, which can give hints on your personality must be included in every case. Especially profession of parents, siblings, age, hobbies. Apparently this was supposed to help HR to find the most fitting person for the job and the company. This was outdated at the time I was at school (and sometimes even considered unprofessional, as I was told during an internship to which I applied using those guidelines), but the curriculum hadn't been updated.

Marital status is completely irrelevant: leave it out. Discrimination based on "Oh, I think you're about to have kids and take a bunch of maternity leave" is illegal.
In practice, date of birth can be inferred from the dates at which you got your degrees and what jobs you've had.  OK, you might be a prodigy who got their BA at 14 and their PhD at 17, but the overwhelming majority of people aren't. Or you might be a total bum who was unemployed until the age of 40 and then got a BA at 43 and a PhD at 48 but, again, the overwhelming majority of people aren't that, either. So including your date of birth doesn't really say anything that the recruiter couldn't guess.
Age discrimination is illegal in the UK, and I'd assumed it would be EU-wide. The usual form would be to require somebody to be within so many years of their PhD, though even that's not-really-so-indirect age discrimination.

Note that sadly, there is a difference in some places between "illegal" and "not done (not even in a hidden way)".

It's illegal only on paper, because it's almost impossible to enforce.

@user4050 Sure but large employers, such as universities, tend to follow this kind of law. There's a much higher chance of an organization with thousands of employees being sued over something like this than some small company who can argue "We rejected that one person for legitimate reason X and, look, we've only hired three people in the last five years so there's no pattern."

@DavidRicherby: Not to mention that large employers are more likely to have procedures to educate staff about these rules and review hiring decisions to rule out any such bias in the first place. (I'm not saying that this is 100% effective at preventing any abuse, but it creates some obstacles for certain kind of abuse that are simply not there with small employers - where hiring decisions may even be totally in the hand of just one person.)

I dont agree, there was a presentation of Erasmus Mundus, and married student were told that they cannot apply.

@SSimon I can see nothing in the Erasmus Mundus Programme Guide saying that married people are ineligible. Various ineligibilities are listed in Section 3.2 (e.g., bankruptcy, "grave professional misconduct", etc.) but searching the PDF for words such as "married", "wed" or "dependant" gave nothing.

@SSimon: I cannot find any documentation that married students are not eligible for Erasmus Mundus.  Here is one that mentions special services for married students: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus_mundus/results_compendia/documents/projects/action_1_master_courses/phoenixem_mc.pdf.  And here is one saying married students need to bring their marriage certificate to register: https://www.cs.nuim.ie/courses/desem/erasmus/students.

@DavidRicherby Action 2

@PeteL.Clark EU students are not eligible for all options and full scholarship, out of EU student, or non-EU student was told so, program that I refer is under Action 2

this caused an uproar, among the audience, why they discriminate. I was shock. It was 2010, now all programs are replaced with Erasmus Plus,

I suppose items such as marital status, children, professions of parents, place of birth, etc., are not so much there for providing any information as such, but rather form a part of what "belongs" to a complete CV.
You can leave some of them away, but skipping too many of them (without filling your CV in another way) may send a signal like "This person has never bothered to learn what a 'properly done' CV should look like. They are uneducated and/or not diligent about what they do."
Now, this is based upon what I learned back in school, may be country-dependent (I'm in Germany), and - at least here - should probably rather apply to small companies (whose HR people might rather expect adherence to traditional form than the most modern trends in recruitment processes when evaluating CVs) than to academic departments.

Professions of parents?!?!!!

@DavidRicherby: Yes. I still learned at school (around 2000) that among the personal information, it is customary to list the names and professions of your parents. I never did, and it never seemed to be a problem that I skipped that bit of information. On the other hand, I never found anything strange about it; I always felt it is reminscent of descriptions of historical/public persons - for instance, look at the articles of a couple of actors/actresses on Wikipedia, and you'll find that most of them will briefly mention who their parents are, even if the parents themselves are not actors.

@DavidRicherby that seems another good way of "recommend" someone with influential parents.

@DavidRicherby: Germany is bizarrely conservative with respect to the hiring process. On top, some people are almost hysterically afraid of breaking some unwritten rule and schools are very slow at updating what they are teaching, which slows down progress in this area. Nonetheless progress is happening and all modern advice I found recommends against listing such information on your CV – even though it was the norm some decades ago.

This is bizarre. How does a bunch of information which is (1) no one else's business and (2) completely irrelevant to your ability to do a job, "belong" on a CV? A CV is not a Wikipedia biography, it's supposed to be a summary of your academic qualifications.

