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I received one bad (but still succesfull) grade. It is the first and (I hope) it will be the only one. How should I handle this my possible ac career?
This question is somehow related to Retaking an exam to improve a low, but passing grade. Why do universities not allow this?
I have received the first bad (but still successful) grade in my studies. I will not let it bring me down, but, certainly, my academic career, for which I hope, will be violated.
How can I correct this? Are there prospects to retake the course full? Maybe in some other university, maybe as a free-standing module (as a free listener - Universities allow them to study along the regular students) and then I can add this certification to my papers? Or maybe I can write some papers in the field and establish some reputation?
Our country (Easter European country) has very strict addmission criteria to PhD studies based on the grades.

If PhD admissions are based on the grades you earned during your degree, then I don't see how there's much you can do about this. I'm wondering, though, whether the influence of a single grade is really as extreme as you seem to assume. Are there a significant number of students in your country and field who never have a bad grade? (For context, I'm working in mathematics in Germany, and I would consider a single bad grade to be essentially meaningless, unless maybe it's in an advanced course that is very close to the topic of the PhD project.)

And, these days, going to another country in Europe for a PhD is not uncommon.

We can't tell you what your university's retake policy is.

For people that did well in their Secondary School / High School, the first bad grades at University come as quite a shock.
As a person that has tutored about 100 university students over a 15 year period, let me state, "In High School you can get by being clever, relying on the intelligence you already have.  At University, success is mostly a function of how much work you do."
Your first bad grade is not a detriment or failure, it's a wake up call to do more work.  You may not be able to achieve an "A" in the class, depending on how bad the grade was, but in the scope of your entire degree, you should have enough classes to not overly impact your final GPA.
Now, if you find that you are consistently getting "just not good enough" grades, then you might need to readjust your likelihood of getting into a PhD program.  It is easy to dream of getting into desirable programs, and alas many people fail to obtain the few spots that are available (grades being only one reason).
And if you find you're getting poor grades because your prior learning has not yet prepared you for the class, you probably should drop the class (regardless of your grade) and seek to fill any educational gaps as your next exam will likely not be better.
As for PhD programs, many of them maintain different GPA requirements for "in discipline" classes and "not in discipline" classes.  How you decide should depend on where you want to go, and how they evaluate their candidates.


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Decrease chance of academic article being sensationalized in media
I am first author on a perspective paper being reviewed. The last authors are well known and comfortable discussing the future of certain technologies that can be seen as exciting but also provocative/delicate/controversial.
Our paper has about 20 co-authors. We wrote the paper very conservatively, only discussing the less delicate aspects of the field for the short-term. At one point, we did add a direct mention of the long-term more provocative possibilities (using explicit terms) - but then a small number of co-authors expressed concern, stating that if we explicitly stated these more long-term provocative directions, we could be "put on a list" by certain funding groups. This is because certain data we present, when coupled with explicit terms, can make the paper all the more provocative.
I always felt uneasy with stating the explicit long-term direction our work could go. So, I was relieved when the co-authors stated this - because we then removed the most controversial sections. I now strongly prefer to avoid explicitly stating controversial terms and long-term directions.
I could sense most co-authors, though, were disappointed at the removal of the more explicitly-stated bold future directions in our perspective piece. Only myself and two others seemed more conservative. Some co-authors even tried to edit back in softer mention of these bolder terms. Our current version does not explicitly mention provocative terms.
I am concerned:

Peer reviewers may ask us to add in the explicit terms as future directions. One co-author told me this is likely because to not mention bold terms could make us look uninformed or 'beating around the bush' about where this field could lead.

Our paper will be sensationalized in the media. Our last authors have said they think this paper will almost certainly make it to the media. I think they plan on contacting various media outlets. They are comfortable with the explicit terms (and have been publicly, which is why our paper, by virtue of being connected with them, softly implies the same). This is my biggest concern - having my name (as first author) connected to sensationalized headlines that make our paper sound extremely provocative.

I wanted to decrease the chance of these situations happening. Especially point 2. I plan to have a conversation with the last authors and ask them to avoid using those explicit terms when contacting the media. I am not sure if they will remember (due to being very busy), if they will comply in the end (especially as co-authors tried to edit back in explicit terms), and if they will state it clearly enough to media writers.
Has anyone ever dealt with such a situation before? Are there any other preventative measures I can take? Such as requesting that I can review media pieces before publication etc. or that my name simply not be mentioned at all?
(As a side note: I do plan to switch fields after this. I am on great terms with all my co-authors and plan to stay that way! But, I am switching into a field where there are fewer ethical complexities).

As a general comment, how would you in practice "request review" from media? Your research is public, and everybody can cover this any way they see fit. A serious newspaper may inquire with the authors first to double-check, but a boulevard newspaper or bad online blog will read your article (rather: glance the abstract) and write whatever they feel like. And that's not even going into active misinformation campaigns.

Do you agree with those findings/future work suggestions though? Arguably, communicating your findings is a bigger part of scientific work than actually discovering something novel. This is why you are writing papers in the first place. It being read and picked up by other people is the entire point, and I do not see how you would benefit from sweeping something under the rug, media drawing the same sensational results from your paper and you being "defenseless" because of not stating your point of view. They will just put words in your mouth, basically. You would not like that.

