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How to find PhD students interested in 6-months paid exchange visits to work on a supervised project?
I am a junior research fellow with a bit of a luxury problem. I am in a field with many good, open problems. I have a grant which could easily support salary for a couple of exchange PhD students for say, six months, to solve some of those under my supervision - but how do I find those?
I have tried some of the obvious channels, asking network, including old supervisor. Asking around at conferences. Most senior people I talk to agree it would be a good idea - but I can't seem to get any good people to bite.
I am asking advise from people who have been in a similar situation - also students who have accepted such offers, what made you do it? What made you hesitate? Is the prospects of 6 months of relocation off-putting? Are you afraid what your supervisor might think? And for more senior people, whose students I would potentially snatch up: Would you recommend a good student to do something like this? Would you be annoyed that I "borrowed" your good student, just after you taught them all the difficult parts?

Did you try posting on student-based forum? Reddit? etc.

Is Reddit considered a student based forum?

Reddit has sub-Reddits for students in different fields as well as scholars/researchers. There also are other student-based forums i.e. (http://www.eng-tips.com/) etc.

What’s an “exchange PhD student”? Do you mean visiting researchers? If so, is it customary for the host to pay them? As far as I’m aware they’d be paid from their usual money pot during that time. Or are you referring to covering the cost of lab consumables/… for that time?

Six months is too much time to put life on hold. PhD candidates usually do short term scientific missions of a couple of weeks to a month.

@TheGuy at my university at least, there is a sizeable “reddit crowd” that posts a lot, but most students don’t go on reddit (at least regularly).

What field is this?  In pure math, I wouldn't mind in principle sending a good student somewhere for half a year to do another project.

Have you tried mailing lists?

Are you currently at a highly well-regarded institution? The sort of work you are proposing seems to be most valuable as a networking opportunity for students, to let them meet people they might do a post doc with (or in the future on the job search), get acquainted with people who can write additional recommendation letters, etc. As a more junior person, you probably can't offer these things directly more than people at the students' home institutions, but there may be peripheral contacts that you can use. Otherwise it sounds like a tough sell.

I'm curious to know what field you are working in. I am from India and know that for a fact that people here(read, students) whether phd or not would jump at a chance of being able to work with a professor abroad, especially when it's funded.

@TheDoctor Not where I am.  Most projects people work on here are planned for 1-3 years. The "small side projects" usually end up using way more than just weeks as well. But six months time is a lot of time to pay double rent/ leave your young family/ put your main large projects on hold for.

@skymningen In my field we are able to collaborate at a distance. The short term scientific missions have the purpose of establishing and nurturing collaborations. The projects continue for more time than the couple of weeks.

@TheDoctor I collaborate over a distance, to me the whole "borrowing" would be the difference, and would mean to move to the other location (I did that for two weeks to finish off a distance based collaboration project.) Otherwise it is just a collaboration and happens every day. In that case I don't understand the question. I read "Is 6 months of relocation off-putting.". Without a fairly high compensation, compared to an actual Post-Doc contract or a longer term PhD position, yes, it is.

At my university we have a programme webpage in Spanish that does exactly what you are talking about. I've had friends apply (they where thrilled, and say it was a great experience) and I, myself am planning on applying soon. If you are like us, from a country with not that many opportunities, that is not necessarily well funded, that has only 1 expert on our field IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY! then the paid exchange visits are awesome! Please do them!

This is a bit of an expansion on aeismail's answer, which already covers what I expect to be the central issue - a 6-month internship with a "junior research fellow" is just not particularly attractive to many PhD students.
Put yourself into their shoes. Your project, even if leading to a nice article, probably does not contribute strongly to their own dissertations. Most PhD students in the Western world are fully funded, so the fact that you also have funding does not help them (they would basically be temporarily replacing one funding for another). Your reputation is probably not yet strong enough to be a good experience just for name recognition and letter purposes alone. This is not to say that there are no students out there that would be interested in that, but I would guess the majority is not and finding the ones that are is not trivial.
However, I am sure you have options:

The most obvious one is to take the funding for "a couple of students for 6 months" and arrange it in a way to fully fund one PhD student for their entire study. If necessary, try to co-fund if you have to from some other source.
Conversely, you can try to fund undergraduate research from your own community or university rather than convincing PhD students from abroad to come to you for a few months.
Try to work with your research collaborators to arrange some sort of exchange with them. If you have good connections to some other seniors in your field, set a collaboration up with some of them that includes a 6-month visit of one of their students at your site in the context of a larger project. This has the added benefit that a longer collaboration is surely more useful for the other senior, you, and the student than a one-shot visit and article.
Offer (paid) internships for students from developing countries. For such students, a paid visit to a stronger, more well-known university can be incentive enough. You will need some local contacts, though, to bring you in touch with interested students and help with screening of applications.

And for more senior people, whose students I would potentially snatch up: Would you recommend a good student to do something like this? Would you be annoyed that I "borrowed" your good student, just after you taught them all the difficult parts?

I would recommend it to the student only if we already worked together, or if I otherwise had a really strong opinion of you, or you had access to something that the student really needed for their own project (say, good industrial data). I would not be interested in you "borrowing" a student if it was not clear to me what would come out of it for the student (no, "publish an article" is by itself not good enough - the student would do the same back home).

"A couple of students" probably means about two years' funding—not enough to fully support a student.

@aeismail No, but how much off it is depends on location. In the UK you only need one more year, in central Europe maybe one or two years.

Accepted answer for the refreshing, brutal honesty: "- a 6-month internship with a "junior research fellow" is just not particularly attractive (...) Your project, even if leading to a nice article, probably does not contribute strongly to their own dissertations.(...) Your reputation is probably not yet strong enough to be a good experience just for name recognition and letter purposes alone. "
This is exactly what I need to keep in mind when I approach people, so thank you for that.

"Most PhD students in the Western world are fully funded". That's probably true for the rich countries. In Latin America (basically half of the "Western world") we are not so lucky :(

Your post has hit on the problem: you want some PhD students to come work with you for six months. This is a bit too long for a summer internship-like posting, but not really long enough to justify the work required for what would amount to a relocation. It's like a long temp assignment.
Perhaps you should be looking at trying to support some students who are just finished with their PhD's—or have just handed in their theses and are figuring out what to do next—at nearby universities. Or trying to arrange the funding to support a postdoc for a year.

Thank you for your comment - I had not considered that the duration itself might be sub-optimal. In my mind, six months would be adequate to take a small, well-posed problem and make it into a research article for the benefit of both of us.
Unfortunately my grant provider will not allow me to hire a post doc with this funding, otherwise that would also be a good idea.

@nabla just want to say that it might be even more difficult to get post doc for a 6-month post, since post docs might have families, more personal responsibilities. it's even more difficult to uproot for a very temporary position.

Which is exactly why I would not consider that :)

The people just finishing or trying to finish a Ph.D. will have more than enough on their hands (writing a thesis, preparing a defense, writing applications, juggling fellowship deadlines,...).

@skymningen Thanks for the catch. I meant “finished with” not “finishing up.”

That still includes them being worn out, covered in the need to apply for a comparatively safe position and thus not able to put as much effort into the project as it needs. To me, this sounds like a plan for a "cheap, short-term Post-doc that you can't count as a post-doc in your CV". Why would they do that?

@skymningen Maybe they need the money?

I've been on both ends of the table.
As a Phd Student what would attract me:

assistance with accommodation (not just $$, but that would be very helpful, but have that sorted out would be a plus, because housing is often a headache inducing problem, at least certainly in cities and around big universities, and depending on when the 6-month post would start), so having some help on this front would be very attractive
clearly define in your advert (if this is the case) that the student would be given a self-contained project (i.e. solving A specific problem) under your supervision, and that by the end of the post, there's likely a paper that can come out of it.
along the same line, lists any specific techniques that your lab specializes and whether the student will learn/use these techniques.

As a postdoc hiring students:

am not a faculty member so can't speak to that, but have hired students as a postdoc. It helps to have your collaborators put in a good word for you, for example, if you have colleagues in the same field (but not doing the same thing), they might be interested in collaboration in the form of having students exchange and spending the 6-month working on that collab. project, obviously things can go wrong, from what i heard, but that would also depend on the discipline and relationship between the labs etc. But it's one place where you may find students whose expertise lies generally within what you might need, and will likely come with their supervisor's endorsement.

Try getting a Danish PhD student. At least as the University I am currently working at in Denmark, an extended stay is obligatory. But then again, the students home university would probably pay for the stay, so your first world problem of too much funding might persist ;)
Other than that, I would go through recent publications citing your work. There ought to be some PhD students who know your name already, and work in similar areas. Those are the ones I see most likely to join you, and those I would invite.
It's probably better if you contact their supervisor first, as you don't want to steal away a PhD student for half a year, without the supervisor agreeing on it. But if he is willing, he can pass on the offer to the student.

Go talk to people who manage "Marie Curie Sklodowska Actions" - research programmes ran by the European Union. Those are usually indusutrial doctorates, and they work as follows: "most of the 3 years in the industrial partner of the program + several months of stay in any institution of student's choice". It's very flexible stuff.
Those several months can easily be 6, if it doesn't derail the industrial research. Such stay (called a "secondment" in the bureaucratic lingo) is usually paid by student's home institution, and can be in any place in the world.

