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I discovered a new analytical integral. How should I present this knowledge?
During my research in theoretical physics I encountered a problem that required integrating a space of functions that I don't think has ever been done before. I discovered that these integrals are analytic and can be represented by a linear combination of elliptic and non-elliptic functions which I believe is a rather non-trivial result.
I think this research, while rather esoteric, is nonetheless important enough that the world should know. In my paper this result is buried beneath other more physics-oriented results. My question is this: how should I present this pure-mathematical knowledge to the world? Is there a journal that this kind of result would be suitable for or some mathematical database of known analytical integrals? Not being a pure mathematician I am unfamiliar with the correct protocol.
Thank you!
Edit: After discussing with a pure mathematician I decided to have another look thought Gradshteyn & Ryzhik and I think the result I obtained is probably just a linear combination of known integrals, albeit in a hidden form.

I guess maybe you could contact researchers at your institute doing math research and consult them ? If it is solid perhaps it is publishable quite quickly and could then be referenced in your other paper ?

You actually have three choices: physics, pure math, and applied math. It might be useful in any of those domains.
But there are two questions to ask, and they are related.

In which domain is this result most useful?
How is it connected to other things within each of those domains?

A pure mathematician will find the result most interesting if you have strong connections. A physicist or applied mathematician will find it most interesting if it is useful outside its original application.
That's not to say, of course, that any of them would find it uninteresting. But they are all looking for things that can be used to extend their own work.
So, I would try to figure out where it fits most naturally and write it up accordingly, focusing on either the connections or the usefulness. Then send it to any good journal in that domain and listen to the feedback you get. Reviewers may agree that you have chosen correctly or not.

Please don't take this personally and keep in mind that your description is vague enough that I have to extrapolate some details and might go off in the wrong direction.
But to be blunt, I disagree that it is non-trivial. From the viewpoint of research mathematics, taken on its own, being able to integrate a certain class of functions isn't interesting in any way, especially if as you say it turns out to just be a linear combination of known results. In fact I could out dozens of such classes using the reverse process of just differentiating random terms and then reversing the calculation. So even if you would find a journal to publish this in, no one would read it.
What matters is context. Mathematicians are generally interested in the greater whole. Two possibilities come to mind in this context, but I fear neither of them is true here.

The proof uses interesting and novel techniques which ideally can be used in lots of different problems. Keep in mind though that novel in this context will not mean a tricky looking substitution (that's 18th century stuff), but some application of deeper theorems or other tricks usually from an entirely different area of mathematics. As a rule of thumb, if your proof is short (i.e. less than say 10 pages) and not heavily relying on citations from somewhere else, this is unlikely.
The class of integrals is in itself interesting. This usually means that it occurs in a lot of completely different places, which would indicate that those places have something in common that has not been explored yet. But even in this context, the solution of the integrals would not be the important part, but rather an analysis of the fact that these integrals seem to occur everywhere.

As a final remark, don't be discouraged, physicists and mathematicians just think differently and as a result have different concepts of what is interesting. I've seen the converse happen as well, where I was able to prove something about a physical problem that looked interesting to me but where the physicists I talked to did not see the point.
If you still want to continue with this, the options I see is to either just post your integral on math.stackexchange to see if someone else has seen something similar or if you want to publish your physics-result anyway, just mention your integrals in the abstract and cross-list the arxiv pre-print to math.CA (which I think should be the most fitting category).


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Mathematical manuscript flaws between major revision and reject
For mathematical manuscripts, what makes the editor opt for a rejection rather than major revisions and vice-versa?
Usually, the editor determines the gravity of the mistakes within the manuscript. If they can be corrected in time, the authors are given the chance to revise and resubmit (major revision). But, if the mistakes can't be corrected in time. Then, a rejection decision is made.
The issue is that in the mathematical field, it is usually hard to determine whether the manuscript can be corrected in time or if the mistakes made are unfixable. Indeed, one can try a slightly different approach and fix the "grave" mistake in a short period of time. So, my question is what do editors rely on to decide that a mathematical mistake in unfixable no matter what and doesn't deserve a chance for a major revision.

Time to correct issues is not the only factor in rejections.

I think they rely on the authors and reviewers.  Let's say a reviewer says a proof is flawed.  Then it's up to the authors to admit that the reviewer is correct and thus a new proof is required (if possible).  Otherwise, the authors provide a response to counter the reviewer's assertion.  If a proof is critical and cannot be corrected, then the authors will withdraw the manuscript. Otherwise, it's up to reviewers to check the responses or revised proof provided by the authors.

For journal publication, time is of little importance other than for special issues. For conferences, time is of the essence. But if a paper isn't completed for the next issue or so, there is always the issue after that.
The main reasons for rejection are:

Not consistent with the journal's policies or focus.

Not sufficiently novel/interesting to publish (here). Or, these results are known already.

Probably not fixable at all. Serious and fundamental issues.

A few others, I'd guess.

Rather than a direct answer to the question, the following is more of a frame challenge. I think the assumption in the question about why a mathematical manuscript can be rejected ingores a number of very relevant reasons.
First of all:

The editor might come to the conclusion that the results or techniques in the manuscript are not sufficiently innovative to warrant publication in the journal to which the manuscript was submitted.

On a similar note, the editor might consider the topic of the manuscript to be not sufficiently "interesting" (however the editor interprets this word) to warrant publication in this specific journal.

The above two cases will often result in desk rejection of the manuscript rather than peer review. It might, however, still be likely that the manuscript can be published in a different venue.
If, however, the manuscript makes its way to peer review, then the reviewer(s) will typically be asked to recommend whether the paper should be accepted, or revised, or rejected. The final decision will, of course, still be within the discretion of the editor, but in my experience, editors will often follow this recommendation.
Now, there are many potential reasons why the reviewer(s) might recommend rejection, even if they do not find an unsalvageable mistake in it:

They could find that the results are not sufficiently "substantial", i.e. they might be more or less clear to experts in this particular field.

The results and proofs might be written in a very sloppy way, which makes it extremely difficult to even determine if they are correct.

The writing of the paper might just be outright bad, thus making it a real burden to even read the paper.

It might turn out that the authors are completely unaware of large parts of the relevant literature.

The last three points might, in principle, be fixable, assuming that the authors take them seriously and put sufficient effort into it. However, this does not imply that the reviewers were necessarily obliged to recommend a revision of the paper instead of a rejection in such a case. A good reason to actually suggest rejection in some of these cases if the following experience that I made quite often when got the first requests to review papers:
The manuscript suffered from several of the issues mentioned above; I wrote a very lengthy report where I pointed out in detail all the problems that I encountered and suggested a major revision of the manuscript. The authors apperently took this as an encouragement that there paper were "close to acceptance", and instead of thoroughly improving the manuscript, the tried a "minimally invasive" approach to superficially deal with the issues I had raised, but did not make a real effort to substantially improve the paper - leading thus to yet another long report in the second round of review.
After I had become more experienced and already used to this pattern, I changed my recommendation practice. If a paper exhibits too many issues of the types mentioned above, I will typically point out several of them, include some general recommendation to the authors how they should improve their paper if they plan to submit it elsewhere, and recommend to reject the paper.
In such a case, recommendation for rejection (rather than for a major revision) clearly signals to the authors that, from my perspective, that paper is not close to being publishable - so much more work is needed to improve it than would be the case during a "major revision".
For the majority of papers which I, as a reviewer, recommend to reject, the reason for my recommendation is actually this "not close to being publishable" issue rather than non-fixable mathematical errors.
TL;DR: Apart from mathematical errors that cannot be fixed (or cannot be fixed within a reasonable time frame), there are many more potential reasons why a math paper can be rejected by the editor or recommended for rejection by the reviewer(s).

Journals do not accept all submitted papers which are correct.  I find this a bit silly, but they continue to produce a fixed number of pages per year, and are trying to put the "best" articles they can manage in that number of pages.  So, in general, editors will ask for a revision if they think that it is likely that the paper will be accepted after the revision, and will reject if they think it is not likely.

Why do you say "silly"? And, editors don't do this on their own. They use the advice of reviewers in almost all cases.

@Buffy The silly part is the restriction on the number of pages.  There's plenty of room on the internet for as many articles as they want to accept.  I don't understand your point about reviewers; I agree, they will either ask for a revision or reject (usually) with a report in hand and using that to inform their decision.

Page limits lead to better, tighter, writing. Ask a writing professor. Imagine the workload on reviewers without page limits. Imagine the workload on reviewers if journals would accept an unlimited number of articles and/or pages. And even web hosting has costs, not just in space but, more importantly, in maintenance. A higher standard than "correctness" is appropriate, actually.

@Buffy I feel like you are reading a huge number of things into this that I didn't say; you're arguing with a strawman.  I was just trying to explain the fact of page limits to the OP, and made an off-hand side comment, not a detailed description of my plan for fixing journals.