@ElizabethHenning: For better or worse, there are certain conventions as to how a CV should be written. These can be arbitrary (as in, based upon developments and fashions in the course of many decades or even centuries) and will vary between countries (cf. e.g. customs about including photos and certificates in applications). Whatever the conventions are, as an applicant, you are expected to know and adhere to them. If you don't, that's a first red flag that you could be unaware of other norms, or a troublemaker who breaks them on purpose.

@ElizabethHenning For instance, in my country, it's not uncommon to require a copy of an ID, which, of course, would reveal at least gender, age and sometimes marital status. Failing to send the required documents would cause the exclusion from the selection. But notice also that selections in my country sometimes involve a written exam and an interview, which would reveal anyway many pieces of information.

Since a month, I have been applying to jobs in multiple European countries. In Germany, I had to have a professional help from a German to create "lebenslauf" for private industry and academic jobs. As personal datawise, it includes my birthplace, birthdate, nationality (as I require work permit/job sponsorship) plus I had to have a photo, where you can identify my race, and my gender. As a person living in the US, and keeping the US as a priority, I find this many information, irrelevant to the position and my qualifications, kind of unnecessary and makes me prone to be discriminated, but it is what it is. Moreover, I have also been applying to jobs in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, and I had friends living/working there and so they know the work ethic and the expectations from a CV or resume. In those countries, I straight out use my "American" CV, which does not include any personal info. Clearly, there is no standard in European countries, I concluded based on four countries I have had experience with.
Also, I have friends who used "just the qualifications - no personal info" regular CV in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark academic jobs and got hired. So I assume you should check each country if you know someone who is acquainted with the work environment and ethic.
If you don't know anyone, I suggest you couple things before you decide to include certain personal info. If you require work permit, and not a citizen or permanent residency in the country you're applying, including your nationality may be useful. Yet no more than that, because gender, age, marital status are irrelevant; and they make you prone to be discriminated. To further make sure, you may skim the available CVs of professors, postdocs etc. which are available on the university or research lab pages. I think most people have them available in university pages as attachment (at least I have seen most put them), and you can decide whether to include certain personal info or not.
All in all, I don't think in the end it really affects the decision on you being hired as where I was born or whenever I was born or whether I am married with kids or not does not imply how good I am in machine learning, or comparative literature or whatever.

Maybe it should be noted that, at least in Germany, gender is almost never a secret once the name is known. That may not be true for some foreign names. Yet, it may explain why the vast majority of people subject to the convention wouldn't see an issue with it, and may rather consider it professional to tidily list "gender: ..." explicitly in a brief list of personal information, rather than leave HR people guessing whether to start the response letter with "Sehr geehrter Herr ..." or "Sehr geehrte Frau ..." (Mr./Ms. at the beginning of the letter) and thereby call attention to the omission.

@O.R.Mapper Not to mention that certain names which are masculine in my country (e.g. Andrea) are feminine in Germany and in other countries, and viceversa. I can imagine that many people could prefer to explicitly declare their gender instead of being accidentally addressed the wrong way.

@O.R.Mapper For further need of declarations in response letters to clarify unisex name such as Andrea as pointed out, almost all universities, companies, research labs in private sector do it automatically with their own database that you have to fill out. At least for mass emails. Moreover, by the time you get individual email related to the job itself, it means you've met whomever the contact point is whether s/he is a HR employee, or the department chair. Therefore, they already know whether you are identified with Mr or Miss/Mrs. So, it really does not make sense to put gender, imho.

@kukushkin: "almost all universities, companies, research labs in private sector do it automatically with their own database that" - you mean all kinds of organizations have huge databases with names and gender of everyone who might possibly contact them at some point (like ... the entire population of Earth, or at least of the organization's country)? I find that rather unlikely. "you have to fill out" - the point of the question is why certain pieces of information should be provided at all. If you're only concerned about including them in the CV document rather than directly putting ...

... them into a database, I think that is beside the OP's point. "whether s/he is a HR employee, or the department chair. Therefore, they already know whether you are identified with Mr or Miss/Mrs." - from the aforementioned database that, even if it exists, probably has no data about you at least upon your first attempt to establish contact?

At my university in Spain, it is required by the regulations that applicants to positions send a copy of their ID card or passport. This implies revealing DOB, gender and photo. I think it would be better not to require that, to avoid bias, but it's how it currently works and I think most if not all Spanish public universities do the same.
On the other hand, CVs here typically don't feature marital status or number of children. Requiring that would be frowned upon, and probably illegal. And the same applies to other European countries as far as I know.