Obviously funding is an issue.  Can you pay relo/salary/housing what?  It sounds like you have some but not clear how much.
Why do they have to be Ph.D. students?  If anything, this sort of thing is better for a post-doc or junior researcher similar to yourself (done with his main project, able to get traction on a problem and publish in half year).  I have seen these come from Japan or France to the US at a major research university for 6 month stints.  They enjoyed it and got good stuff done.  Not sure exactly how it worked with the money but these were people with secure positions at home, but more junior.
Some appeal of the place would be helpful.  Anyone doing this is going to want to get something out of the experience more than just "chance to work on your problem for 6 months".  Warm climates have appeal to cold weather types (in winter).  California is appealing at all times of the year.  The US is intriguing to Europeans and Asians.  (The converse also, but maybe to a lesser extent.)  Being in/near a big city is interesting.  Etc.
P.s. Not a canned answer, but hopefully this helps you think through the problem.
P.s.s.  It would also be more helpful if you told us the field, area of problems.  There may be generalizable insights to other fields, but there also may be specific things about what you are doing that make it harder/easier to attract people or to have them be effective for short duration.


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Where should you mention the name of potential mentor in research statement when applying for a post doc?
I am going to apply for a postdoc position. I exchanged emails with one of the  professors as potential mentor and he told me to mention his name in my research statement. In which part of the research statement his name must be written? Is it enough to write it in the first paragraph?

Please ask only question per question. Ask the other as a separate one.

Your research statement should probably mention the new potential mentor's name in the context in which his research interests align with yours. So give a bit more than just the statement that he has agreed to mentor you. In other words, say why it would be a good plan for you to work with him.
As to having your previous advisor give you advice on your research statement, there is no ethical concern at all. It is natural for you to continue to seek professional advice from your doctoral advisor. Your relationship doesn't break when you finish your degree. It changes a bit, as you become his colleague in the field, rather than his student.

I don't think it matters so much where you mention your potential advisor, as long as you do it very, very prominently. From what I understand the fact that you already have an advisor in mind is a key fact in the application procedure, and you should never assume that the evaluation committee reads your letter with care. That is, format / write it in a way that even an evaluator who only glances over your letter will understand this fact.
With that in mind, I suggest to bring up your advisor (at least) in your cover letter, in the introduction, and maybe in the conclusions of your research statement. You don't need to be heavy-handed about this - it is ok if you add something along the lines of "I am very much looking forward to work with Prof. X on Y" in a few places, although at least once in your statement you probably want to have a small dedicated paragraph where you discuss that you have been encouraged by Prof. X to apply to work with them.

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Impact factors of preprint repositories
I'm wondering if the growing catalogue of preprint repositories have known 'impact factors' similar to those of popular print journals. If so, can anyone highlight them?

Even if there are services computing them, the impact factor for a preprint repository would not be useful.
Impact factors represent how many citations an article gets on average within a certain period of time. As such, they are supposed to be a rough metric for the selectiveness of a journal. If a journal is highly selective, then only highly impactful articles should (in theory) make it in, driving the impact factor of the journal up.
Now a preprint repository is explicitly designed to not be selective - Every paper gets in (possibly under some conditions that are hardly comparable to peer-review). As such, the impact factor of such a repository would not measure anything of interest.

Thanks Jeromy. But how would you really tell if your article is making any impact? I mean, how would you grade the preprint outlets in terms of their effectiveness?

The whole point of the preprint repositories is to provide an outlet for new results that bypasses the peer review system without offering an alternative to it. Since preprints are not peer-reviewed, they should not be cited (otherwise the whole peer review system would be broken, and we might as well cite Wikipedia). As they are not cited, they cannot contribute to an impact factor.
The most a preprint can receive in terms of "impact" is exposure via social media, and most preprint archives offer such metrics (bioarxiv for instance). This can be nice to look at, but ultimately it really means very little about the traditional impact of the paper, the same way that a newspaper writing about some research does not increase its credibility or scientific importance. It can also give a false sense of achievement.
From my experience the media hype around preprints is not related to the repository but rather the authors sharing it via twitter and it being picked up by sufficiently connected users. Again, this doesn't say anything about the impact of the paper but rather how "viral" it is.
Why are you publishing a preprint? What would be your motivation to choose one repository over another? I can't see any reason not to go with whatever repository is respected in your field. If you are publishing a preprint to avoid scooping, or out of sheer altruism, it shouldn't matter so long as the information is publicly available. If you want publicity, it also doesn't matter (as explained above).

I completely disagree with "Since preprints are not peer-reviewed, they should not be cited". It's important for people citing articles to know whether they are peer-reviewed or not and to take that into account when citing, but that doesn't mean preprints shouldn't be cited, and it's normal to do so.

Ok, so let's start citing preprints, and citing papers that cite preprints, and soon the whole peer review system collapses. This isn't my opinion, this is just policy of most journals. You can mention a preprint, but it shouldn't be used as supporting evidence. A similar issue is met by citations of retracted papers, only that it is harder to solve in retrospect. The problem is that there is no tiered system in references that can separate ones that have been retracted or preprints from peer-reviewed papers, so it all gets added to the same stats.

"This isn't my opinion, this is just policy of most journals" - can you support this statement somehow? I am not aware of any journal that bans citing of preprints. Peer review isn't quite as magical as you seem to think it is - lots of bad stuff makes it through peer review, and lots of good stuff hasn't been peer reviewed yet. As an author, if I am citing a preprint I am going to do my own "peer review" in deciding that the work is worth citing.

Since preprints are not peer-reviewed, they should not be cited --- This view is probably a bit field dependent, as it is fairly common in mathematics to include preprints in references (now, 20 years ago, 40 years ago, and earlier). See, for example, this google scholar search for "Borel set" (a rather common mathematical term in many areas of mathematics) and "preprint". (continued)

In earlier years (and often even now) one would usually see things like "unpublished manuscript", "in press", "submitted", "to appear", etc. rather than the actual word "preprint", so the search I gave using "preprint" shows only the tip of the iceberg, especially for papers more than 20 or 30 years ago (which are still often very relevant in mathematics, by the way).

I've no idea how things are in mathematics, but as far as I know it's many worlds apart from life sciences, and the number of preprint citations I have seen even in recently published papers is probably less than one per paper. Before you shoot me for coming from a different field, consider what I wrote above, that all our metrics (at least in my field) are based on citations. Poor research is already a problem, adding preprints as viable "supporting evidence" would be very bad. Of course, mentioning a preprint is totally fine, but if that becomes common there should be a separate ref list.

probably less than one per paper --- It's almost certainly less than one per paper in mathematics, at least in the final published versions. (It's likely higher in preprint versions, since some of the latest findings being cited might not have been published, but will be by the time the paper itself is published.) I got the impression that you were suggesting it was almost nonexistent (in your field), but it might actually be higher in life sciences than in mathematics!

Citing preprints is common in some scientific fields (e.g. computer science, some subfields of physics, math), so doing so will arguably not break the peer-review system by itself. In some cases, the ArXiv preprint version of physics papers is cited more than the version published in a journal (where there is one)

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How to determine if an institution is a research or teaching university in the United States?
I came across a faculty vacancy announcement at a US university where it is mentioned that the candidate will be expected to perform teaching, research and guidance duties in area(s) of expertise. In addition, the candidate will share responsibility for committee and department assignments including administrative, supervisory, and other functions. From this statement, can it be determined that it is a teaching university where I will be primarily involved into teaching and administrative duties? There is no point of contact mentioned in the announcement whom I could contact with in order to know the details.

The faculty webpage will give a contact address you can use for asking questions specific to this job. (But the general question is a good one.)

It's always wisest to do these evaluations based on public information such as university web pages, catalogs, etc.  You should start by looking at what academic degrees are offered in your discipline (bachelor's only, MS, or PhD) and look up the research activity of the faculty to see what they've been up to.

Just ask them???

Come now...is there any such thing as a "teaching university" anymore?

Sure there us. Ask anyone teaching at a CalState or Michigan State University or similar with a 3:3:3 or 4:3 teaching loads just how much research they are getting done. It's not zero but it can be close.

@RoboKaren That would be a teaching position, rather than a teaching university. I bet they have someone with a lower teaching load.

The OP notes that he means a university where "I will be primarily involved into teaching and administrative duties." Most of the positions at mid- and low- tier state colleges fit within that category.  There may be one or two people with course releases or buyouts, but they would be the exceptions rather than the standard.

I teach at a research university and we have pretty much the same language in our job ads.
How to tell if a school is a research university:

See if your university is listed as one of the original 59 Research I Universities defined by the Carnegie Institute (see the 1994 list here) or 108 Research University/Very High (RUVH) in the current classification.
a. Related to this - does the school offer doctorates in your field? Is it well known for producing high caliber scholars? Does it seem to be getting national grants? These are all part of the criteria for the R1 or RU/VH designation.

See if the course catalogue is online and look at how many courses a semester each professor teaches. Research universities will be 2:2, 1:1, 2:1, or 1:1:2 or even lower (1:0, 0:1:1, etc.).