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Peer-review duration and journal quartiles
Does the journal's quartile have anything to do with the peer-review duration?
While reading papers in my discipline, which is Mathematics, I found out that often Q1 ranked journals take about a year, Q2 about half a year. While Q3 and Q4 journals take about three months.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115120/how-is-the-scimago-journal-ranking-q1-q4-defined

I would say, to some extent it is true. For example, top mathematics journals like Annals of Math., American Journals, Duke math journals, Invent math etc all belongs to quartile Q1 and all takes sufficient time to check article before giving nod to pass the acceptance

No. Review time is more a function of how active the editorial board are and how complex the paper is than it is of the journal's impact.

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Does adding a co-author with a high citation record in a paper have an impact on the peer-review process?
While going through some papers in my research area. I have noticed the presence of an author X with a high citation record (+3000), on several research papers. Digging deeper, I have discovered that, in addition to papers in my research area, X has published other papers dealing with problems in applied mathematics, physics and computer science. Moreover, most of these papers have spent two months in the peer-review process, which is rare when it comes to fields such as pure and applied mathematics.
As it turns out, one of my former colleagues was a co-author on one of the papers. After asking him about X, expressing being impressed on how a researcher can master different fields at the same time, he informed me that X rarely does any contribution in the papers that they're co-author in and that the other co-authors basically add him to increase the chance of the paper being accepted in the highest-reputed journals and shorten the period of the peer-review process, basically since X is known within the scientific community and has many Editor in Chiefs as colleagues. Furthermore, he told me his personal experience of one of his papers being rejected by a reputed journal without giving any feedbacks on the reasons of rejection. Later on, after adding X to the list of co-authors and submitting the paper to the same journal, it was accepted.
This raises the following question in my mind:
Does adding a researcher with a high citation record and influence affect the peer-review process (acceptance, period of peer-review, etc.)?
Remark: Note that I'm note questioning the validity of the results of the papers co-authored by X, but rather the possible influence they might have on the editors, which may affect the peer-review process.

Something seems fishy here. "...after adding X to the list of co-authors...". Was X added with no input? Were they added without permission? Should Erdös be added to every math paper?

If the peer review process is double blind, adding or not adding an author shouldn't have any impact at all on the review process.

@Sursula-they- Double blind review is uncommon outside of a couple fields.

@Buffy, X was aware of his addition to the list of authors.

It certainly works the other way round.  I once had a paper rejected because of a criticism that was demonstrably wrong, and the editors response to my refutation was that they sided with the reviewer because they were very eminent.  These sorts of things shouldn't affect peer-review, but it is inevitable that they will because we are only human.

@DikranMarsupial I kind of disagree: they happen because we are human but some humans think extremely high of themselves and do these things because they think they are less human than the others. Sometime they even says about themselves they are rational and without bias.

Some of these prolific authors are simply quality checker.  They point out mistakes that would kill a paper.   Hence, if a paper passes their checks, then it will likely be of 'good' quality. In my experience, at least in my areas, many authors have no idea how to write high quality papers.  So these authors are valuable for that reason.   Note, you may argue they shouldn't be a co-author -- that's a different discussion.

@EarlGray being unaware of your cognitive biases does not mean you think highly of yourself.  "and do these things because they think they are less human than the others. "  I don't understand this point.  One of the things that makes us human is the ability to override our cognitive biases to some extent (but not without effort) and achieve a degree of rationality.  This if anything is being more human, rather than less.

Even if the reviewers themselves are not influenced, it can certainly influence the editor, making them find reviewers more diligently, finding reviewers that are usually quicker to deliver a review and/or are known to be less inclined to finding issues in papers, "accidentally" giving the reviewers a positive a priori, following up with the reviewers more often, rejecting rejections... The "co-author" may also influence the review process by letting people in the field who may be chosen to review know about the paper beforehand...

@jcaron, I totally agree, especially with your last point and the sad thing is, there is no way to stop such unethical acts...

@DikranMarsupial If it's demonstrably wrong, then demonstrate it.

@candied_orange I did, that is the point (it was to do with the computational complexity of an algorithm, which was evident when the algorithm was presented as a series of nested loops with scalar maths in the inner loop).  The ironic thing was that it was borrowing an idea (and presented as such) from another branch of stats where the algorithm was already known for its low computational complexity.  However the editor still sided with the reviewer.

Adding an author solely to impact peer review and not because they contributed authorship to a paper is unethical.
However, yes, reviewers seem likely to be biased by names (and institutions) on a paper. Some references:
Okike, K., Hug, K. T., Kocher, M. S., & Leopold, S. S. (2016). Single-blind vs double-blind peer review in the setting of author prestige. Jama, 316(12), 1315-1316.
Tomkins, A., Zhang, M., & Heavlin, W. D. (2017). Reviewer bias in single-versus double-blind peer review. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12708-12713.

Agree with this comment, I would add that I think it unlikely that the additional author in question provided zero input — hopefully they, at minimum, reviewed it and perhaps asked for an edit or two where they felt it was appropriate prior to putting their name on it.

@Greenstick Sure, though there have also been cases where additional authors were added that actually had zero connection to the other authors and had never seen the paper (not that this pertains to the individual OP refers to). Importantly, though, reviewing a paper and asking for an edit or two is not sufficient grounds for authorship. An acknowledgement in the form "the authors thank X for helpful comments on a draft of the manuscript" would be fine.

There has even been at least one "fun" case where an additional famous author was added without any knowledge of the paper, and then the actual authors asked to remove the famous name during revision, apparently all to avoid desk rejection. https://retractionwatch.com/2016/11/28/new-way-fake-authorship-submit-prominent-name-say-mistake/

@BryanKrause Yes, I’ve heard the term “gift authorship” to describe some of these cases. And agreed w.r.t. reviewing and edits, though I had in mind the notion that these edits were sufficient to rise to the degree of a meaningful intellectual contribution, not just a “reference this” or “re-word that” kind of edit.


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Is it normal to reject a paper due to a large amount of ambiguity and lexical errors instead of recommending a major revision?
I'm writing a report regarding a paper in mathematics, which I have spent three months reviewing. During this period, I have tried to understand the ideas presented by the authors, but in vain.
The format of the paper and the length of the proofs are making it hard, even to an experienced reader, to understand what the authors are trying to prove. In addition, there are some lexical mistakes overall throughout the paper.
Now, while the question addressed in the paper is novel. All the above mentioned problems have pushed me to opt for a rejection. But then, I'm hesitating and thinking about recommending a major revision instead, given that as I mentioned, the idea of the paper is novel.
So, is it normal to recommend a rejection solely based on the problems that I have mentioned or  should one opt for a major revision instead?

Would the edits you have in mind to make it much more readable be so substantial to the point of effectively being a new paper? If so, I think a rejection would be okay. A rejection is not necessarily a permanent no. A paper can be rejected with invitation to resubmit after issues are addressed (might need communication with the editor on this point). Part of being a good paper is communicating the ideas in a clear manner. You shouldn't feel compelled to accept a paper just because it addresses something novel if it would be incomprehensible to others in the field.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/17131/17254

You say you've tried in vain to understand the ideas, but you also say the idea is novel. Are you confident that, if the ideas were made clear, they would still be novel?

@AndreasBlass, what I mean by the idea is novel, is that the problem the authors have worked on is novel, but the ideas used to establish the proofs are hard to understand, due to the length of the proof as well as a large amount of ambiguity.

We should all be familiar with proof by illegibility - this is the LaTeX version, I presume.

My experience: 1. The authors are good but their english is bad. Then recommend using a language service. 2. The authors are not good and their reasoning is bad. They usually make big claims that turn out to be either known, trivial or unsubstantiated.

A relevant quote from the world of computing: “We’ve found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway).”

It probably doesn't matter much which box you tick as long as it comes with an explanation about your hesitation. The editor will be the one taking the decision anyway.

My understanding (which I'm not sure is universal) is that a recommendation of major revision should indicate that you have high confidence that the authors can make the necessary changes (and in particular the necessary changes are possible!) for the paper to be accepted.
Given that you don't know if the paper contains a true theorem, I think this paper does not meet that threshold.

"Given that you don't know if the paper contains a true theorem" --incompetency of a reviewer cannot be a reason for rejection. I am not saying this is the case, but it is a possibility.

@yarchik: You take your argument to the end and you have the situation of the ABC conjecture, where many experts claim there is a significant gap in Mochizuki's claimed proof and Mochizuki claims all these experts are incompetent.

It would seem a well written paper would at least let the reader know in an obvious way that it contained a theorem, and its proof.

@yarchik: Communication is a two-way street.  If the reviewers can't understand the paper, neither will its target audience.

In a case like this where you after a lot of effort cannot make out the contribution of the paper, a "reject with the possibility of a resubmit" is in order. My reason is that by returning "major revision", you are indicating that the contribution has sufficient value for publication (eventually and after lots of changes have been made). But what I understand from your write-up is that you cannot make out the contribution.

I found "reject with the possibility of a resubmit" amusing. I always felt it is obnoxious from the editor to give that message, something like "look, your paper is bad, but I am so noble-minded that I will allow you to resubmit it at a later date" ... so much against the idea of peer-review that I never resubmitted (so it may be a good strategy, according to your goals, I don't know :D ).
Sometimes it is better to call crap for what it is, crap: if it is not a worthwhile contribution, better to give a rejection as a signal to restart from scratch, without giving "hope" to the authors.