The question seems to be stating that current affairs oblige candidates to specify their marital status and age. However this statement is factually false. For the UK for example, there is no need for a candidate to specify marital status, date of birth or even nationality. It is many times illegal to even request this information. It is also usual, from my experience, that committees do not address this information. For other continental countries the rules may be different.


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Should scholarship/fellowship monetary amount be listed in CV?
I know there are similar questions but here I would like to focus on scholarships and fellowships that pay tuition and/or a stipend. This is for a CV for PhD or scholarship/fellowship applications, so early career stage and whatever that my imply on the length of the CV.
Given a candidate with 3-5 of these ranging from $1000 to $15,000. Should the amount and what the amount covers be listed? Or just list the institution and award name?

In general, I would leave out the financial amounts of scholarships and fellowships from CV's. If it's a small dollar amount, putting it on diminishes the amount of the award. If it's a well-known award (such as an NSF fellowship), or at least well-known in your field (for example, a fellowship or scholarship by your field's professional society), the details are already sufficiently well-known that they don't need to be mentioned.
I might only list them if they were (a) rather substantial in value and (b) not well-known enough to be on most people's radar screens (at least in your field). At the same time, listing just a few sort of calls attention to the fact that the other awards might not be so large. So again, I'd lean towards not including them at all.

i don't like the inconsistency of listing some and not others. Would it be a better options to list what they paid for? Dean scholarship, tuvalu university. 2000, tuition and stipend.


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Offer for a pre-PhD visit, how to handle the situation with other PhD applications in the queue?
I have received an offer to visit a lab for 4/5 months that could lead into a fully funded PhD. In the meantime I have other applications in the pipeline from which I will hear back in either a few weeks or a couple of months (just different educational systems).
I am excited about going to this lab but I want to wait to have all my offers on the table before commiting to a program. Also I am not sure yet if I will be able to develop in this lab the project I have in mind. However the PI of the lab is highly regarded in the field.
If I were to leave the lab I would want to leave in the best note possible not to burn my bridges with this person and institution.
I am sure the PI knows I might have applied elsewhere and also although it is likely that this visit will turn into a PhD there is also a small chance it will not.
What would be the best way to handle this situation in an ethical and correct way, and not disappointed anybody?
PS: I will get paid in this period but not as much as PhD student. Let me know if more information is needed.
EDIT: So apparently by the end of the visit I will present a PhD proposal, so I hope that at that point it will not be too late to answer other offers.

Is this the same as an open-house? If so, I doubt there would be any conditions imposed on you to accept their offer.

I am not sure what an open-house is. Myself and the PI applied for a "visiting student grant" and got it.

This will depend on all of the institutions involved, but I expect it should work out for you.  I am sure the laboratory making the offer must be familiar with this situation, so the first thing I would do is talk to them about the various contingencies.  Then for the other offers, as they come in, you will have to explain you are getting experience in this laboratory and give them the date you expect to know whether or not you can accept their offer.  If they insist on knowing sooner, then you can take it up with your PI.
It may not be easy emotionally (decisions between good offers can feel very hard even though really neither choice would be "wrong"), but I think it is very unlikely that you will be disadvantaged by taking the opportunity to work in a prestigious lab.  Some of the other offers may be willing to wait, and for the ones that can't, they may allow you to reapply if you don't receive the offer you want.
There is a slight chance that the PI is taking advantage of you this way, but if so I'm sure they will have a reputation for that, and the first person to make you another offer would let you know you are better off leaving even if it does "burn a bridge".  Then you may need to ask around a little more to be sure who to believe.  But it is more likely you are in a win/win situation – you get experience either way, and if a really nice offer comes along from another lab, probably your PI will be OK with you taking it, and you can finish their work up before going and taking up the new offer.

In general, I think so long as you and the PI in question are forthright about your mutual expectations, there should be very few problems.
If the PI who is offering you the position is planning on having you become a PhD student, then that should be made clear. Similarly, if you'd like to consider other options, then you should let your potential advisor know that a "competition" will be taking place.
However, since you said you'd be writing a PhD proposal, it's not clear that you'd automatically have a guaranteed offer for a position at the end of this position if successful. This should also be cleared up before you make a final decision.