Look at the CV of faculty and see if they are publishing actively in highest tier journals

Ask a faculty member who teaches there what the teaching:research ratio expectation is.

Beggars can't be choosers. Unless you have other options then you take the position if offered and then when outside opportunities beckon, you switch.

Discussion: While it's easy to figure out the overall research vs. teaching balance and emphasis at a Harvard University versus Sweet Briar College (a small liberal arts college); there is a considerable grey middle ground. At upper-tier SLACs and state universities, there may be more of an equal 50:50 research:teaching emphasis, or even an unexpected imbalance that an outsider would not be able to easily perceive. Usually, you can ascertain this over drinks at the post job-talk dinner.

I think your point (3) is the ultimate measure. If people are publishing, it's a research university. If they are not, it's not. Also, be particularly careful before applying to positions where current holders used to publish a lot before coming there, but are not anymore. Basically, if I have the impression that a school has a tendency of attracting good people who then fall off the research train when they join, that's a big flashing stop sign for me.

Also, re: your point (5) - at least here in Europe, a good postdoc is much better for your research career than a teaching professorship. As postdoc, you'll get less reputation but a lot of time for brushing up your CV, and you can apply for funds and get your quasi-own students. In a teaching position, most people don't have students nor time to actually write grants or conduct research of the quality that would later on lead them to a research professorship.

When I hear teaching university, I think of a four-year liberal arts college such as Colgate, where excellence in teaching is prioritized over "publish or perish."  When I hear research university, I think of an institution where you don't get tenure without a record of significant original research, such as Cornell University.  To get a quick clue, go to the institution's home page and look for "Academics" in the menu.  (If that doesn't yield a blurb, try searching for "About [name of institution]" in the site's search box.)  Here are two examples.

With a 9:1 student-faculty ratio, our students are pursuing their intellectual passions in close contact with field-leading experts. (Colgate)

vs.

You'll interact closely with world-class faculty and a diverse student body, each a collaborator in learning, in research, and in service. (Cornell)

Note there are schools that try to hit a balance, such as Ithaca College, where faculty are strongly encouraged to involve their undergraduate students in authentic research experiences.  Here's a clue:

Ithaca College strives to become the standard of excellence for residential comprehensive colleges, fostering intellect, creativity, and character in an active, student-centered learning community. (vision statement)

An additional clue is whether the institution offers a wide gamut of graduate degrees.  If so, it's probably a research institution.  You can check this aspect quickly at the College Board and put the name of the institution in the search box.

University of Phoenix offers a lot of graduate degrees, but is hardly a research university...

And there are some graduate degrees that are not research oriented (eg. MBA)

Use the institution's reported balance of instructional v. research staff in the IPEDS database. Head to http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/ and choose Look Up An Institution (or others if you want). Choose the institution you want, then click Human Resources. Probably the best metric is simply All Staff - Full Time Research versus All Staff - Full Time Instructional Staff.

Harvard: 1897 to 2136, highly research
Minnesota: 1329 to 3330, highly research
Valparaiso: 0 to 262, highly teaching
Wisconsin - Milwaukee: 101 to 1113, mostly teaching

There are a number of other useful metrics, including grant money from the federal government. For instance, NIH gave Wisconsin-Madison $257,660,041 in 2014. See http://www.report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm. Check out the number of graduate research fellowships awarded as well: https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=loadAwardeeList. These are applicable if the NIH, NSF, GRFP, or other government programs offer awards in the fields you care about.

That sounds like a normal faculty position at a research-focused institution. I can imagine at a teaching-focused institution, research might not be mentioned. Even at research institutions, there is still a lot of teaching that needs to be done. 2-3 courses a year would be common for new junior faculty with maybe some relief in the the first year plus a startup package that you could use to buy out time.

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Is it acceptable to submit manuscript to new journal if the first journal provides no response, is unreachable, and might be fake?
I have submitted a paper to a journal. Having got no reply (after waiting for more than the period of acceptance) I tried to connect the editor via telephone numbers given on website. It said that the telephone number did not exist. So, I tried to open the website link, it did not open initially and later it connected me to a different site with the same name where it sold hardware parts. Hence I thought it was a fake website and applied to another journal and was accepted. Now it asks me to pay fee to publish paper. Is there any problem if I publish the paper in the second journal?

Did you tell the story about the first journal to the second journal? Also, who asks you to pay fee to publish paper? Please clarify.

Just a rough intuition: That is a fake journal and do not pay to publish, for it would do you no good...

"Never pay to publish" is good advice only in some fields, I am afraid.

"Now it asks me to pay fee to publish paper". Would you please clarify that who is that "it"? Who asks you to pay fee to publish paper? The first journal or the second journal?

Based on what you describe, I would see it as exceedingly likely that the journal is indeed fake. I would formally retract the paper at the journal, and afterwards discontinue all dealings with them. They will likely not answer, but I would just assume that the entire submission is dead as soon as you have told them that you wish to retract. The will likely not publish the paper anyway, if you are not paying them a fee (which you will of course not do).
After you have retracted the submission to the first journal, there are no ethical issues with submitting the paper again, this time making sure that the journal is in fact "real". Some advise you to tell the second journal about the "history" of the paper, but I am honestly not convinced that this is ethically or practically necessary. As long as the paper is not under consideration elsewhere (and it is not, as you have retracted the original submission), the new journal does not need to know where you have tried before to get the same material published. For instance, one also does not typically indicate if a paper was rejected before at a different venue.

May I ask: how would  the OP do to contact the first journal to express the will that he wants to formally retract the paper?

@scaaahu Well, I was assuming that you still have something (a contact mail address, a contact form, anything). If you have indeed no way of reaching the old journal, I would just assume that the entire thing stopped operating by now.

I know what you mean. I am still dubious. I am not a lawyer. I don't know how can you legally claim that you have formally retracted the paper?

@scaaahu I don't think that this is a legal question. Legally, as long as you have not signed the copyright slip, the journal cannot go forward and publish the paper. It is more a question of publishing ethics re: double submission, and in this sense I think you should be ok as long as you made due effort to retract from the first journal.

Okay, I am satisfied with your explanation about legal issue. I am still unclear about how would the OP claim that he has made due effort to retract the paper. For example, what if the first journal did not disappear, just that they changed the name/phone number and web site? How would the OP claim that he has done everything possible to track them down? Sorry that I may sound very pushy(I don't know the right word to describe it). In my opinion, it's a tough  issue. Or, am I thinking too much?

@scaaahu You're thinking about it too much.

@scaaahu, they got in contact to demand payment, all he need do is respond to that contact that he is withdrawing the paper. That's it. It would have been better if he had done so before he submitted elsewhere, but this seems like a bit of a special circumstance. The first journal basically disappeared. You're not required to wait forever while and allow a journal to hold your article hostage.

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What to do when completing a full-time masters by research, and a part-time job interferes with grades and progress?
I'm currently in first year of MS by Research in computer science. The first year includes coursework and second year is research thesis.
I've been working part time 20 hours a week in a software company. I have 4 subjects. So far I have managed to complete assignments but haven't really studied well.
Now as the semester is close to end, I have projects, assignments and exams. I'm struggling to decide if I should continue working here. Sometimes I think it's doable but it's a little risky. I may not get proper marks to progress to next semester. What would you do in such situation?

The question really is not "Is it possible?" but "How much slower will progress be?"  Taking a full-time courseload while working is not the path most would take.

Well it's tough ! Really Tough ! I almost went crazy half way through. But I reminded myself, key is to never quit. However, I'm not getting time to study.

It is most certainly possible to get a research degree while working part-time --- or even full-time.  I know a number of people who have done it.  As you are finding, it is quite rigorous, however.  In many cases, it may be better to take the coursework part time, so that you have enough space to really absorb the material, rather than just trying to hit passing marks.

Yeah, probably I should study part time and work part time. All 4 subjects I'm studying are really heavy but itneresting. I wish I had more time to go in depth.

Another option might be to focus on your studies full time, without working.  Do you have savings that would permit this?  Can you get a teaching assistantship?  What about a student loan?  Perhaps your employer would give you a leave of absence.


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Why might only some papers from a conference be included in Google Scholar?
Why some publications are not included in Google Scholar, while some are, for the same conference?
For example, there are a number of papers on Black Hat:
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Arnaboldi-Abusing-XSLT-For-Practical-Attacks-wp.pdf
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Evenchick-Breaking-Access-Controls-With-BLEKey-wp.pdf
But when you search for them, like "Abusing XSLT for Practical Attacks" on Google Scholar, there is no result.
They are papers in 2015, it has been one year since then.
Also, they meet the Google Scholar's inclusion requirement:
https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html
However, for some other papers in the same conference (Black Hat USA 2015), they are included in Google Scholar.
So what are the real standards for publications to be included and searchable in Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is pretty hit and miss - it's using a crawler not manually curated. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if material is just not picked up for various reasons.

Your title and general question are appropriate (i.e., why are some publications included, while some are not), but if you are only really interested in why Black Hat conference papers are not well indexed by Google Scholar, then you should ask that as a specific question. Otherwise, the Google Scholar inclusion criteria information (which you link), answers your general question adequately. The Black Hat case is a minor exception. If, however, Black Hat is what you really care about, then please make that the topic of your question, not just "an example".