@EarlGrey: When the editor judges that a submission is crap, then yes, they shouldn’t give the authors false hope.  But as this answer illustrates, there are plenty of situations where a paper can’t be judged acceptable now, but isn’t necessarily crap either — it has some chance of becoming acceptable after revision — and “reject-and-resubmit” is for those cases.

@PLL I still think that if you see the diamond of the interesting idea sparkling in the crap paper, then it is your duty to do the maieutic thing of suggesting major revision, and showing where the major corrections have to be done. But I am an optimist ;)

@EarlGrey: Absolutely — if I can see a diamond, I’ll say so, and recommend major revision.  And if I can see it’s just crap, I recommend rejection.  But if I can’t tell whether there’s a diamond in there or not (because of bad writing or similar), that’s when I think revise-and-resubmit can be appropriate.

I assumed that the paper was written by an inexperienced author and that would induce me to give some lee-way as a referee.  One of the most difficult things to learn as an author is that what is obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to the reader and that notation I learned is not necessarily agreed upon short-hand.  A reject with possibility of resubmission is a clear message: "We cannot understand your paper to make a judgment on it". It is of course to be a very rare thing to do. In this case, the questioner apparently tried and failed to understand the paper.

Let me add another angle that may be considered harsh and cynical.
Papers should be readable when they are submitted; ensuring this takes some effort and time, and the authors should invest it.  This author did a disservice to the editor and the referees by submitting a paper in such a bad shape. They are wasting everyone's time. A rejection "punishes" them and gives them a negative game-theoretical outcome for this. Condoning this behavior with a major revision encourages them to do the same again and again.
Not setting incentives to discourage this behavior is harmful to the community.

Even if the paper has been prepared in good faith (and the outcome is still the bad shape depicted here), a well justified rejection will be a good thing for the future (for the authors papers and for their reviewers), I agree.

That happened to me before. My suggestion is to give a major revision stating paper is incomprehensible in this state and requires major rewriting before it can be reviewed properly. I stated no other explanation in my case and that was good enough for the editor and authors. The paper was in a much better state in the next revision. If a paper is salvagable and contains novelty and/or results/experiments that can be of use to someone, it will be a disservice to the authors and the community to reject it outright.

My experience is not in Mathematics and therefore not completely relevant, but I had an editor tell me that after asking for two major revisions, it was impossible for the editor to reject the paper.  I am glad it worked out in your case.

I got a paper reject after two revisions as they were insistent on bad/cheaty experimental practices even though method was acceptable.

In the given situation the most important thing for me would be to ask myself whether I believe that what the authors did there is not only original but ultimately correct, and that things can be repaired so that this becomes clear.
If a paper is incomprehensible and it's therefore not clear whether the claims are correct, this is a good enough reason for a rejection. If a paper is badly written and hard to understand, but ultimately the main results of the paper are in all likelihood correct and worthwhile (at the level of the journal in question), I'd ask for a revision.
An additional consideration is whether the writing of the authors disqualifies them sufficiently that you don't believe they are able to make the paper publishable without an unacceptable amount of editor and reviewer help even if results are potentially worthwhile. That may merit a rejection as well (I have seen obvious inability to handle mathematical formalism correctly and lack of understanding of what constitutes a valid proof in several papers even if the ideas behind them were good), but that'd be a subjective call depending on how sure you are.

What is the journal you are reviewing for? Is it for the practitioner on the topic or for a broader audience?
If you think the proof will benefit from discussion with the practitioners, suggest major revision and give already a forecast "if the form will not improve substantially, both in lexicon and in clarity of exposed proof, I suggest rejection in the next revision".
If you think the idea is really novel, then go for rejection and suggest to improve a lot the manuscript and then submit it to a higher impact (pick whatever metrics you like) journal.
The editor will not like this review suggestion, but who cares.


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Extending the PhD Project into Post-Doc
I am an early career researcher about to finish my PhD in six months or so. My area ispolitical science, and I study a very interesting conjunction of a few research areas. I found a good post-doc position to apply to, and they are asking for a post-doc research project proposal. I want to extend my PhD research to the post-doc. Let's say I am working on centre-right parties, and now I want to include far-right parties, more cases, etc.
Is "extending" your own research a bad idea? Should I find a new focus?
Also, maybe most importantly, if I can extend it, can I refer to my previous research? As in, "In my doctoral project, I did this and that, researching and analysing these cases, now I want to expand this to a larger perspective", and so on.

Couple of things here (even though I am from a different field, so customs may vary):

What are your long-term goals? Do you plan to stay in academia for the long run (or hope/want to)? In this case, people will often advise you to switch topics so you can show that you're not a one trick pony - but also because it helps you to have a perspective from different fields so you can innovate. This is not a make it or break it issue, and the switch also doesn't necessarily need to be very big or occur during the first postdoc after your PhD, but it is something to take into account.

If there is a position to apply for maybe the hosting group/institute also has an idea about the topic - can you first reach out informally to the contact person listed to gauge if you with your background would be a fit? This may help and inform how you approach the project proposal (or decide if it even would be worth it to apply).

Well, first answer is yes. The second, it does seem well fitting - I do have experience on things that they want, even beneficial skill they are looking for, also language, etc.
But I think I get the gist. I want to keep utilising similar methods and "build on" my previous research with a greater focus. For example, my focus was environmental policies of centre-right parties, now focusing on right-wing parties with EU and environment, etc. As far as I understand that should take me beyond "one trick pony" aspect?

Not quite an answer, but an anecdote that might be helpful. Mathematician Bob Solovay once told me  he thought the most important piece of research in your career was the first one after your dissertation. In his case he moved from algebraic topology to mathematical logic.
That suggests that if you decide to continue the work of your dissertation, try to make sure you do more than just write another chapter.


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Alternative for illegal downloading books
There are books with scientific content, very broadly cited in bibliography that haven't been printed by any publisher for decades (as far as I am aware). Plus hardly any copies have ever reached my country. They are now very hard to find and very expensive, though necessary for my studying (see Computational Complexity, Papadimitriou or Computers and Intractability of Garey and Johnson).
I can find some of them in my school's library (one copy most of the time) but I can only borrow them for 20 days (no more than that in a row). I have tried to reach publishers in Greece so I could get information on whether they could publish them but never got any answer. I don't like the option of illegal downloading, because it's unethical too, but buying from Amazon is too expensive. I need these books for my studies. Moreover I would like to have them in my personal library. Are all the above the only legal choices I have?

Your university librarian should be able to obtain a copy for you.  That will not help if you want to own the book.

What about this draft of another Computational Complexity pdf book

For what it’s worth, Papdimitriou and Stieglitz has been republished in paperback by Dover within the last 10 years or so.

@mkennedy Yes I am aware of this draft. But in classes of computational complexity we are taught some reductions that are not present in this draft. And I have only found them in the books mentioned above.

@BrianBorchers I don't know if it has all the reductions that Papadimitriou's book has. I will look it up. Thank you very much!

@AnonymousPhysicist I am not quite sure that I understand how my library will obtain the copy. Do you mean reaching the publisher or the author?

For one book at least (Papadimitriou - born in Athens), you might consider writing to the author himself at Berkeley. He might have suggestions for some others, as well. You might even consider pointing out the problem in general and see if he might have ideas for a local solution for you and others at your university.
I once gave several boxes of books to a person who was paying to have them shipped to Kenya where there is a similar issue. Some US academics might have copies of older books. Many retiring academics might be willing to give up parts of their library, as I was. Shipping cost is a problem, however.
Some faculty members even periodically put out a box of books for students to grab. If you can somehow make a connection to them or their universities it is possible something could be worked out.
Some publishers will respond to requests for inexpensive (even free) copies of some books. It needn't be a Greek publisher. And some have subsidiaries that print lower cost versions various places around the world. These are priced more in line with local economies (though still expensive).
Living authors might respond to a request for a pdf with a promise of not passing it on. Their license from a publisher might permit it. Some have been given a few free copies of their work.
Professors in your country who can obtain grant money might (possibly) be able to get funding for books that they can lend or give to students. You and other students might try to work with the university to try to provide a solution. Money is always an issue, of course, but an appeal to a publisher from a university might be possible. And, lobbying to increase library funding is worth the effort.
Used copies in general are available, though, again, shipping costs are high.
Even in the US, the cost of books is a burden to students. This is partly due to the small market for advanced books that are expensive to produce.

Note that none of the above are especially likely to succeed. It is a problem throughout the world.

It looks like he moved to Columbia in 2017.

Thank you for all the options! Some of them would have never crossed my mind! I will try them one-by-one. Though I am afraid that it might take more than one semester to finally get even a rejecting answer. So I am hoping for a solution for younger graduates. Grant money sadly is not an option. Here universities are public and have great issues even for office supplies (sponges, chalk, markers). Plus graduate students aren't entitled to free books and I am alone in this effort. Even teachers advise us to download the free pdf for these books.

"I don't like the option of illegal downloading, because it's unethical..."