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Are publications in IEEE and ACM journals and conference proceedings considered decent quality by prospective employers in academia?
Both the ACM and IEEE have their name attached to a host of conferences and journals.  Some are known to be better than others, but I feel generally that any conference or journal with the ACM or IEEE brands attached are considered decent quality.  (Questions like this indicate I'm not the only one to think so.)
Question: Are publications in IEEE and ACM journals and conference proceedings automatically considered decent quality by prospective employers in academia?  (When applying for postdocs, assistant professor positions, and so on.)  Or is it more nuanced than that?
Essentially, I'm asking what weight do these brands have.
The ARC ERA2010 rank these journals and conferences from A* (the best possible ranking) to C (the lowest possible ranking).  But it's possible that these rankings are not an accurate gauge of the community's attitude towards a particular journal or conference.

What kind of employers are you considering? The majority of IT companies will not care about your publications. If anything, the publications show that you can do a bit of work, but they don't show that you can do "real work"(tm). The "good venues for publications" game is so academic that only very few HR representives or interviewer will ever some up with the idea to check whether a publication is in a good venue or not. Of course, this comment is a bit subjective (I don't know all of the employers), and does not apply to applications to research labs.

I mean in academic positions (where publications matter [I presume!]); I edited my question to reflect this.

what weight do these brands have — The correct answer ought to be NONE.  ACM and IEEE sponsor several top-tier conferences, but not every sponsored conference is top-tier, and not every top-tier conference is sponsored.  If you want to find out how good a conference is, there is no alternative but to read the papers.  But I have admit to some personal bias on this point.

Within many sub-disciplines of Computer Science, conference proceedings, rather than journals, are the main publishing venues for new research. In contrast to journals, which have an impact factor, there is no unified metric to quantify the quality of a conference proceeding. Although there are indeed a number of categorizations, I haven't seen them actively being used to decide which venue to submit to. I found that within these sub-disciplines of Computer Science, academics are very aware of which conferences and journals are competitive and what the impact is of publishing a paper there. These are indeed mostly ACM/IEEE, thus, giving them a certain status by name. Nevertheless, just because the conference is supported by ACM or IEEE, does not imply that it is a high quality conference.
However, when you apply for post-doc or faculty position, there might be people on the hiring committee that are not fully aware of this. To mitigate this issue and emphasize this difference to other fields, I have seen several resumes that explicitly explain how the publishing model in their respective subfield differs from the "classic" journal based system. You can achieve this with a simple note in your resume before listing your publications. An example:

Note: Within the field of (subdiscipline of computer science), selective peer-reviewed conference proceedings are the main
  dissemination of novel research contributions. Conferences such as
  (conf x) and (conf y) are highly competitive publication venues with 2
  review rounds that include reviews from 3 external reviewers as well
  as at least 2 associate chairs. These conferences have an acceptance rate between 10 and 15 % and papers that are accepted and published are refereed as full length papers.

Ok a couple of things for me;
Firstly just because it's published doesn't mean it holds academic calibre. To quote an old lecturer of mine - "Some of the most popular papers are popular because they're wrong".
If anything its a point of conversation if in your CV you've declared your papers and also offers them a location to go and find, read then evaluate your work. I think that's a big thing too, you're dealing with seasoned 'paper-readers' they most certainly won't think - "Hey this guys published, they must be awesome". They'll want to read your papers and develop their own opinion.
I'd say it depends partially on the type of personality of your employer (if going for non academic roles). My current employer likes that I went to a good university and often tells some of our clients. So I assume if I had published papers he would also love to tell people that. To my last employer I could easily see that as a nice bonus (during the interview) but nothing more passed that, he preferred to know that I've had real world experience but after the interview we never discussed it again.
In terms of the 'brands' of ACM and IEEE they were always the locations I was sent to for getting research papers from both my undergrad and postgrad university so if there had been 'better' brands - we would have been directed there
I hope this offers a bit of help for you


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How does 'accepted' but not published paper look on my CV?
I am an undergraduate who recently worked on a 1-page abstract (as a team of 3) and got it accepted to the conference.
However, neither our advisors nor the university agreed to aid us on the registration fee, which means that our paper will not be presented (I am not saying published here, because 1-page abstracts are not published in the journal).
Now I am wondering if I included this in my CV, how this paper would appear to whoever's reading my CV.
To be more specific, I will probably be applying for a Master's degree, and I was intending to use this to simply showcase my various experience and that I worked hard.
The paper I wrote is not related to the major I will be applying in.
I am basically asking this question whether it will be worth it to pay for all the fee ourselves to get it published(presented), or would it serve its role as it is.
Thank you in advance.