Doing a little bit of poking around, I found most articles on BlackHat 2015 not listed in Google Scholar, and all of the articles that I did find listed were cited by other papers.
It seems to me then likely that this is among the "grey area" sites that Google Scholar is not indexing (BlackHat's status as an academic conference is murky), and thus that any material that you find is being added to the Google Scholar index through other routes.

What the "other routes" are? If the paper has a citation, would it be crawled?

@WindChaser Google infers publication records from citations, even if it can't find the original document.

If so, how Google Scholar binds its found PDF file to the publication entry (which previously has no PDF available)?

@WindChaser I'm not a Google engineer, so I don't know for certain, but my guess is that Google finds all of the PDFs with the rest of its web-crawling, and it's not to hard to link it over when Scholar discovers that it's a scientific publication.


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I have the option to retain copyright on my published paper. Should I?
My coauthors and I have just had a paper accepted by a journal.  The journal in question is published by a nonprofit professional society and offers two options in their copyright agreement.

We transfer copyright to the publisher, as is traditional.  The journal has exclusive publication rights but we retain the rights to post the paper on our web pages or arXiv (post peer-review), distribute to colleagues, etc.  We also have the right to release our paper to the public domain after 28 years.
We retain the copyright for ourselves, but grant exclusive publication rights to the publisher.  We still have the rights to post and distribute the paper privately as before.

I am trying to determine the pros and cons of each option.  From a practical standpoint there doesn't seem to be much difference: in each case, both we authors and the journal have the rights to do the things that we respectively care about.
In principle, it would seem better for us to retain the copyright rather than transfer it, just on the grounds that it is better to keep as many rights as possible.  I could only think of one possible drawback: suppose that a number of years from now, some person X wants to republish our paper, or use it in some other way that requires the permission of the copyright holder.  If we transfer it, X can work it out directly with the journal, who should remain easy to contact.  If we don't, X has to track down all three of us authors (or our heirs) to get permission, and then we have to decide what to do about it.
I'm not asking for legal advice, and I know you're not a lawyer, etc, etc.  But I would be interested to hear about any experiences with this, or other issues I haven't thought of.
The publisher is the American Mathematical Society and their copyright agreement form can be found at http://www.ams.org/authors/ctp.pdf

I wonder (not for the first time) what it means to retain the copyright on something but grant "exclusive publication rights" to someone else.

@PeteL.Clark IIRC only the copyright holder or their designated agent is allowed to file a DMCA takedown request or copyright infringement lawsuit, at least without having it thrown out of court immediately. So basically, the responsibility of enforcing copyright falls to the copyright holder.

If I remember correctly, the drawback you mentioned, in case someone wants to republish your work, is the reason the Association for Symbolic Logic decided (long ago, when I was on its executive committee) to ask authors to transfer the copyright for papers published in the association's journals. I believe the copyright transfer agreement included clauses allowing authors to post their papers anywhere they want and, generally, top make them accessible any way they want.


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My transcripts are not an accurate indication of my academic ability
Can the absence of an official academic adviser in the department at which I finished my undergraduate studies be used in my graduate application to justify some deficiencies in my undergraduate grades transcripts?

Without knowing the whole story, generally no, the admission committee looks for reasons to enroll you, not the reasons for your bad grades. If you have bad grades due to the lack of an adviser, then you better have other evidence to show your true academic ability. E.g. exceptional TOEFL and GRE, or a steady improvement in grades from freshmen through senior year would be ideal.

@Penguin_Knight - you really should be submitting this as an answer. It responds to the question perfectly.

Maybe you can use percentiles for your grades. That is a more fair system. What kind of deficiencies are we talking about?

@Penguin_Knight: Good TOEFL and GRE scores are unlikely to make up for a sufficiently bad transcript.

Do most PhD applicants have official academic advisors?  I would find that very surprising.

@Trylks Deficiencies such as taking some advanced courses before their unofficial prerequisites (the devised plan doesn't mention the dependency), or taking a course with a lecturer who arranges exam dates that conflicts with other courses from other departments (happens a lot)

The lack of an official advisor is most unlikely to be of any benefit as an excuse for not doing well in classwork. Presumably you have a common core of classes in your major, and you'd better have a good explanation for any significant deficits in those courses. The lack of an advisor might have led to poor course choices in electives, but you could have ended up taking the same courses even if you had had an advisor. Moreover, your advisor didn't take your classes for you; he didn't do your homework or take your tests or complete your projects for you. Ultimately, you are responsible for your performance as a student.

I also can't help but think that giving this as an explanation is probably worse than not addressing it at all.  One of the key things programs expect students to develop is independence, the ability to learn things on their own and to take responsibility for their own education.  Even if it is unfair, I think this makes "someone else did a bad job of telling me what to do" a uniquely bad excuse.


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What if the value cannot be accurate to one decimal place?
I have read a lot of papers, and the tables they draw are accurate to one decimal place. But my data looks like this: 0.003% 12.736% 19.255 and so on. If it is accurate to one decimal place, 0.003% is zero. There are three more data in my table: 5.265*10^8 6.840∗10^4 2.213∗10^3 and their sum is 5.266∗10^8, but if I am accurate to one decimal place, it becomes 5.26∗10^8 6.84∗10^4 2.21∗10^3, their sum is 5.26∗10^8. The sum equals the first addend.
How precise should I be?

Use significant figures not decimal places.

Also, read up on the general topic of uncertainty analysis. Stopping at sig figures is sometimes sufficient, often not.

This question is answered thoroughly in books on uncertainty analysis as well as in textbooks for first year courses in chemistry or physics.. It belongs in Engineering, Chemistry, or Physics stacks. If you move it to one of those sites, include information on the specific part of the background reading that you have done in the reference books where you are not able to master the concepts in practice.

Thinking about data in terms of decimal places is misleading.  You should really be thinking about data in terms of the precision with which you know the values, also sometimes referred to as significant figures.
How precisely do you actually know those values? It is 12.736% because you actually have enough data to say that it is accurate to one part in 100,000, or is it because of something like Excel defaulting to three decimal places?
You need to figure out the amount of error in your measurements, and once you know that, then the answer to your questions will be clear.

+1 Setting up a measurement instrument such that you can distinguish between 12.736% and 12.737% is in most cases an extreme investement in time, efort and resources. So if you have such an extremely accurate measurement, then you know about it. In other words, if this isn't screamed at you every time you approach the data, then you can be pretty certain that it is not that accurate, and 12.736% in reality just means 13%.

@MaartenBuis  "You can be pretty certain" is not a scientific principle. You need to know the specifics of the source of the data. Accuracy varies widely. I have examples of data with 7 sig digits. I have a case where the magnitude has uncertainty. I have a case where the sign of the value is uncertain.


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Acknowledgements section of the paper
Conference papers are now double-blind. So when was the acknowledgment part written? If I write an acknowledgment when submitting the paper, isn't it easy to leak information? Is the acknowledgment written after the paper is accepted?
Thanks

Definitely.  Otherwise, there is nothing to thank, especially if reviewers are nasty.

Thank you for your comment, but what do you mean? Is the acknowledgment written after acceptance?

If I write an acknowledgment when submitting the paper, isn't it easy to leak information?
Definitely
Is the acknowledgment written after the paper is accepted? Definitely

The author name is also added after acceptance, isn’t that the exact same issue?

Manuscripts should be submitted for double-blind review without acknowledgments, which are added after acceptance in the camera-ready manuscript.


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Would this be considered a valid reason to apply for deferral for graduate school admission?
I have been recently admitted to a top 5 graduate school in the US and I am considering deferring my admission by one year.
My reason is that I am currently pursuing a master's degree and under normal circumstances, one can complete it in 3 semesters, however, I am in a position to graduate in two semesters. Still, I would like to work on a research project with my supervisor (who is very famous in his field) in the third semester starting this fall to hopefully publish something useful.
Do you think that this is a valid reason to ask for a deferral?

Why not start your PhD program as soon as possible and do research and publish there? No good reason to waste time.

Have you already started doing research with the famous professor? Or would you be starting from scratch during the third semester?

@cag51 I will start working on my master thesis in the coming spring semester, but converting it into a publication will surely take more than a semester

Suggestion: contact your PhD supervisor and ask them whether writing up your MSc thesis results for publication would fit into your other obligations at the start of your PhD program

In the global scheme of things, nobody really cares whether you work with Prof A at university X or with Prof B at university Y. but you can't do both at the same time. Life is about making choices, even if you would prefer not to.

You can ask the program what their policies on deferrals are, but I wouldn't defer for this reason.
Your goal at this point is to move to the next step. You've been admitted to a PhD program, so you completed that transition, it's time to start working towards your PhD.
It's perfectly reasonable to finish up previous work as a side project (you don't want to delay progress on your PhD, but it's worth dedicating a bit of extra time to polish up a manuscript and get it through review). Assuming your start time is fall 2021, you still have several months to push the project as far as you can. I would strongly suggest that approach rather than trying to buy another year, even if it's permitted to do so (it may not be).