At the risk of being condemned, I shall nevertheless say this: not everything illegal is unethical.  Knowledge belongs to mankind.  This is the reason why my two coauthors and I have no objection against pirate copies of our highly cited 900-page monograph being present on the internet.  On at least one occasion, we could have requested a certain website to remove the copy, but we chose not to.  Spread of knowledge is more important than copyright. Call me names.

Are you the copyright holder, or did you yield that?

@Buffy We never yield it.

If you are the copyright holder and make no objection to free distribution then you are, in effect, giving a, perhaps unannounced, license to all for the work. That is actually commendable. Your publisher might not agree if they have unmet expenses, but that is a private matter between you.

authors: Νικολέτα Σεβαστού


text:
Best methods to send citations to co-reviewers
I am currently conducting a systematic review and have finalised my initial extraction. I need to send a list of citations to my co-reviewers so that they can screen the relevant citations.
Does anyone here have any suggestions of the best ways to export citations so that others can conveniently review them, and will also facilitate calculating inter-rater reliability? I was thinking of using excel, but I have no experience here. I am using Mendeley as my citation manager, if this is relevant.

Are your co-reviewers using citation manager software as well? You should be able to share a curated list between different types of citation software. For example, Zotero accepts imports from Mendeley, and I would expect the rest of the most popular citation managers to be able to inter-operate in a similar fashion.

That could work, I was thinking excel could be useful as it would be simple to calculate inter-rater reliability (i.e. a column for each reviewer's verdict on accept or not, which could then be easily compared), as well as being a general reference document for all citations. How have you found it going directly through reference managers? Thanks for your response :)

You can export from most citation managers to .csv, which can then be converted to Excel. So if you think the next stage of your work would be easier in Excel it should be simple enough to switch from Mendeley.

There's lots of software dedicated to this use case: letting multiple reviewers work on a single systematic review. I don't have much personal experience with such software, but Rayyan might be suitable for your situation: it offers a generous free version with very capable features.
For more options, I refer you to this list copied from University College London:
<start quote>
Software for systematic reviews
A range of software is available for systematic reviews, especially to support screening and data extraction but also for other stages of the process. Specialist systematic review software may also contain functions for machine learning, data-analysis, visualization, and reporting tools. It is also possible to use reference management software or Excel for some of the stages of reviewing.

EPPI-Reviewer

Developed within the EPPI-Centre, at UCL Institute of Education. While there is a cost to use, there is a reduced fee for single-use reviews (used by students or researchers on small budgets), compared with the costs for a review that can have more than one user. The fees go towards the cost of infrastructure, development, and support of the software. There is also a free trial available.

EPPI-Mapper

Tool for visualizing ‘maps’ of research evidence.

Rayyan

Rayyan is freely available software that can be used for the screening process and has other features such as text mining tools.

Covidence

Covidence has a free trial with a limited number of records and reviewers and then requires an annual subscription. Can be used for screening and to support data extraction.

Abstrackr

Free open source screening software created by Brown University.

Systematic review toolbox

A comprehensive list of software to support systematic reviews at a variety of stages. You can also search by the stage of review (e.g., protocol) to find appropriate software.

RevMan

Software from the Cochrane Collaboration. RevMan Web facilitates the creation of meta-analyses, forest plots, risk-of-bias tables, and other systematic review elements. Free to authors working on Cochrane Reviews; otherwise, a subscription is required.

<end quote>

DOI: https://www.doi.org/
DOI is the most convenient way to share citations.  It retrieves documents very quickly using only a web browser.  No user account, special software, or fee is required.
It does not help you perform ratings or determine inter-rater reliability.  You should use statistical software for that.


text:
What should I do if I cannot understand a peer reviewer's comment?
I have submitted a paper to a journal in the field of computer science. My paper was accepted with major revisions. However, a reviewer asked : " Give more  mathematical treatment of the proposed algorithm; What are its pros ? ; Author must explain "  .
I do not understand what they mean with mathematical treatment. Should I analyze my proposed system mathematically ? Can you please help me understand the reviewer’s comment?

What does your advisor think it means?

The title and body of your question don't match, the former is a generalized question (what should I do when I don't understand a reviewers comment?) that could (once successfully answered) yield interesting insight for other with the same problem. The latter is very personal (How should I interpret a specific remark that I do not understand) and is difficult to answer here. I am thus voting to close.

possible duplicate / general advice: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/177505/understanding-reviewers-comments-on-research-paper

We cannot say exactly what is needed in your case without seeing the algorithm and the context. It might mean that you should prove its asymptotic speed or memory use using big O notation, and compare to a different algorithm.

I would mention it now to the editor and ask if the reviewer can give a bit more guidance. I'd do this concurrently with starting on the major corrections, just to save time. If you wait for another submission to bring it up then it will delay things (at best). It seems like a mistake to put it off and any answer can guide your revisions.
It is likely, however, that the reviewer is asking about theoretical efficiency of the algorithm or some proof of correctness in a few cases. You might even phrase your inquiry with one of these suggestions or anything else you can think of.

The reviewer should have been more clear. Rather than guess, you should contact the editor right away, and request a clarification.
However if I had proposed a new algorithm and received this suggestion, then I would  try to compare, for the new algorithm and for commonly used algorithms, statistics such as the worst-case run time, expected run time, memory requrements, how well it parallelizes.
An example of a simple undergraduate book showing how this can be done: Thomas H.Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford  Stein. Introduction to Algorithms. Chapter II "Sorting and Order Statistics". It shows that for Quicksort,  the worst-case running time is Θ(n²), while the average-case/expected
running time is Θ(n log n). For some new sort algorithm, making up the staistics, the proponent might say than the average time is only Θ(n), a pro, while the worse case time is Θ(n³), a con, compared to Quicksort.
I don't know whether your paper already has this analysis & comparisons. Perhaps the reviewer meant something else, such as a mathematical proof that your algorithm actually works. You need to ask the editor.

If the paper is accepted with major corrections, I would do the possible corrections and let the referee knows that we could not understand the requirements in the given point by the referees.

Think you mmarmelomartelo. Should i mention to this in my response or just sending a letter to editor telling them that we didn't understand the following comment

Why would you wait and then submit a revision known to be inadequate along with the issue?

Sorry, my suggestion is to say in your reply to the referee that you didn't fully understand the question and NOT the editor. A direct approach to the editor would be offensive in my opinion


text:
Is there any free alternative to Mendeley desktop app on Windows?
I have been using Mendeley for a very long time now. I use it for organizing and reading articles. I just noticed that it keeps removing files randomly from the folders and groups. I don't know the exact reason for this. I wonder if there is an alternative to the Mendeley desktop client for Windows.

While still using your mendeley account and database? Or are you asking for free reference managers in general? There are plenty.

Zotero is a free (and open source!) alternative: https://www.zotero.org/
There is a plenty of other tools (just google 'citation managers'), but I believe that Zotero's open source nature renders it preferable to all alternatives - including Mendeley, which belongs to the large commercial publisher Elsevier.

Please note that Mendeley online storage allows up to 2GB for free users, while Zotero only allows 300MB for free users. Unlimited storage will cost you 10 $/month for Zotero and 13,75 $/month for Mendeley (if you choose the annual subscription)

You can also use your own pre-existing cloud storage solution to store your Zotero PDFs (although you have to be a little bit careful setting it up: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/55909/sync-with-onedrive-dropbox-and-other-cloud-storage-services )

@BenBolker wow. this is amazing. thank you for sharing

Can we use Zotero without using any link to cloud storage?

@alper Yes. I use the desktop version without the cloud at work


text:
Is it ever alright to add a subtitle to a title shortened by publication when citing?
Let's assume that a paper was submitted under the "Extremely long and necessary title that explains you are studying pieces of Class A, Class B and Class C of this Bigger (and much more frequently searched) Topic".
This, of course, had to be shortened for publication and now is published and cited under the title:
"Extremely long and necessary title that explains you are studying pieces of Class A, Class B and Class C"
Still correct but likely to fly under the radar of many researchers. So, is it ever OK in a citation (APA or in general) to add the [additional subtitles] when displaying the citation like below? Is it even ethical to adjust the title post publication?
"Extremely long and necessary title that explains you are studying pieces of Class A, Class B and Class C [of this Bigger (and much more frequently searched) Topic]"
I'm a new academic and I appreciate any thoughts.

I'd stick with the published title.  You definitely shouldn't edit it without indicating that you are doing so, for example with square brackets, and I'd avoid that too.  I've never seen anyone do it.  If you do edit the title, then the best case scenario is that you'll come across as a little eccentric, and you may confuse or irritate readers.  (They may wonder whether you are referring to a slightly different version of the paper than the one they have, for example a longer preprint or working paper that was shortened for publication.  Then they may waste time looking for it, or decide you are being sloppy about your citations.)  It may also throw off citation counts, which is not in your interests.  Incidentally, I assume you are talking about a previous paper of yours - you certainly shouldn't edit someone else's title.
Instead of editing the title, you can convey this information in the body of your paper via your citation.  For example, you could write "For background on Classes A, B and C and how they fit into Bigger Topic, see Paper X."  If you give the reader enough information, then the shortened title really won't matter.

Definitely my paper. :) Good answer and it makes a lot of sense.  I'm going to leave the question open to encourage others to answer.