Why did you submit a paper to a conference you had no funds to attend?  Did your advisor ask you to submit to the conference, or did you and your team independently submit your work hoping that, if you got it accepted, that someone would bail you out?  Or did the money just dry up between submission and acceptance?

Could you submit it to arXiv or to similar services? Looks like better than nothing.

I think your field is extremely important here, and possibly even subfields. E.g., in theoretical CS, conference submissions are worth a lot, while in physics, depending on the field it can be super-important or completely irrelevant.

There might be the possibility (check with the conference!) that somebody else (who is not a co-author) presents the paper. So if you know anybody from your department presenting there it might (only might!) be an option. Also do you only lack funding for the registration fee (or plane tickets)? Usually students registration fee can be quite low, did you ask them?

Lalala gives a good suggestion. This can be done even underground if the paper is a poster (if the presentation is scheduled) or just the going researcher tell the organisers, with you/your supervisor CC.

Submitting work to a conference, having that work accepted, and presenting that work at the conference has value, such accomplishments should appear on CVs.
Withdrawing an accepted work from a conference due to no funding shows lack of foresight, perhaps even disrespect (by wasting time), and likely shouldn't appear on CVs.
Seek other funding sources, e.g., the conference itself or a national funding body, perhaps ask your advisors for suggestions.
Whether you and co-authors pay yourselves depends on personal factors, e.g., can you afford to?

Thanks! I didn't think about the 'lack of foresight' and 'disrespect' aspect, and I believe you are absolutely right. I had to ask this as the submission deadline is approaching, but I will try as you suggested.

Also, try local administrators. I got at least airplane tickets few times. Contact all offices at both town and area levels explaining the situation (youth bureau, culture, even sport...). This is obviously country depending. In my one, perhaps all letters would have gone to the paper basket. But in another one it worked. Ps: to the OP

"Withdrawing an accepted work from a conference due to no funding shows lack of foresight" - I do not doubt some might interpret it that way, but this stance sounds slightly out of touch with reality to me. Typically, the formal process for getting money is that you first need to justify why you really need that money (by showing that your work has been accepted), and based upon that, you can solicit the money. I worked in well-funded places where this was a mere formality, but I know from various contacts of mine that actually getting the solicited money is not always a given.

@O.R.Mapper Any such formal process is usually preceded by an informal process, in which the funding should be sorted out before submission, so there is a lack of foresight involved. That being said accidents happen and no-one expects undergraduate students to already know how things work. Personally though, if there is any blame I'd put it on the advisors. If you are not willing to offer some of your own funding after everything external falls through, then maybe you shouldn't tell your students to submit to a conference.

@mlk: “…an informal process, in which the funding should have been sorted out before submission” Ideally, yes, and at well-functioning and well-funded institutions this is the case. But I’ve known/worked with several people from institutions where the funding process just wasn’t this predictable; the gamble of “submit, then hope that one of their potential funding sources will come through” was the only option.  And suggesting students in such department shouldn’t be encouraged to submit to conferences at all — that’s yet another barrier for students from less-advantaged backgrounds.

@mlk I think you are making some very strong assumptions, through a geographically biased lens, in the comments on formal an informal processes, and the availability of funds. Funding for research and travel grants vary dramatically between countries (and organisations within countries). So, to me, the “lack of foresight” comment is off base

@PLL,fileunderwater You are both right, and I am fully aware of the bias I have in that regard. That is why I put the "if there is any blame" in there, as there need not be any, but it is kind of hard to cover all the specifics in the character-limit of a comment.

As the answer of user2768 has stated, doing research which leads to an accepted abstract at a conference is a good accomplishment for an undergraduate. Congratulations. Doubly so since -- for whatever combination of reasons -- you don't seem to have extensive support from your more senior advisor(s).
If you find the funds to attend the conference and present the paper, you will turn this into an accomplishment that will be meaningful on your CV for years to come, not only to be admitted to a Masters' degree but afterwards. You will also hopefully learn a lot at the conference and begin to make contacts, which is valuable in its own right.
However, I deviate from the other answer's perspective that if you need to withdraw instead, it shouldn't appear on your CV, and would indicate lack of foresight or disrespect. This may be true for an established academic, who has or may be expected to have a stable portfolio of funding, but is not true of an undergraduate or other emerging scholar. (I hope this is true in all fields.)
If you are unable to secure funding for at least one of your team to attend to present and do need to withdraw, I think you should definitely mention your accomplishment (marked as "accepted abstract at ___" and leave it at that) on your CV at this stage in your career, especially for the purposes of Graduate School admission. It will help document, as you said, that you do have research experience of some sort already. Were I on an admissions committee, I would look at it favorably in this context.
The difference comes afterwards. I suspect that when you are job hunting after your graduate degree, you will censor out such an "incomplete accomplishment" because you will have more recent, more standard, and "completed" conference presentations and/or publications. While if you do find the means to attend the conference and present, the presentation will remain a line item on your CV documenting your sucessful research activity is of longer duration. This will quite likely have incremental value at that time.
There will, of course, be purists who will argue that nothing should ever make it onto your CV that will later be censored out (i.e., that your CV is a universal and evergreen list of all your accomplishments, as opposed to a résumé, less used in academia, which presents a subset of accomplishments chosen as most relevant at that moment for a specific purpose.) That is, perhaps, a good overall aspiration. But there are many junior academics who have at various points listed "submitted" or "manuscript in progress" items on their then-current CVs, since those were meaningful accomplishments at the time. But where for various reasons those items did not progress further, and were silently removed from the CV later.
Admissions committees get it! And they want to see whatever evidence you've got of academic and research experience and potential. So congratulations and good luck!