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Types of research papers
There are research papers that focus on the presentation and analysis of application of a specific idea on a specific subject; e.g. how a closed-loop (in contradiction to an open-loop) can help patients with early symptoms of Parkinson's disease, experiencing low-amplitude tremor. It includes the application of a specific method (closed-loop) to a specific case of study (Parkinson's disease, early symptoms) using measurements and experimental data that are relevant to this study only and could probably not be useful under a different set of assumptions.
There are also other types of papers where the authors only need to give a general scope a method or set of methods, without considering the uniqueness of any specific case, and by using simpler models and more general assumptions; e.g. how to use closed-loop interventions, to shift brain activity from an initial arbitrary pattern to another.
Are there names for these two types of research papers, based on the above distinction?


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How to get a new personal academic webpage to show up in searches
I recently create a new google sites-powered webpage for my academic page (after seeing discussions at this question and others).
However, being a brand new page, it won't come up at all if you search for my name (even with qualifiers such as 'math' or my institution).
What steps should I take to ensure that others can find my website?
I am specifically looking for answers that apply to academic pages, as I've heard that they may be indexed in a different way from normal webpages.

Why would academic websites be indexed differently?

Yes, patience helps; but check your metadata.  If you publish with wordpress, establishing useful metadata is quite streamlined.

The usual approach would be to create links to the website from other prominent indexed websites. So for example, you might want to create a link to the page from your university profile page. You could also add links from ResearchGate, LinkedIn and other social networks that allow you to share a link to a personal website. You could start creating content and sharing it on social networks.
Then, you just have to wait a bit for the web crawlers (particularly Google) to find and index you. This might take a month or more.
If you are specifically interested in being indexed by Google Scholar, check out these guidelines:

Individual Authors
If you're an individual author, it works best to simply upload your
  paper to your website, e.g., www.example.edu/~professor/jpdr2009.pdf;
  and add a link to it on your publications page, such as
  www.example.edu/~professor/publications.html. Make sure that:
the full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with ".pdf",
  the title of the paper appears in a large font on top of the first
  page, the authors of the paper are listed right below the title on a
  separate line, and there's a bibliography section titled, e.g.,
  "References" or "Bibliography" at the end. That's it! Our search
  robots should normally find your paper and include it in Google
  Scholar within several weeks.
If it doesn't work, you could either (1) read more detailed technical
  guidelines in this documentation or (2) check if your local
  institutional repository is already configured for indexing in Google
  Scholar, and upload your papers there.

can you remove items from the google scholar results?  Some old versions of my papers appear there, and I'd like to remove them.

that sounds like a good question. Perhaps ask that as a separate question on this site.

Often times, new websites will find themselves in the "Google Sandbox."
This means that you won't see your website showing up in search results for upwards of six months (as some studies have suggested). However, do not be dismayed by this. Keep adding content, Google will still see it ... and rank your site accordingly when the time comes.
As it were, if you are interested in moving away from the Google-site, and to WordPress (which is MUCH better), there is a pretty good guide here: Building Your Personal Academic Website

I will disagree with you on what you just posted.  I prepare websites and they will show up in searches within days, not 6 months as you stated.  You can even submit a website directly into Google console, so it can be indexed by the search engines, which takes no longer than 3 days.  However, there will be steps one needs to take, in order to do the indexing and being found process a success.  If it were 6 months to show up, we as web developers would not have any job as no one would believe us.

Since this question by the OP has come back to current search results, I will say that the better approach is to use your own domain name to be found.
Part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices is to put links from social media or other reputable websites to your website.  Nevertheless, when searched directly for your practices or name, you have control on your own website how you want to be found.
There are a number of ways on how you can manipulate search engines to make your site come up above other websites and pretty fast actually. Even if you link yourself from an academia page to your original website, this will hierarchically be higher on the scale than the person being found in-between pages of another page.  But again, there are rules to be followed such as meta-tags,  getting your website approved by Google, going to the Google console and submitting a request to be indexed by robots and other SEO practices.

You don't have to do anything, it takes a couple of weeks for search engines to index your website. There is no difference between academic website and normal website in the way they are indexed.
To ensure that others can find your website, do awesome research and publish excellent papers. Otherwise, no matter how many SEO techniques you do, nobody will care.


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Will focusing on statistics experience be beneficial for math job applications?
I've had a PhD in pure mathematics for the last 5 years, and have found several good positions, including a tenure track position I amicably left for personal reasons.
However, the job market is getting pretty tight in mathematics for tenure track positions.
I just recently have one year of statistics teaching experience (the most recent year). While interviewing for my current (temporary) position at a small liberal arts college, some of the interviewers were highly interested in my statistics experience, and I was told that statistics experience was essentially a requirement for the position.

I'll have taught for a second year, when I apply in the fall.
Is this a valuable experience that I should emphasize in my resume
(compared to my  several years of calculus/algebra/linear algebra
teaching)? If so, how can I  effectively highlight it?

I can't tell if it was just a fluke (like the occasional combined math/comp sci positions), or a general rule that those with statistics expertise are preferable at liberal arts colleges.

I can't comment on academic jobs, but from my experience, knowledge in statistics is extremely beneficial if you ever want to get a job outside of academia. So my advice would be that pointing out expertise in statistics will never harm you, and will often help you, so it's worth pointing out. Worst case scenario is they just think nothing of it.


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Is a post doc advisor who makes superficial contribution entitled to authorship?
I am a postdoc with two advisors (not something I would recommend for everyone). I would describe the involvement of my two advisors in the project I undertook as quite superficial. I met and discussed a lot with them, they gave me some useful ideas, but they didn’t contribute much to the core of the project.  I didn’t even feel they put genuine effort to understand what I was doing.  Most of their feedback was related to ideas that didn’t work or was not implemented. If the right for authorship is defined by a significant intellectual contribution, then I wouldn’t really describe their role as such.
Is it ethical to include them as coauthors in the article summarizing this project, with an author contribution statement that describes each one’s role?
In this case their role will be something like giving useful tips, analyzing the results, ..etc.

What does it formally mean to have two (or one for that matter) advisors as a postdoc?

@TobiasKildetoft: Advisor = supervisor / boss / PI.  This terminology is commonly used in math, for instance, where the relationship between postdoc and advisor is less supervisory and more collaborative.

@Nate Right, hence the "formally". Usually when the term is used it refers to an informal relationship, which makes it unclear why the role of the person as advisor is really relevant.

Is it generally accepted to negotiate authorship at the start of a project?
To me that seems obvious, but I feel like I get weird reactions from my peer PhD students and faculty when I suggest this. (Perhaps I should spin this off as a separate question.)

What do your supervisors and Co authors say

@Philip Yes, you should ask a separate question. And no, nothing in academia is "generally accepted" :)

In some fields, post-docs are treated as "persons with PhDs" and not as "students", so advisors' contribution is minimal :)

The reality is that standards for authorship are not universal across disciplines.  In some disciplines, your advisors should be considered authors.  In other disciplines, you advisors should not be considered authors.


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How to reference a work that I refer to on multiple occasions?
If I have taken an idea or quote from somewhere I will of course reference it properly.
However my question is every time I mention someone e.g
'Joe Bloggs said..."
 do I need to reference every time I mention that person if I have referenced him at least once?
Or if I say 'this proof is given by xyz book'
if I have ready referenced xyz book do I need to reference it every-time I mention the name of the book?

Short answer: Yes.  Longer answer: You will have been asked to use a particular citation format, or to choose one.  Look it up and follow their rules.

@BobBrown With respect, answers should not be posted in comments, since it dilutes the function of both.

In short: Yes. For every quote or idea that is not your own, this must be made clear to the reader. However, depending on the citation style, this does not always need to be in the form of “Joe Bloggs said” (which I have never seen in academic literature anyway), but may, e.g., just happen via a foot- or endnote.
If you are intensively quoting somebody or following another work, it may be feasible to have one sentence explaining to what a citation applies:

The following overview of discombobulation techniques is based on Bloggs et al. (1987).
Unless noted otherwise, all quotes in this section are from Bloggs et al. (1987). [this requires that quotes are visible as such]

This meets the above requirement.

Ok so if I say 'xyz said ..' I do not need to produce a footnote?

I would guess that this depends on the conventions of your field. But even then you would have to have a proper reference somewhere, so using a footnote would be the least obstrusive way anyway. Moreover, I never encountered “XYZ said” or something even vaguely similar in academic literature. Are you sure that you want to use it?

I am not using that specifically but I am saying stuff like 'this was presented to us by ...'  what about if mentioning someone, would you also  have to cite by their name ?

I do not see a big difference between “this was presented to us by X” and “X said”: They cannot replace a proper citation. Otherwise it would be difficult to confirm your citation or even to the correct person.

I'm not sure I completely agree. Citations should indicate which ideas are not yours and provide pointers to the original sources of those ideas and one should strive to make sure they do that. However, they're not a magic incantation that needs to accompany every non-original thought and walls of citations are often difficult to read.
Consider a paragraph like this*:

Johns, Jacobs, Jingleheimer, and Schmidt (2015, p. 15) state that "the
  weather is going to be good today", a claim supported by several other
  experts as well.  (Jones, 2015; Xu, 2015b p. 9). However, we argue
  claims like "the weather is going to be good today" are meaningless in
  New England, where the conditions change rapidly and unexpectedly.
  Relying on a claim about how the 'weather is going to be today' for the entire day may cause the listener all sorts of discomfort.