Rob: Welcome to SE. However, please be careful in your terminology: you mean "not accept this answer yet," not "leave the question open." A closed question is a question judged unsuitable for SE. Your question clearly is not!

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


text:
Technical documents to publish or not
What can we do with the technical documentation we develop during our career?
Is it worth to publish? If so, where?
I am considering those lines of code that we took time to write and that we usually only use in the first steps of our own publications, that we never actually added to the publication .. but saves all our colleagues (everyone one asks you to adjust your code to their needs...).
Is this a good way to guarantee that our colleagues give credit to the work previously developed by us?

Are you speaking about lines of programming code or English text? is the final product that you are publishing a paper or some sort of software? Please explain, I can't get it from your question.

programmin code. the final product would be a technical document on ho wto use the code and how to modify it to adapt to your research.

It depends on whether the software is private or not. If it is public, you can either:

add your name to the AUTHORS file (you have one, right?).
ship the manual with the code.
slap a technical report number onto it, so that people will find it easier to cite.
write up a detailed description of what the software does, and publish it in a journal that publishes algorithms --- there are many of them.

If the code is a well-kept secret of your research group, not available even for sale, I am afraid there is very little you can do. People won't be interested in documentation of some code they cannot run themselves. You can still do 1--3, but don't expect people to read and cite it.
Your only hope in that situation is that your co-authors are fair and acknowledge you appropriately whenever they use your code and documentation.

Also, if you are allowed to make the code public, you can put it online. GitHub, Bitbucket and Google Code and Sourceforge are obvious possibilties, but there are many others.

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


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Open Source Software and Reproducibility in Computer Science
As a PhD researcher in computer science, my scientific results often take the form of algorithms, which in turn come with implementations. I am convinced that releasing these implementations under an open-source model has various benefits especially for scientific codes, one of which is reproducibility of results. I also believe that "Release Often, Release Early" applies to science, as it opens up the possibility of feedback that ultimately leads to better software and better research.
However, my advisor is concerned with the danger of plagiarism in case the code is released before the respective paper is published, and therefore disagrees with that philosophy. To me it seems like a very theoretical threat since I have never heard of a comparable case of plagiarism. However, we just got a paper rejected in which one major criticism of the reviewer was that it was impossible to reproduce results since the code was not available. My advisor thinks that this is unfair criticism because the conference has not explicitly asked for a release of the source code.
What do you think? Is it sensible to keep implementations secret until the paper is through, or is open-source actually a requirement for reproducible computer science?

(Open source) reference implementations aren't a strict requirement yet, but the faster they become one the better. I don't see how plagiarism is even relevant, as the source code isn't published as text.

@MarcClaesen: Theoretical plagiarism workflow: Take the code from our release, run some experiments with it, claim work as your own, publish first, get credit.

(1) Nobody will know the code well enough to get useful results that fast. (2) You need to know what's going on in the code to write a paper about it. (3) Your own paper should be on arXiv or a technical report, immediately proving you were first. (4) The use of your code should be acknowledged.

Why not publish code and preprint at the same time, then submit?

I don't believe there's a single answer that will be right for all situations.  I suspect this is highly dependent on the specific situation and context, and on the specific benefits for releasing early.  In any case, this sounds like a call for opinion about a broad class of situations, without a lot of context to enable providing an informative answer.

Is it acceptable to put the code listing as an appendix to the paper?

Computer science is a particularly friendly environment for releasing material in advance of publication.  In fact, there are a number of methods for doing so that provide a clear archival time-stamp on your work, including university technical reports, arXiv, and big repository sites like github and bitbucket.  Moreover, unlike many other disciplines, such pre-release almost never impairs your ability to build conference and journal publications on top of your released material.  In fact, you can typically release not just your code, but also your draft paper through the same mechanisms.
If you do such pre-release, you are essentially immune to plagiarism, because anybody who pirates your results will look like a fool with date-stamps marking their guilt for all to see.  It may not stop bottom-feeders from trying, but it will mean that nobody you care about (including reviewers) should take such an attempt seriously.
The only likely problem that you can run into is double-blind reviewing, as discussed in this question.  If that's not a major concern for you, or if you can use one of the mechanisms suggested in that question, then I see no likely downside in computer science publication.
On a side note, however: just because the code is available doesn't mean it's reproducible, as anybody who's spent significant time having a dependency-fight with poorly-document open source projects can attest.

Remember that timestamps are significant in arXiv, but certainly not in Git, where it is trivial to rewrite history a posteriori.

And if the code is hosted in Bitbucket and it can be made private (for free), shared with the reviewers, and then made public after the publication. Or so I think.

@Clément There seem to be ways around that with the added benefits of getting you a DOI for your code. I'm not sure this is the way for a preprint (which may yet evolve), but for the "real" publication one should probably do this.

It should be noted that directly working on a public repository such as on Github automatically makes commit times visible, but can actually give away too much information, as I have also described in another answer. These particular issues can mostly be mitigated by only pushing certain pre-releases to the repository rather than every single commit.

I wish that more papers were rejected for such reasons, that more grant funding agencies required release, and that more publishing venues did so as well. That this is not the case, is a reality we have to live in.
A paper should be, at the very least, good enough that an intrepid reviewer could follow the description through to an implementation of their own that works and can reproduce its results. I have certainly seen this done for one of my own papers where our code was not ever published and another author compared their later algorithm to ours by reimplementing our method. In fact, I asked them to do this as part of the review process using their code for their problem since our two approaches were so similar. It made for a much better paper.
I don't believe that in most cases simply rerunning someone's code on the same inputs tells us much more than the paper does. If you don't believe that someone's implementation does what they says it does, you are essentially accusing them of fabricating their results. If this is your concern as a reviewer, then you should say so. E.g., "The results of this paper are unbelievably good! I have worked through the implications of their algorithm and cannot see how an implementation on a real computer could achieve this level of performance. The authors should provide (at least to this reviewer through the editor) code, inputs, and instructions sufficient to reproduce the results in Table 10." Now, they may tell you and the editor to go pound sand, but the peer review process is where this can be addressed now.
Additionally, there are other reasons to keep the code secret. The authors may in some stage of patenting their software. I think that software patents are wrong-headed, but the fact of the matter is that US law allows federal grant awardees to pursue patents for things they invent under federal grants (with a non-exclusive license for use back to the government). In some circumstances, the authors may wish to pursue a patent on the implementation while describing the methodology and mathematics in the open literature. This can be tricky.

So was the reviewer justified in taking this as one reason for rejection? On the one hand you seem to think so, on the other hand you say that the reviewer should state it more openly if she has doubts about the results.

Being unsure about the truthfulness of results or whether reported performance generalizes to other problems is a very good reason for rejection. Providing code as supplementary material is almost always possible, and pretty much entirely addresses such concerns. I'd be happy if major computer science journals/conferences would require reference implementations.

@cls, I think it's justifiable, but it's also a matter of opinion that's yet unsettled in many scientific communities. There are at least two actors here. If this was the only reason the reviewer gave, and the journal editor accepted it, I'd have some concerns for the editor's behavior, too. At the very least, I would have written a response to the editor offering to share the code (though the editor) with the reviewer (at the least) to help alleviate their concerns. If there were 15 other reasons given for rejection, maybe you have to take your lumps, revise the paper, and submit elsewhere.

Having made a career in open source software, I have two comments:

I've never had a case where someone "scooped" me. My code has often been available in some form or other (on open software repositories) months or years before the paper was finally ready, but nobody ever scooped me on it. On the other hand, a fair share of my collaborators thought that the code I produced was good, do not have the requisite knowledge to work with it themselves, and asked to collaborate with me. All very positive.
I've probably written 10-15 papers for which the source code is available (as open source, well documented, production-ready code). In almost all of these cases, paper reviewers thought that very positive and it helped the paper getting accepted.

This is a great example. Do you have any evidence that a reviewer actually reran anything in one of your articles. I have the feeling that reviewers in PDE simulation sometimes play lip service to reproducibility by wanting to see code, but I haven't ever seen anyone try to actually reproduce anything. You're also a journal editor, so maybe you have some examples?

No, I have no evidence whatsoever that reviewers ever ran any of my codes during review. But that's beside the point -- they thought it was a service to the readers of my papers to make the code available, and that increased the relevance score you always have in the back of your mind as a reviewer.


text:
Affiliation and Conflict Disclosure: Ethnography with Workplace customer’s
I am conducting an ethnographic survey with customers of the company I work for.
I work for an Essential Oil company in the product development corporate department. The company is an MLM, and I obtained customer information during our yearly convention where we announce new products launched, and had one on one conversations and initial consent from the customers to participate.
To protect myself in my paper, how do I disclose that I work for the company, but the study is not sponsored by or representative of the company I work for?
I am trying to get my first ethnographies out there so I can leave this job, and work towards my career in Anthropology.
This study is to understand how people talk about holistic health benefits and beliefs on products, and what the culture of being an independent product sales rep is like without direct and constant support from the company.
I want to know if they feel limited or restricted and more importantly, I want to understand more about where the beliefs of product benefits come from.
So, how do I tell in my informed consent that during the interview/study, I am operating on my own, and not under direction of the company and their info will only be used for this ethnography and nothing I say is representative of the company, and anything discussed will be confidential?