I deviate from the other answer's perspective that if you need to withdraw instead, it...would indicate lack of foresight or disrespect. This may be true for an established academic...but is not true of an undergraduate or other emerging scholar: An emerging scholar and, to a lesser extent, an undergraduate should understand what they are doing. Conference websites regularly explain that at least one author must attend the event and present accepted work. In submitting, authors are taking on that responsibility. They shouldn't shirk their obligation.

(I appreciate exception circumstances do exist, e.g., https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/162470/how-does-accepted-but-not-published-paper-look-on-my-cv#comment437146_162475)

@user2768, submitting with no intention of attending would indeed be inappropriate. However, where we differ is what you call "exceptional circumstances" I fear is quite commonplace. In the one major conference I cochaired (well-respected, though in a different field), ~20% of the accepted abstracts were no-shows, for a variety of reasons.
In any case, I don't completely disagree with you, but I wrote a different answer since I felt a) it's important to emphasize the accomplishment not the criticism, and b) I think the author should for now list in CV even if he cannot present.

Having an abstract accepted by a conference comitee doesn't prove that any actual work has been done. This might not apply generally, but my observation is, that especially with tight deadlines, the abstract that is submitted may be only a plan of what you are about to do, not a summary of what you actually have done. There's also the full spectrum in between. Hence, the abstract alone, even if accepted, does not necessarily prove/represent anything.

@DohnJoe. Agreed (though depends on the field). So -- if I were on the hypothetical admissions committee -- ideally I'd love to see that a paper/preprint has been written or other evidence work was completed. Of course, it needs to be said as well that a poster or presentation made also doesn't necessarily prove much, in the absence of a peer-reviewed endproduct....

@Houska yes, most probably field dependent. The conferences I have attended so far, mostly decide on the submitted abstracts whether to accept a contribution. However, even when not peer-reviewed; if you have attended the conference, you are listed in the proceedings. Without attending you have nothing to show for.

@Houska Just to clarify: I don't believe I criticised the OP.


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Which is more common in Europe - applying for a 'PHD Program' or coming up with a research Q? I still don't fully understand the application process
Do I keep visiting website like 'find a PHD' which have advertisements of PHD programs and their respective application deadlines?
And would these be considered 'pre-designed' programs with a broader/general curriciulum? as opposed to developing my own research proposal and writing to random professors to see if they will take me on? What is the exact difference here?
I have a general topic in mind but I'm struggling to understand how 'general' and how 'specific' to be when applying. Part of the reason is due to the fact that I am also struggling to define my research question/topic.
Yes I know these are very general questions but I'm a bit lost here. I am well aware that a PHD is not the road to Damascus as some people may idealise it, but it is something I wish to try and which I believe could be a good fit for me - I'm nearly 31 and time is running out.
Thank you for your help.

Europe is, (unfortunately in your case), quite heterogeneous in how that works. Can you narrow it by country perhaps? For instance, for the case of Germany, you would not look for "PhD programs" but rather for open positions as scientific employees that are suitable for writing a PhD thesis while holding the position.

In addition to DCTLib's suggestion, it would also be good to specify your field - in my university PhD projects can range from almost entirely pre-defined (typically lab sciences) to almost entirely designed by the candidate (typically Humanities). There are exceptions to the general rules, but it's helpful to know a rough discipline at least.

@StephenMcMahon thank you for your reply.
My desired and planned discipline is conflict resolution/counter-terrorism/the broader international security and conflict field.