Repeating the entire 50-character citation** three times in three sentences would not add much value. The phrasing and punctuation clearly indicate what Jones and colleagues thought and, at the first mention, the citation is right there if the reader wants to follow up on it. However, there are two important caveats.
Books--and even papers--aren't necessarily read from beginning to end. To ensure that the goals of the citation are achieved, you need to ensure that anyone reading the uncited or "informally-cited" parts encounters the citation too. People are unlikely to pluck a sentence from the middle of a paragraph, but they might skip from section to section or paragraph to paragraph, so the citation should be repeated anew in each section/paragraph/figure legend. You may have a bit more latitude if the text is clearly a critique of one specific work: if the document is entitled "A critique of 'X, Y, and Z, 1995'", don't pepper every other sentence
with the full citation***.
Citing something for one fact/idea/quote also doesn't "absolve" you of the need to cite them for a second fact/idea/quote, even from the same document. The reader may not know that Johns and colleagues also made predictions about the stock market and the fifth race at Belmont.
In summary, make sure that it's clear which ideas are your own and which are borrowed, and indicate where the borrowed ideas may be found. Once you've done that, make the text as readable as you can.

* Example cribbed from a now-closed question on the same topic.
** Some citation styles do have a "short form" for subsequent mentions of the same work. That certainly helps here too.
*** Though you may want to be more liberal if the repeated citations include useful information (e.g., a page number).


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What is the purpose of an undergraduate viva for a dissertation?
What is the purpose of an undergraduate viva for a dissertation?
In the viva the supervisor is present who moderates the viva and a second examiner who asks the questions.
Lets say that my supervisor knows that a certain topic included in the dissertation is not my strongest point, would it be fair for a large number of the questions to be directed on this topic?
Should my supervisor have made this clear to the examiner in the viva?

I suspect that vivas / defences vary greatly from country to country. It might be wise for the question and answers to mention to where they refer.

The supervisor is not typically present in vivas in the UK, as far as I'm aware. (Mine wasn't anyway though that was 15 years ago.) Can we take it that you're restricting attention to vivas where the supervisor is present?

If your question is specifically about undergraduate viva's, it is actually off-topic here. Is it possible to change your question to be about viva's / defences in general?

There is no single purpose of the viva, but broadly speaking it tests a student's ability to act like a researcher. It is not easy to define what does "being a researcher" mean, but the list of skills required definitely includes such things as: understanding the importance of the problem and its place in a wide picture of researchchoice of appropriate method to solve the problem ability to find a sound, elegant and technically accurate solution ability to communicate the solution for different audiences Many undergraduate assessments only test skill 3 from the list and (partly) skill 2. When students prepare a coursework or sit an exam, they always communicate their results in a certain style, typically in writing, and written for the single reader: the lecturer running the module.
Unlike a typical assessment, the format of viva allows three-way communication between the student, the text of thesis, and the readers / examiners. The opportunity to ask student a question about the text changes the game completely for all parties. For the student, the task is not only to write and present a text with the solution, but also to understand the solution, the questions which may be marginally connected with the topic of the text — a «big picture». For examiners, the goal is not only to check the formal correctness of the arguments, but also to make sure the student can freely use these arguments, and apply them to problems within the big picture.
Answering your specific question: it does not matter, what does the supervisor know. In viva, you, as a researcher, present the thesis. Your skill to be solely responsible for the text you produced is what is tested, not the text per se.  It is you, who should focus the examiners on the important parts of your thesis. Through the way how you present the research, you should be able to create a right context, and to attract the attention to the strongest parts of your thesis. Success in this part will invite comfortable questions; failure will result in a number of random questions distributed all over your thesis, which you'll have to answer. If you feel really uncomfortable talking about (some) part of your thesis, you possibly should ask yourself, why this topic is still a part of your thesis in the first place.

Many thanks for your answer. Is it not difficult to turn the examiners attention to certain bits of the dissertation if they keep asking very specific questions on very tedious bits of algebra? Lastly if throughout the viva the student can not answer a singly question on where certain bits of tedious algebra come from,   would they have failed the viva?


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How to search for a paper when you have journal name, volume, issue, and year?
Is there an easy way to search for a paper in Science or Nature by the volume, issue number and year?
For example:
Science 317, 1500 (2007)

1500 is not the issue number but the page number.

Just Google it.

I don't know OP's definition of easy way but it only took me 2 minutes to go to the journal's webpage, click on the archive, go to year 2007, open up some of the issues in volume 317 and finally find page 1500 in issue 5844:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/317/5844

Year, volume and issue (and page numbers) exist to make finding an article easy. I'd say, that's easy enough but might be wrong. Yes, having a DOI is easier.
Page 1500 actually includes 4 technical comments:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138179
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138764
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138956
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138773

Exactly. It's like finding a house if you 'only' have the house number, street, and zip code.

I love this analogy! Accordingly, the DOI would be the geo tag.

Put it in to Google Scholar
In general, Google scholar is very good. You can copy a full reference into Google Scholar and it will often return just the article you are looking for. In general, this works well, for example, you can copy and paste the reference from a journal article into the Google Scholar search box and get the article.
Presumably, this process is less reliable when you don't have the title or author names, but sometimes, year, journal, issue, and page numbers may be sufficient.
For example, this is the search result when you plug it into Google Scholar
https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&q=Science+317%2C+1500+(2007)&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C39&as_sdtp=

More generally
Most official academic search engines such as Scopus and Web of Science will have an advanced search that may facilitate narrowing your search to specific field codes.


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Does an acceptance of an abstract mean that I will definitely be presenting at the conference?
I just had an abstract accepted by a UK conference and will be submitting the final paper in a few months. We were notified by email of the acceptance and directed to register for the conference. The information we were sent currently does not mention a presentation and the schedule is not yet posted.
Does this mean that I will definitely be presenting at the conference? Or are abstracts/papers sometimes accepted but not presented?

Yes, it's absolutely reasonable to ask the department to pay. However, you should have agreed this with them before submitting the paper. Obviously, funds are finite so the department has to prioritize and they would obviously prefer to pay for cheaper and/or more prestigious conferences (of course, those two goals are often mutually exclusive). In general, you should avoid putting yourself in the position where you have to pay for your own conference expenses: this usually means being selective about which conferences you submit to.

You say "We were notified", which I assume means you and your supervisor. Since your supervisor was fully aware that the paper was being submitted, he or she should have already planned how to pay for one or both of you to go to the conference.

I am just wondering... How can a conference accept papers based only on their abstracts? Isn't it an indication regarding the (lack of) seriousness of the conference?

@PatW: Different academic cultures.  For instance, in mathematics conference submissions are not peer-reviewed (and hence nobody considers a conference presentation to be comparable to a publication).  Organizers typically accept as many submissions as possible, provided they appear to be actual research.  The abstract submission is mostly just to verify that your proposed presentation is on-topic for the conference and that you are not a raving lunatic, and to help the organizers estimate how much space is needed and to group related talks together.

Similar to @NateEldredge and his comment on mathematics, abstracts to public health/medical conferences are often peer reviewed, but its generally just a "No, just no...", "Poster" or "Oral Presentation" ranking system, and they're not considered to be even remotely comparable to an actual publication.

The practices vary significantly by field, but unless it is a very unusual case, having your abstract accepted means that you will be presented in some form or another.  It is not certain, however, whether you will be making an oral presentation.
In some meetings, having your abstract accepted means that you are definitely going to be getting up on stage and presenting.  In others, it means that you will definitely not be presenting, but will be given a chance to stand next to a poster in a distant corner of a giant room where nobody will realize that you are even there.  Most are somewhere in the middle, and you cannot know where it will fall on that spectrum without asking the organizers or looking at information from past conferences.
In all cases, however, it is reasonable to approach your advisor / department to ask about travel support.  Whether you can get full support depends on their policies and finances.  If you cannot, many conferences also have student travel grants or opportunities to work as a conference volunteer in return for having some of your costs compensated.

Good to point out that you've also small grant agencies and foundations that offer student travel support. Someone around you could point you out to something. I cannot since I'm not in the UK (and it would probably be a too specific question for this site).

Yes, "accepted" means that your talk is going to be included in the program (when it's published) and you are expected to present it at the conference. Congratulations! Don't get your hopes up though, your time slot could be as short as 15 minutes and in parallel with other talks, and the conference organizers will not contribute any money towards your accommodation or registration costs (unless explicitly stated).
If this is a joint work with your advisor and/or they suggested you to apply for the conference, probably they have already plans for the funding to be covered by your department (usually, under their research funds or under a common fund for phd students). If you applied for the conference without telling anybody, this is unusual and it will be a surprise for them. Ask your advisor, definitely, but the answer is not a certain "yes", especially if they are short on funding.
If I can add some more advice, don't be afraid to talk to your advisor for matters such as this one. It is a reasonable doubt and it's understandable that you have it, since you have zero experience with conferences.
It is crucial for the future of your doctorate that there is a direct and healthy line of communication between you two.

In many fields, being accepted does not mean getting an oral presentation slot.