Are you asking what to write in the resulting paper(s) or something else? A bit unclear.

Well, to be truthful this is my first independent paper, not following a school rubric, so I guess I’m also not sure. I feel that I need the people I’m interviewing to understand that the the company is not asking me to do this, and if I talk about hypothetical products it doesn’t mean they are being developed

Where do need to "disclose"?

And then if I were to publish or post the paper, people will know that I am employed by them but am doing it independently so I don’t get automatically discredited for being an employee, and they didn’t sponsor it. Does that help?

Did you receive human subjects approval and/or exemption?

I received verbal approval of 10 participants. I now am getting to write up the informed consent to see if those 10 are still willing to participate

Did the company approve your using their customer list for your own independent research?  If not, then all ethics aside, this is likely to get you fired.

I think what you need to do is to put a paragraph (Disclosure: ...) in the paper you write saying what you say here. You are employed at X, the subjects are customers, the company is not involved in any way and has no control.
Your affiliation is probably just "Independent Researcher" with a permanent email address.
However, there are some issues. You probably need to get approval from an ethics committee since you are using human subjects. Universities provide these to faculty and research organizations do also, but in the US it is an IRB (Institutional Review Board). There are laws in various places requiring pre-approval of research with human subjects. The laws are in place to protect safety and privacy of subjects, even when it is only questionnaires.
I believe that there are other organizations that provide such approval for a fee.
You probably need written waivers from your subjects, not just verbal. But a review committee/board will give proper advice on that, as well as data retention, etc.
Note that in the past there have been some terribly unethical studies, resulting in the current laws and regulations.

Yes, written waivers, in my understanding of current U.S. regs.

That’s helpful! I think I was over thinking how to go about it. I was on the IRB site about the process as well. I was worried about ensuring that the participants understood my employment was not related to this


text:
Reference letter from the university professor rather than thesis guide
For my PhD admission in Europe I need 3 reference letter from my university professor.I also collected 3 reference letters.Among 3 letters one is my masters thesis guide.But my masters thesis guide doesn't have good relation with me because he wants I will do continue my PhD from him. And this professor(thesis guide) doesn't praise me for admission in one university in France that's why admission was cancelled.I have an small trouble.
My question is, is it mandatory to provide project thesis reference letter during PhD form fill up? Or Could I provide another teacher reference who knows me very well as a good student? Could I provide 3 letters from professor who knows me very well as a good student rather than masters thesis guide? Or if thesis guide letter is mandatory how do I recover from this cruel teacher?

"And this professor doesn't praise me for admission in one university in France that's why admission was cancelled." What do you mean, admission was cancelled? Do you simply mean to say that you were not accepted? How do you know that the reason your "admission was cancelled" was because your professor "didn't praise you"?

@AdamPřenosil yes, he said regarding me that I was bad student, I didn't work as he expected. But actually I did the good project. And I had good experience with him. But he is playing game with me.

How do you know what your thesis guide communicated to a French university?  Did he tell you this himself?

@PeteL.Clark one professor X from another institution was ready to send me France but this teacher ask me what's my thesis guide and I provide thesis guide contact details to professor X. But professor X saying your guide saying me your guide doesn't prefer you, you didn't work very well.. Blah.. Blah..

Sorry to hear this has happened to you.
Unfortunately, there is little recourse or protection available. Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons not to provide good recommendations, and in some cases, willing to have you, "a bad student", in their lab, would be legitimately more acceptable for them than putting at stake their reputation.
That said, for the admissions committee your inability to reconcile with your own MSc advisor is certainly a negative trait. I would only resort to that if you could not possible convince your advisor to provide you with a good LoR. If the situation is as you describe and your advisor appeared to be happy throughout your MSc program but now is making an U-turn, you have to communicate clearly that you are not planning nor willing to do a PhD with them. If, instead, they were nagging you to work harder the entire time and you believe that the project has turned out to be good, well, is it what it is, the advisor simply would not write you a good LoR because they do not believe in it.
If you ultimately decide to get LoRs from someone else, that is possible, but the question about your advisor's opinion about you is imminent still. As a measure of damage control here, you could try putting more emphasis on your thesis. Their review of the thesis as submitted to the thesis committee (if this practice is used at your home university) could be supplied as evidence that they do not think as poorly of it as they communicate during admissions, but it is quite a stretch, especially given you do not seem to be a native English speaker and said review would presumably require translation.
All in all,

Try to convince your supervisor to provide you with a more positive LoR. If the entire issue is, indeed, them expecting to make you work in the lab for a few more years as a PhD student, you could just claim it would not be happening.
If (1) is not possible/feasible, do it without providing a letter from your supervisor, but prepare for a lot of struggle. It will be an uphill battle.

My work is praised by another reputed professor who was ready to send me France but this teacher ask me what's my thesis guide and I provide thesis guide contact details to professor. But professor saying your guide saying me your guide doesn't prefer you, you didn't work very well.. Blah.. Blah..

Could I mention regarding my guide's character in motivation letter?

Again, burn the bridges as the absolutely last resort. Academia is a small world, if every time you are denied support you place the blame squarely on someone else you simply won't survive there. Drama happens, some professors do have nasty personalities, but it is usually a relatively well-known thing. Heuristics applied here is simple: your advisor were able to become successful in academia and others managed to work with them just fine, but then a student with nothing to their name shows up and says they are a problem. It is not the student they are going to believe here.

One important question is my advisor give negative recommendation everytime, could I reject everytime?

Talk to your advisor instead of hoping for them to change their behavior without any intervention or other professors not asking for a reference.

Could you apply at your current location and use the acceptance as a counter to any idea that they think you are not qualified?

@GeorgeWhite I already get admitted if I want. But my advisor have been insisting me to do phd from him. And he is  playing game.My thesis was impressed by another reputed professor from different institutions.

@Lodinn my advisor is very greedy person and my all junior who have facing same problem. Your suggested plan doesn't going to work.

I’m suggesting mentioning in your applications that have been formally accepted to stay and to a PhD with same professor. That fact contradicts any suggestion you are a bad student.

@GeorgeWhite you mean in motivation letter, could I write?

Yes that is my suggestion - however I do not have direct experience with this. How is it logical to accept you but also say you are not recommend? The reader should see this contradiction.


text:
Advice for strengthening PhD applications
I'm a recent social sciences master's graduate based in the UK, and I'm interested in making PhD applications next year. I would like to take the year I have available to gain some kind of experience, ideally research experience to strengthen my applications. Do you have any advice on some steps I can take for this? I have been thinking about research assistant positions but there aren't many of them available, especially in the field I am interested in. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Are you financially secure or do you need to work? Are you near a university?

@Buffy I need to work. Luckily I live within commuting distance to a big city with several universities.

One possible option is to try to land a job in, perhaps, the library at a nearby university. My daughter did something like that. It not only gives you access to the library itself, but also to the faculty, if you can work out the hours. Some other position at a university might also be possible.
As you say, you probably can't land a research assistantship, but it is possible to still collaborate with people as an independent researcher and get a start on research. You need access and some time to invest. It is also good to have some ideas for possible research that some faculty member might be interested in. You need too avoid getting exploited, but a cooperative relationship isn't out of the question.

This could work if you already knew a faculty member who you would like to work with and just need the income. Otherwise I don’t think it will help your application much…

@Dawn, but it puts you in a situation in which you can do the work that will help. Being able to validly hang around the coffee room and chat with people in your field is itself a boon, as all grad students know (I hope).

I guess you are imagining some departmental library or coffee shop? My university phased these out years ago but maybe others have not.

Think broadly!
To maximize your potential for finding a position, you can search for any position that has a research component vaguely related to your potential PhD topic. For instance, if your topic is women's labor force participation during recession, you should be very broad and look at positions related to women, to labor force participation, or to recessions. The position could be in a university or more broadly in a nonprofit or similar NGO.
If you can’t find work with a specific research component, you can also look at positions that would give you experience with the population you are interested in.

PhD admissions tutor here! First, you are doing exactly the right thing in looking for more experience. If you are applying for a funded studentship they are very competitive and you need to stand out from the crowd. If you can get a research assistant post in a vaguely relevant area that's great. But I also really like applicants who have a bit of non university experience - consider NGOs, market research companies, local government, civil service, industry. These will give you a different perspective on research and some new skills and contacts. Civil service in particular is often an excellent option if you can get in. Good luck!


text:
Should I include my research interests in my CV? How?
I don't have any publications yet and I never coauthored a paper.  My question is, should I put in my CV the list of publications I have read (publications of other authors, I mean) and list them under "Read publications" or it is meaningless?

After your Educational qualification, mention a section called "Research Interests". It should work. Don't be too specific on the areas.