This may get lost among the other good answers, but it's worth looking at the conference website for last year's edition of the conference (or the last several) in order to find out about the format. If it's entirely organized around parallel sessions of paper presentations, then you're likely to be giving a talk. If it's an even mix of posters and talks, then it might be up in the air.
Also, you should look at the Call for Participation for this year again as well. If posters are mentioned as a separate submission item with a different date or other specification, then it's likely you submitted for a talk and should be presenting one. It might also say there whether accepted abstracts will be invited for talks, posters, or a mix.

First of all don't worry about whether the question is silly or not. There are no silly questions, there are only silly questions ;) Moreover, it's pretty normal for early PhD students to be unacquainted with the 'politics' of academia (how publishing works, differences between venues, etc..). So it is pretty normal to ask your supervisor about these stuff, otherwise he/she might assume that you know that information already and, then, you will be in trouble.
In my field, some conferences base their acceptance on the abstract only, meaning that they accept or reject your abstract, and based on that you get an opportunity to write the full paper, submit it and present. I am sad to say that usually these conferences are not really strong ones.. but in any case going through the submission process and getting the opportunity to write a paper and present it has a lot of benefits that outbalance the strength of the conference.
You should examine the conference's website, you could also email the organizers. Usually they should clarify whether accepted contributions are to be presented in talks, or as posters (where you print a poster, stand next to it and answer questions of those who pass by).
I don't know any venue that accepts contributions without planning them to be presented. So I really doubt that.
As for the funding, yes it is always okay to ask, if they can't fund you they'll just say that they can't. They could also agree but set limits to the accommodation (e.g. it doesn't have to be a 5-stars hotel). If your supervisor recommended submitting a paper there then he probably knows that it is possible to fund you to attend.

I would suggest that, as the other answers say, you should talk to your advisor about this. First off, they will be happy to explain the process to you. In fact, I'd go so far as to take a guess that your advisor will have potentially published in this conference before (you could check their past publications to see if this is the case). Was your advisor aware that you had submitted to the conference? (I will presume so, as in my experience, UK PhD students typically show their papers to their advisors prior to submission). If not, it might be helpful to do so in future, as it allows them to anticipate the potential need for conference funding in advance.
I know that my first publication was at a conference which my advisor had previously presented at many times before (as well as having at one point been an organiser). As to if you will give an oral presentation or not, that is highly conference-specific. My first conference presentation was highly unusual, in that I ended up having around 1 hour to give a presentation and field an extended Q&A session (which was very helpful). Don't fret though - this was highly unusual, and I was aware of it in advance. You will more likely either be giving a poster presentation, or a standard-length presentation with a few minutes for questions. I simply give this example to highlight that you really should speak to your advisor, as every conference is different.
Don't feel silly about asking your supervisor, however. I am sure they will be supportive, and happy to explain how this works. They should also be happy to explain how the process of paying for conferences works (since it is hardly an elephant in the room - conference publications are relatively expensive). There might even be a designated fund to pay for student publications.
While certainly not always the case, I had my own budget for conference travel and registration fees, and was able to simply use this to pay for conferences and travel. For my first conference, I spent roughly the same as you are talking about spending, so that's not wholly unreasonable. Conferences can be expensive, but the opportunities to network, meet other researchers, and share your work are important, and your advisor should understand this and be able to help you understand what is going on.


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Difference between "referee" and "reviewer" in the context of journal manuscript review?
I've seen the terms "referee" and "reviewer" both used to describe a person who gives feedback to a paper in a journal submission. Are there differences between the two terms? Is one used in some situations where the other isn't?

Mildly related: difference between draft, manuscript, preprint, paper, article.

Somewhat more than mildly related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32720/what-are-the-differences-between-peer-reviewed-journals-and-refereed-journals

I'm a non-native speaker mostly interacting with other non-native speakers, but for me "reviewer" is slightly more formal than "referee". I agree with everyone else that they are synonyms, though.

For a submitted manuscript, probably they are the same thing.  Sometimes papers may be "reviewed" after publication, and that guy would be a reviewer and not a referee.

So far as I have ever been able to tell, "referee" and "reviewer" mean exactly the same thing.

I was searching the web for this question as this renowned mathematician[http://www.imath.kiev.ua/~rop/] has used word Referee and Reviewer differently, don't know why,

@IgotiT He distinguishes between his work reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication in a journal ("referee") and reviewing already published papers for an online database ("reviewer"), just as JessicaB explains below.

I think they are synonyms.
I guess there might be a very slight emphasis that a referee makes a decision, where a reviewer produces a report. But both do both, in the case of journals.

A referee never makes a decision on a manuscript; that is the editor's job. They can (and do) recommend one, though.

My experience is that usage varies. In my field, it is common to use 'referee' for the person who anonymously comments on a paper submitted to a journal, and 'reviewer' for the person who writes about a paper already published to appear publicly in a database. However, people I know in similar areas use 'reviewer' for the first meaning. To confuse things more, there are some discussions underway about changing the publishing model, which would have the effect of essentially combining these two situations.

Typically they are synonymous (see this wiki entry).  Some journals use one term or another, and some use both.  Some fields may tend to use one more than another, but I don't know.  However, my impression is that the term "referee" means someone who makes a thorough evaluation of a paper (one should check correctness and make detailed suggestions if appropriate), and the term "reviewer" is more general for someone whose opinion is solicited.
In math, full refereeing takes a considerable amount of effort and many journals now solicit quick opinions from experts to determine if a paper should go through the full refereeing process.  The experts who give brief opinions could be considered a kind of reviewer (in practice, I haven't heard this term applied here, but calling them something like "preliminary reviewers" seems reasonable), whereas they should not be considered referees.

They are not synonymous. A referee decides whether a contribution is to be accept or not for publication. A reviewer provides information on published articles and books. A review of a academic work gives a brief and clear account of its contents. Reading the review is not intended to be a substitute for reading the original work; the primary purpose is to help the user to decide whether he or she needs to read the original. Therefore, the main results of the paper should be briefly described, preferably in a non-technical manner.

I would say they seem absolutely synonymous in every use I've come across.
If anything, it might actually be the case that Referee is the noun and a review is the verb i.e you are a Referee but you are doing/giving a review.

I think in practical terms both do the same thing. In theory a reviewer just reviews while a referee also decides whether to accept or not.
In more practical terms, when a referee delegates the reviewing process to one of their post-grads, the post-grad is a reviewer but not a referee (and yes I know this "never happens").

The editor/editorial board decides whether to accept or not.  Referees make recommendations.

@Kimball I'm just saying that the referee's duty is to state whether they accepts or not. I do know they often don't have authority to make the decision and it's in most cases a recommendation. The reviewer does not have this duty.


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Where is the latex template for IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health?
I was trying to find the latex template for IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, but I am only able to find the .doc template. Do we have any .tex template for this journal?
http://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/create-your-ieee-article/use-authoring-tools-and-ieee-article-templates/ieee-article-templates/templates-for-ieee-journal-of-translational-engineering-in-health-and-medicine/
Usually there should be latex template as well.

There is an IEEE Transactions LaTeX template.

It seems JTEHM does not provide any template for LaTeX documents. The standard IEEE template is available with \usepackage{ieeetran} but it does not seems to be coherent with the word document provided (e.g. abstract), so it might need adaptation.

Maybe papers on "translational engineering in health and medicine" do not have any equations in them, so the editors think LaTeX is not needed.

You could play with IEEEtran to generate the similar looking document template. This is what I could get.
\documentclass{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\title{Here goes my JTEHM Title}
\author{Author1, Author2, Author3 \\ Institute1, Address1\\ Institute2, Address2}
\begin{document}
\twocolumn[
\begin{@twocolumnfalse}
\maketitle
\end{@twocolumnfalse}
\begin{abstract}
~{\lipsum[1-1]}
\index{keyword1, keyword2, keyword3}
\end{abstract}
\bigskip]
\section{Introduction}
\lipsum[1-7]
\section{Conclusion}
\lipsum[1-1]
\end{document}

Looks like tex SE. Was the question more fit for tex SE and somewhat-less fit for academia SE?

Thanks, very similar, but minor differences. For instance, the first letter is Capital.

@TinaJ won't it be taken care by editorial team after acceptance.

I contacted their office and looks like they don't have latex template. But they provided me with IEEE JERM tex template which is almost identical.


text:
Uploading a revised version of published journal article on arXiv
I uploaded a pre-print of an article on arXiv 1 year ago. The article was accepted in SCI journal and currently available online. However, I found a typo mistake in one equation and want to add more discussion related one figure (On researchgate I am receiving a lot of queries regarding that figure). Should i upload a new version of pre-print on arXiv? (How citations will work in this case? as arxiv version is more advanced compare to Journal version) OrI may upload a short document on arXiv as an errata/correction with extra discussion?Or I may address errata and discussion in online page of journal? Actually this journal allows the registered users to comment and start discussion related to published article.

I'm not sure what you mean by "how will citations work?"  Can you explain what you are concerned about, specifically?

I wonder if arXiv version is more advance compare to journal version how the research community will know this? and also once this article get published in journal the google scholar has removed arXiv version from my profile.

This has happened before. Just update the arXiv version and indicate in the "Comments" field and ideally also inside the file itself that the version is newer than the published one. Examples of such updates:

https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3306v4 (sadly, the Comments field isn't too clear here)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04832v1 (here, the fact that this is a post-publication update has been made clear in the file itself)
https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0602634v4

The fact that I found/recalled these three links within 10 minutes should suggest that this is not a rare occurrence, although I wish that people would make the status of the preprint as being a more correct version of the publication clearer. Either way, the update is highly encouraged from a reader's perspective :)


text:
How to contact EiC when his emails seems like auto computer generated reply
One of my article is under review in reputable IEEE journal. The average time of first decision for this journal is 3 months. However, my article is under review for 6.5 months and upon my inquiry I always get same email from EiC (editor-in-chief), which looks like an auto generated email, stating we appreciate your patience and we are trying to complete the process ASAP. According to journal policy, I cannot know who is the handling Associate Editor and all inquiries should go to EiC. In the given situation how can I invoke editorial board to expedite the process? Is it fine to make a call to EiC on his personal contact number?

Does the journal have a desk editor (that is, an employee of the publisher)? If so, you could try contacting him or her - the desk editor is likely to have more time, and could say something like "we've invited 3 reviewers of which 2 declined and the last review is due in ____ days".

on https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ the only contact person is EiC, and on the Journal website under contact us the email of other two EiC is given.

What's the name of the journal? The link you gave doesn't work (it redirects to ScholarOne).

@Allure sorry for causing confusion "mc.manuscriptcentral.com" is the central system for submitting article for IEEE journals and other publishers. I am not sharing the name as I am afraid it may cause some problem for me, and for journal and EiC reputation.

What does EiC mean?

@henning: "Editor in Chief"

I guess, you can ask directly two EiCs with manuscript detail, something like “did you hear anything from reviewers yet?”

I suggest contacting the publisher and asking them for a status update. The publisher is likely to have more time, and should be able to provide almost as good an update. IEEE's website lists some people to contact. You might be able to find an even better contact person from the journal's website.
I'd write in the email:

Is my paper under review?
If it's under review, are there any problems (e.g. the only invited reviewers haven't responded to the invitation for 3 months, and no new ones have been invited)?
If there are problems, can you ask the EiC to look at the submission?

In a first email I wouldn't mention that I've already contacted the EiC. If they ask about that, then only I'd say I've contacted the EiC, but received what looks like an automated response.


text:
When should academic papers be censored due to public health/safety concerns?
A recent paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, which reports the discovery of a new botulinum toxin, has been censored:

Because no antitoxins as yet have been developed to counteract the novel C. Botulinum toxin, the authors had detailed consultations with representatives from numerous appropriate US government agencies.

The team sequenced the bacterial DNA corresponding to the toxin, but did not publish it.
I can understand the reasoning, and see how it might make sense, but I wondered: in such a case, what are guidelines that should be followed? The editors indicate consultations with governmental agencies, but I think the government might in some case be overly eager to censor data that should, from an ethical and moral point of view, be disseminated.
So, without turning this into a political question: what are guidelines (written rules as well as unwritten moral standards) that an author, reviewer or editor should follow concerning potential public safety issues? I looked for information on the COPE website, but could not really find anything relevant.

A former professor of mine, who worked with Trypanosomes, once told us that there was an under-the-table agreement between researchers that a certain pathogenic mechanism must not be investigated. I remember finding the fact that this was done and that it worked very intriguing.

@biologue: how do you know that it worked, i.e. the mechanism wasn't investigated as opposed to investigations were not published (= in terms of public safety: a small group of people has the monopoly of this knowledge)?

This is a rising bioethics topic in the area of biosecurity and dual-use developments. Last year there was controversy with H5N1 and censorship.
There is no set policy, though they are being devolped. Most recently there is the United States Government Policy for Institutional Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern
The IAP Statement On Biosecurity principles state:

Awareness. Scientists have an obligation to do no harm. They should
  always take into consideration the reasonably foreseeable consequences
  of their own activities. They should therefore:

always bear in mind the potential consequences – possibly harmful – of their research and recognize that individual good conscience does
  not justify ignoring the possible misuse of their scientific
  endeavour;
refuse to undertake research that has only harmful consequences for humankind.

The US NIH Office of Biotechnology Activities is often consulted for such research concerns and has a report Enhancing Responsible Science Considerations for the Development and Dissemination of Codes of Conduct for Dual Use Research and has a series of recommendations.
The WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual does not address publication restrictions/censorship.

I'm wondering if the paper in question did actually comply even with the most basic of those thoughts: if the public shouldn't know of this new toxin until antibodies are available (obviously a terrorism concern rather than about canned meat), then why not wait with the publication of the whole business?
IMHO with the publication now they advertise that they have a new type of toxin, and even say they have the sequence. They just won't tell the sequence publicly until they also have an antigen. So in addition to an "ad" to the terrorist world, trustworthy labs who'd work on an antibody ...

... don't get information they need. To me it possibly has a bit of a smell of eating your publication pie and keeping it. If they cooperate behind the scenes with other labs on the antibody, then why publish already now? Priority date could maybe be established by some notarial act, but IMHO if the safety concern it that large, priority dates or an earlier publication shouldn't compromise it. That being said, I'm not sure that a terrorist wouldn't have an easier go with a "normal" C. botulinum strain, 15% mortality is far less than 90%, but probably still enough for terror purposes.


text:
What's the reasoning behind phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements"?
Phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements" seems strange. Can one submit dissertation in full fulfillment of the requirements?

Most doctoral programs have other requirements for completion of the degree, such as  a certain number of course hours and the passing of qualifying exams. Hence, while the dissertation is the culmination of the doctoral program, on its own it does not satisfy all the requirements for graduation.


text:
What are the responsibilities of the Publication Chair of a conference?
I received an "offer" to become the publication chair of a high profile IEEE conference. Before accepting the "offer" I would like to know what are my responsibilities, and I would like to plan ahead as what portion of the available time such a commitment would eat up.
I saw this description, but it is rather vague. It says:

Publications Chair: Responsible for the coordination of production of conference content (e.g., papers from special tutorial sessions or colloquia, summaries of conference papers, programs, etc.) and serves as the point of contact for all Xplore submission-related inquiries before and after the conference.

It tells nothing about the pitfalls, so I want some feedback from people who have really done this.
EDIT: additional questions
Does it have positive or negative impact on the student. In terms of workload vs. benefit?

I've been publication chair of an IEEE conference before, and it's pretty straight-forward.  IEEE has a well-arranged process for managing conference publications, and you basically just need to hold up your side of the deal and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
In particular: you should have an IEEE CPS publications contact.  You can get this from the current general chairs, since they're dealing with IEEE, or (since its usually the same from year to year) you can ask the previous publications chair.
Set up a meeting with that person ASAP and they can walk you through the process and make plans with you; I've had very good experiences working with their publications personnel.
The key responsibilities that you should expect to fulfill are:

Set a schedule acceptable to IEEE and the conference chairs
Work with the general chairs to fill out the required forms and get them to the IEEE on time, so that you can get the publications IEEE CPS contract signed.  This will include setting the various different types of publications (e.g., main track, short papers, workshop papers, tutorial abstracts, etc), as well as pages sizes, expected number, delivery method (I recommend USB sticks) and budget.
Send information about camera ready from IEEE to the various conference chairs that need it (general, program, workshops, tutorial, etc.).
Work with chairs to get all of the front matter prepared in a timely fashion and within the schedule negotiated with IEEE (cover, index information, introductions, sponsored material, etc.).
Immediately after the conference, report to IEEE whether there were any no-shows (who should have their papers removed).
One month after reporting whether there were and no-shows, everything should appear online in IEEE Xplore. If it doesn't, then you need to keep pinging IEEE's representative to make sure things get into IEEE Xplore as promptly as possible.

Could you please share some of the pitfalls of being a chair too?

@TheFireGuy It takes a bit of time---not much if you keep on top of things and the other chairs are responsive to your requests.  When I was a publications chair, it probably took 20 - 30 hours total spread over a 9-month period.  You also have to make sure to be organized and deal with things ahead of deadlines, or else you could make a lot of trouble for the conference and get a lot of people mad at you.  If you can be organized and responsible, though, it's a great opportunity: it's often used as a "starter" position for trying people out before giving them more critical responsibilities.

@jakebeal can you consider my additional question. And maybe integrate your comment to your original answer

@KristofTak Overall, it's a strong benefit if a) you want to be part of that community and b) you do an OK job.

I can not speak of myself, but my advisor gets similar offers (not for IEEE conferences, he is in a different field). Last year we organized a conference in my University (US) and was somehow involved (replying to inquires and sending reminding emails). My answer is based on what my advisor has shared with us (his students) and what I have noticed before/during/after the conference.

He always complains about not being able to find a good publisher (cheap/er and on time)
The time he spends on organizing and collecting reviewed/finalized and "formatted" manuscripts from authors/reviewers of multiple tracks.
What he complains the most about is "poor/lack of communication" especially for international conferences where majority of participants are from outside the States. As you can tell, this is mainly related to time zone difference, and English is the not the main language.

To be honest, I do not know if there is any legal or financial-related or other aspects.