I do not think it is common nor useful to put publications of others on your CV, because people read a lot - especially in the scientific world - and it therefore at most shows your interests. Therefore, if you want to show what your interests are, you can put it under interests. If you want to show that you have done work around that subject you could mention it as a project.
If you write the CV for a potential PhD position for example, you could cite the papers you have read in your motivation letter explaining about your interest and/or proposed research.


text:
What are the pros and cons of teaching multiple sessions of the same course?
Teaching at least two courses is necessary in my institution.
Because of a very busy schedule and lack of time for doing my other academic duties for the next semester, I am thinking about teaching multiple sessions of the same course (in the same day) for the next semester. The course is the freshman calculus if that matters. The good thing is that the course has many TA's and they grade the exams. In each session (in a big amphi) about 300 students are enrolled.
I taught this course at least 6 or 7 times in the past (only one session) without problem.
I write this to ask what are the pros and cons of teaching multiple sessions of the same course?
I ask this question because I have never taught a same course in multiple sessions.
I found this link
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/teaching-multiple-sections-of-the-same-course/38472
But I would like to ask your opinion about this. Especially your personal experience would be helpful to me.
Sometimes when I teach two courses with some similarities (e.g. some intersection between their topics), at times I get confused, I think I have covered some topics in one of them, but in fact I have not covered it. Fortunately I ask the students about that. But for an identical course I don't know what arrives.
This is only one aspect of my question. Feel free to give your opinion about other pros and cons.

@BenCrowell, not bringing notes to class is ambiguous: it might mean just an outline of topics for the day, or it might mean written-out worked examples. I myself only bring notes as "props" for most lectures, or perhaps, indeed, just a single sheet of paper inside a larger folder enumerating the four or five bullet points for the day, whose filling-out is clear to me...

On the issue of being confused as to what has been covered: I set an ironclad day-by-day schedule in advance. After maybe one or two terms of refinement, I can specify what happens in every hour of class all semester long by memory (appropriate chunking helps). If your memory is that good then you should be able remember a one-page schedule. Otherwise just carry the paper and look at it. Schedule uber alles.

@BenCrowell what i said, was related to the content of that paragraph, I explained why I sometimes forget to remember if I have covered some topics or not. If I take the notes usually it is easier to remember. Anyway I remove that sentence to avoid ambiguity.

One way to learn fine details of a subject with great thoroughness is to teach it a number of times. Twice in one semester may help you accomplish that sooner.

I've done this.  The big con is it can be incredibly boring, but maybe that's just me.  And agreed, what did I say to the one class and not the other?!  The big pro is it can help you refine your materials and teaching methods.  I've had two of the exact same classes taught in the exact same way produce very different results.
Write some things down before you start.  If nothing else this becomes a checklist to get you through the semester.  Goes a long way to keep from getting confused about what you did or didn't cover.

+1 for refining materials.  This is one of the most important ways to hone your own teaching.  If everything is a singleton, then you have no way to even begin to figure out what effects came from you and what came from the students.

The main pro is of course that it cuts your lecture preparation time in half.  Since for many courses lecture preparation is the most time-consuming aspect, this is a very significant time savings. That you don't know this already makes me suspect that your teaching responsibilities are rather light.  At my institution, a full-time instructional faculty would teach four courses per semester (and at some other institutions it would be five).  Even a tenure track faculty member at a nationally ranked liberal arts college will often be teaching three courses at once.  In these circumstances it is common to speak of "preps" -- i.e., the number of distinct courses you're teaching.  So e.g. an institution with a 4-4 teaching load, it might be a policy that an instructor never has more than two preps per semester.
I have taught a lot of freshman calculus myself, and after you get experienced enough the prep time really dwindles.  For instance, if you're going to lecture on integration by parts, you decide that you will introduce the formula by anti-differentiating the product rule, then do a few examples showing various standard techniques, then go back and talk about definite integration, then do a few more examples.  I could give that lecture right now and it would go fine.  It would go better if I thought more carefully, but I think the quality would level off at about 20 minutes of preparation.  You've taught the course enough times that you're probably in a similar situation.  But even 20 minutes a lecture adds up. Also, since freshman calculus is just about as minimally prep-intensive as it gets, teaching any other course would increase your prep time.  And the non-lecture parts are still more efficient if it's two sections of exactly the same course.  Presumably you're writing the exams, and I hope you're writing different exams, but writing two different sets of exams for the same course is still a lot easier than writing exams for two different courses.
As the other answer mentions, you do experience a bit of "Wait, did I say that five minutes ago or 75 minutes ago?" when you teach the same thing twice on the same day.  It can feel a little weird...but it's not a problem.  If discrepancies arise between the two courses, you had better write them down, because they will be very difficult to remember.  You'll always be asking students which section they're in.  And finally: yes, it will certainly be less interesting than teaching two different courses, but it sounds like you have plenty of other things to occupy your interest.
I want to end with some commentary. A calculus lecture with 300 students sounds rather outmoded to me.  With that many students, there cannot be any reasonable expectation that you will stop to field many student questions: if 20% of the students asked a question, those questions and their answers would replace most or all of the lectures.  You are also not grading their exams.  Probably you're not holding office hours for 600 students in a meaningful way.  So what teaching is really being done here?  Is the only reason it's called two sections instead of one is because there's no room to seat 600 students?  Are the students really getting more out of your lectures then if you just videotaped them and then they just played later to whoever wanted to see them?
I don't think this is a very good pedagogical choice.  At my department we recently adopted a small class initative, in which all precalculus and calculus I courses are capped at 19 students.  To cover all these courses we had to hire a ridiculous number of new instructional faculty, which frankly I worry could be bad for the long term health of the tenure track faculty.  But as a pedagogical choice, it seems to be working very well.  A "lecture" for 19 students is different thing entirely than a lecture for 300 students: the instructor really can interact individually with the majority of the students in a given class period.  If you are long term member of your department, I respectfully suggest that you reconsider the practice of having such large lectures.

Steven Krantz in How to Teach Mathematics pegs the prep time at "Thirty minutes can be sufficient time for an experienced instructor to prepare a calculus lecture." (Sec 1.2.) Close enough. The one thing here is that my understanding of the evidence is that small class sizes actually doesn't much difference. There are some science courses with hundreds of students per section incorporating active-learning exercises that claim good results.

@Daniel: We are assessing the effect of small classes in our department.  So far it looks good, but we'll continue.  In terms of evidence: well, I have internet access the same as you, but here is some: https://www.classsizematters.org/research-and-links/#benefits%20for%20post-secondary%20education.  To say though that having 19 students is no better than having 300 seems pretty extreme to me.  In my experience, maybe 25% of my students will see me regularly in my office hours: say, once a week or more.  How can 125 students per week come to my office hours?

"for many courses lecture preparation is the most time-consuming aspect" I usually find grading to be more time-consuming. But maybe I'm confusing time-consuming with onerous.

all precalculus and calculus I courses are capped at 19 students -- Are you missing a zero?

@JeffE: Indeed not.

In my own direct personal experience, and in observation of many colleagues over the years, I see that, although certainly any particular prep time goes down over time, it can also go up either medium-term or longer-term, depending on one's memory. If one has pointlessly good long-term memory, the issue is not remembering what course content is, but, rather, what one has covered "so far" in this episode. Hence the possible need to brief-note-to-self about this. At another extreme, things might have slipped out of one's mind, e.g., through disuse, so that (even if immediately recognizable) one's notes need to include details.
More directly responding to the question: yes, reduced prep time is a plus, if one needed prep time. A down-side is the extra baggage of keeping track of what was said "earlier today" rather than "last year". Deja vu all over again?
I myself would prefer to teach different things, because my own prep times tend to be not-so-bad, and I'd prefer to think about varying things, even if relatively simple, rather than too-repetitive scenarios. I have some troubles about the deja-vu thing even year-to-year and decade-to-decade, which I admit is an unfortunate side-effect of a happily good memory and decades of experience, but/and I do try to make every day a "fresh" teaching situation, which is easier if each day doesn't already contain duplicates.

As other commenters have noted, you must stay organized when you teach multiple sections.  For me personally, teaching multiple sections is a joy.  However, I want to bring attention to one further advantage and one further disadvantage that I don't believe have been articulated yet:
Advantage:
You get a chance to learn to be a much better teacher.  If something you do works in one section, but not the other, then there is reason to believe that your delivery may have been problematic.  If it works in neither, then you have very good information that the problem is with you.
Disadvantage:
Designing multiple exams (assuming that your examinations are in class), or having to worry about students passing information on to students in the next section.  One way you can get around this is by designing n+1 exams, where n is the number of sections you have, and using one as a "practice" exam to negate the advantage that the second section will gain by having knowledge of the types of questions you ask and how (generally) difficult the examination is.


text:
Are there any guidelines regarding the choice of the markers in a graph?
There exist some guidelines on which colors should be used in the figures to ensure that they can be read by as many people as possible, such as color blind people (example  (mirror)).
Are there any guidelines regarding the choice of the markers in a graph?

Example of markers
 (mirror):

Code in python to generate the plot (in case the link gets broken):
#!/usr/bin/env python

import matplotlib.pyplot as pyplot

mark_dict = {
".":"point",
",":"pixel",
"o":"circle",
"v":"triangle_down",
"^":"triangle_up",
"<":"triangle_left",
">":"triangle_right",
"1":"tri_down",
"2":"tri_up",
"3":"tri_left",
"4":"tri_right",
"8":"octagon",
"s":"square",
"p":"pentagon",
"*":"star",
"h":"hexagon1",
"H":"hexagon2",
"+":"plus",
"D":"diamond",
"d":"thin_diamond",
"|":"vline",
"_":"hline"
}

def line_plot():

    x_list = [1, 10, 30, 70]
    y_list = [10, 20, 30, 40]

    pyplot.clf()
    for mark in mark_dict:
        y_list = [y_val + 10 for y_val in y_list]
        pyplot.plot(x_list, y_list, label=mark_dict[mark], marker=mark)

    pyplot.legend(loc="best", prop={'size':11})
    pyplot.savefig("markers.png")

def main():
    line_plot()

if "__main__" == __name__:
    main()

In addition to the shapes and colors, you can increase readability by (1) displaying no more than six lines in any one graph (for a reference you might look at questionnaire design), (2) staggering the markers so they're not all piled on top of each other, and (3) varying the style of the lines as well (different types of dashed lines).

The Grammar of Graphics (2nd ed) by Wilkinson has a very little description about shape in Chapter 10, which discusses the following few concepts:
Morphing (technique used to vary shapes along continuous dimension). Here is the example taken from the book:

Another variant was also displayed:

However, Wilkinson comments such format as

"problematic [...] because it is not rotationally invariant. Shape
  must vary without affecting size, rotation, and other attributes. The
  graphics [above] could be used for representing negative and positive
  variation, but it is not clear that they would work as well as sized
  plus and minus signs."

Lastly, the following one shows categorical shape variation:

Which also agrees with many commonly used symbol scheme.
The biggest help of this section in the book, however, are two citations on relevant works:
Discriminating Strata in Scatterplots by Lewandowsky & Spence (PDF) actually carried out some experiment, showing scatterplots with different symbols to novice and expert. While the work does not recommend any scheme, it does suggest that "variations in shapes, amounts of fill, or use of discriminable letters can be used without great loss in accuracy."
Another one is A Model for Studying Dsiplay Methods of Statistical Graphics by Cleveland (URL), which investigates a lot more than just symbols, and should be able to provide a good foundation in this topic.


text:
My defense is next week and and I have found an error in one of the proofs in one of the chapters of the thesis. What to do?
In one of my PhD thesis chapters, I have a derivation of a theory that I have proposed in the paper. I just found out that I have made an error in the calculation, and my derivation is flawed. The chapter is yet to be submitted in a journal, so it has never been peer reviewed. I never saw the flaw before this. Do I bring it up during my defense? And what do I say if the committee asks me about it? Can that have a negative outcome on my defense result?
I am feeling scared now!
Should I mail my advisor? My defense is on Monday afternoon and I don't know what to do!

Have you talked with your advisor about this?

@Drecate Just figured it out today. Not yet talked to her.

Is there enough time to recalculate and do a new derivation in time for the defence?

First, tell your advisor immediately. Your defense might need to be rescheduled. Suggest that if you think it wise.
Next, of course, try to provide a correct derivation.
If you have to go to the defense in the current state, yes, admit and point out the error and state that you are working on a patch. The committee might let you finish as is and clean up the problem later. They might also delay your finish until you have a correct result (or proof that it is not correct). I doubt that this is grounds for complete failure as it would be if the error is pointed out by someone else.
But your advisor might override any of this advice. That is your best source.
I've been on a final defense committee where we decided the work wasn't ready due to some flaws. The candidate just had to go back to work and we scheduled a future date. But it turned out that the meeting itself was valuable for the candidate as he got some feedback that helped him to the end.

I completely agree with "tell your advisor immediately", but let me amplify that a bit: Tell her everything that's relevant. That includes not only the fact that you found an error at such-and-such place in your thesis but also the exact nature of the error, how much of your thesis is affected by this error (do a lot of later results depend on the flawed argument?), whether you think the  proof can be repaired, and (if so) how long it's likely to take to repair it.

In addition to Buffy's answer: How bad this is also depends a little bit on how central the proof is for your work: Does it severely influence the main hypotheses of the work? If so, rescheduling the defense is necessary. If it is only of minor importance, there might be a possibility to correct this after your defense: At least at my university, this possibility exist for exactly the purpose of correcting minor mistakes, and the committee frequently asks the PhD candidate to make use of this option.
But yes, talk to your advisor about it.


text:
What is a "Junior Faculty" position?
I have seen an ad from Columbia University for a "Junior Faculty" position. The ad had no details on whether it is a tenure-track position or not.

Are these tenure track positions? Is this term common in US universities? Is it equivalent to assistant professor?

Generally it would mean a tenure track assistant professor position. There might be exceptions, but for Columbia, I'd expect it to mean just that.
But they might even be willing to entertain a lower level (non tenure) or higher level (associate professor) position for the right person. I can't think of any other reason for a US university to be non-specific.
But even an associate professor offer would likely come with some probationary period prior to granting tenure. Probably two years or more, but less than seven.
Contrast it with "senior faculty" position. Here it would mean a full professor, even a distinguished full professor or someone able to take over a leadership role.

A couple of months ago, they posted an "Open Rank" ad, in which they specify that it can be in any rank (https://www.google.com/search?q=columbia+university+ee+hiring&ibp=htl;jobs#htidocid=MjYGfB4ble-9FBjZAAAAAA%3D%3D). Would you say that the difference is now they're mostly aiming for assistant professor level candidates?

That is likely. But they might still be open. As a private university they can be pretty flexible for the right person. But maybe there were several positions and they have someone for the higher levels. Universities don't like, in general, to get too heavily weighted towards the upper end as it reduces flexibility and costs money.

Sometimes it takes a while for the higher administration to decide what levels of positions a department is allowed to hire at. So an early ad might not specify any level, but once the administrators impose limitations, a revised ad would include those limitations.


text:
A year in industry and back to a postdoc in a different field
I am finishing my PhD in a Statistics department, but my thesis is basically Math. I want to spend a year or two in the industry and then apply for a postdoc in Stats. However,..

It will be hard, so I wanted to collect some information on how it can be done, e.g., what steps can one take in advance to prepare the ground for returning. I was trying to Google stories of this kind, but usually people transition back to academia when they want to go to a grad school. They rarely go back to academia after a post-PhD industry job. Do you have any stories/thoughts/experience to share?
My past academic record is all over the place. However, I have co-written and published a few papers on the topics I've worked on, which hopefully proves that I have a strong interest in academic research in general. To show my dedication to statistics, I have looked up some topics that I find interesting and that I have some ideas on, but I would need some guidance to work on those. (As a matter of fact, if someone wants to work with me on their idea, that's fine too, for now.) Networking with faculty hasn't proved fruitful, because they are mostly looking for 1st/2nd/3rd year PhD students that will commit fully, and not 5th years who are saying directly that they are leaving for the next year or two to make money. Any tips on how to incentivize a faculty member/postdoc to work together in this weird "I'm working a real job but also doing academic research when time allows" setting?
How hard is it these days to land a postdoc in stats? I know that the humanities are having it really tough, but considering that many stats/math/CS PhDs go to industry without looking back, surely there must be some space left? (I can say that the guys from previous years at my department did pretty good landing those, but they were laser-focused on statistics from the beginning.)

It is possible if you can get a position, but fairly unlikely. There are probably a lot of competitors who are better positioned for any post doc job. If you had some specialized knowledge it might work out.

Also consider, you get the postdoc, then what? That doesn't mean automatic TT job, especially because there is still the teaching part of it, unless you are aiming at industry research. Be cautious with 'jack of all trades', because the rest of the saying goes 'and master of none'...

@artificial_moonlet thank you for the meta comment

@FábioDias I've seen a fella who worked on conformal field geometry in his PhD years, and then successfully switched over to the analysis in medical imaging, so I've assumed that as long as your fundamental math is good, you can work on "easier" topics. That may very well be an outlier, and I do agree that what I want to do sounds fishy. However, I am trying to acquire some statistics, positive and negative, from real life situations, to form an opinion before I prematurely reject this idea.

This is a strange plan, why is this what you want?

@NoahSnyder I like the intellectual freedom and independence one has in academia, and I also like math, but the field is very competitive, more so than statistics. I've also never had a proper real-job experience (for the past 20 years I've been in some kind of "school"), so this is partly to broaden my horizon. I'm currently looking for a job as a quant, so it's not a very big step "to the side".

If you want to do academia in the end, what is the point of being a quant for a year or two?

@NoahSnyder I'm not 100% determined about academia, so I need something to compare it to. I see a lot of academics who are paper-pushers, writing uninspiring research on topics that don't matter, under unreasonable assumptions, and for problems that have already been solved a thousand of times. I don't want to join this bubble, and I know that not all academics are like that. I also want to test myself and my dedication to academia. If I fail to get a TT position after this, oh well, guess the test worked and it wasn't meant to happen.

Most of the comments are about the wisdom of pursuing such a career path. That is definitely relevant and important to consider, but it sounds like the OP is more interested in how it can be done. Is that right, @peter?

@richard Yeah, my question is a bit more about the "how" rather than the "what" or "why".