To the extent that your dilemma involves a controversial topic, diverging opinions between authors, and different appetites for sensationalism, I have experienced something similar. This formed the subject of a previous question on this site.
However, the stakes were much lower because it was a limited publication and there was no media involvement.
Nevertheless, I believe some similarities are relevant. Your reluctance to draw attention to these perspectives seems to arise from:
(i) possible personal ethical concerns,
(ii) impact on future funding/collaborations.
You are the first author, therefore you do have a larger say in the final submission (I'm assuming this is not an alphabetically ordered list). If your ethical concerns are strong enough, you should absolutely state them to your co-authors, and not give their disappointment too much credence. Scientific disagreement can and should be resolved through discussion; you shouldn't need to capitulate. It doesn't sound like the disagreements are critical- but if they are, then the last option would be for one of the parties to withdraw from the work. It is very unlikely that this would be required though.
On the other hand, if your discomfort arises mainly from funding limitations, I suggest you disregard these. As the contours of technology change, a lot of motivations and directions change- this includes funding agencies as well. It is not a good idea to make long-term decisions based on their current disposition, especially in a field that is expected to see disruption.
Finally, to the specific question on media; there are two things to consider. Either the media pick the article up themselves, or one of your co-authors actively approaches them. To avoid the first, you could consider using a restrained, non-provocative title (or one that would provoke your academic readership, but not the general public). In the latter case, I'm sure you could ask the co-authors to be sensitive to your concerns. Beyond that, there's nothing you can do. No media outlet is under any obligation to let you vet/review their publication. Its really beyond your control, and probably best to let it take its own course.
There comes a tide in the affairs of men, etc.

Here's how to decrease the chance of your work being sensationalized in the media.
You make sure that the press release about your work is measured and written in a way that is unlikely to be sensationalized. Make sure to not have any sentence in there that would make very controversial claims when taken out of context.
This will have a significant impact because most 'reports' about a big impact research paper more or less regurgitate what the press release said. Most of the time I see scientific articles being sensationalized it is not due to the newspaper journalists acting irresponsibly but because the official press release was written irresponsibly sensationalist.
Note, you may have to spend some political capital on this within your collaboration but as an author you have some moral rights, and it sounds like you have a good relationship with the other authors. Also, you might have to argue with the people in charge of press release with the university.

I doubt that there is anything you could do if you want the article to have any impact at all. Those who would sensationalize, and especially mischaracterize, research aren't especially rational and will do what they want. Look at what has happened to COVID related research, for example. Where would we be if that research hadn't taken place or people were timid about publishing it?
Write the paper so that it adheres to academic/scientific best practice. Let the trolls troll. They're going to in any case.

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How to quit my TT professorship job gracefully?
I'm a TT assistant professor at a R1 school, and I just recently accepted an offer from a private company. I'm planning to talk with the department head and let him know and I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts how to approach this (with maybe examples if you have anything in mind) and quit gracefully ? Also do you think one month ahead is enough to let him know before the departure ?
Update: Ok, just wanted to share some update. I talked with the head today and something along this answer from @caleb-stanford worked really well.
For example: "While I have really enjoyed my time here, it's become increasingly clear to me that being in academia long-term is not the right fit. In addition, I have personal and family constraints that would require me to be away from for extended periods of time, and make having a more flexible work location a necessity for me in the future. I have nothing but positive things to say about . I'm sorry for the short notice; I'm letting you know as soon as possible, so that you can hopefully work to make plans accordingly for my departure."

That will cause them to scramble a bit, so the sooner the better. Does your chair know you were not happy? No need to sugarcoat it, you’ve made your decision. The rest is details like who takes over your students…

Why would you wait until 1 month before? It may be okay, but it would be more professional to tell them several months in advance, particularly if you have duties (especially teaching) that would need to be assigned to someone else.

Because I looked for a job 2 months ago and they offered to start in 6 weeks (norms of industry). But I'm planning to offer to the department, to keep teaching the class (bc the class is 6-9 pm for an online master degree) and change my appointment to something that would be fit for this plan. Any thoughts on this ?

Ultimately, there's no way to say it nicely. You're leaving, and that makes things difficult for them, so the best thing you can do is let them know as soon as possible. They will want to know why, so you have to be prepared with a well-crafted reason for your departure.
One crucial detail that I think is missing from your post: do you want to remain on good terms with the university, the department chair, and your colleagues, or are you leaving academia for good and have no interest in maintaining connections?

In the former case, you have to be a bit careful. Firstly, you should try to let them know as soon as possible -- I would think, more than just a month in advance! And second, you should be careful about your reason. It's generally advised not to make it about the university or the department; things that they can change.
For example, don't say: "I haven't been getting along with my colleagues here and I feel the university is not supporting me enough financially." That will make them feel defensive, and in the worst case, it could leave them thinking that they could have retained you if you had only talked to them earlier, and you could have worked something out.
Instead, it's generally more effective to make your leaving not about them. It can be the university location, or personal/family constraints, or you simply have decided that academia is not for you. Since you want to remain friendly with your colleagues, you should be as honest as possible, without unnecessarily insulting them.
For example: "While I have really enjoyed my time here, it's become increasingly clear to me that being in academia long-term is not the right fit. In addition, I have personal and family constraints that would require me to be away from  for extended periods of time, and make having a more flexible work location a necessity for me in the future. I have nothing but positive things to say about <university>. I'm sorry for the short notice; I'm letting you know as soon as possible, so that you can hopefully work to make plans accordingly for my departure."

In the latter case, you have nothing to lose, so you can share some negative details about the department if you so choose, as long as you are careful in expressing it. In this case, you can also choose to leave on short notice (as long as it is allowed by your contract); it may upset them, but at the end of the day, you have to do what's best for you.

Very helpful comments. Thanks a lot. Yes the location and family situation is part of my reasoning.  Also for sure, I would want to keep things clean and make as little trouble as it's possible to stay in good terms. They new company directly works with the same school and the department I'm in right now.

You have a contract and it may detail the requirements here. If you are teaching then you should give the head enough notice that they can replace you without negative impacts on students. If you have thesis advisees you need to consider their needs, ethically, if not necessarily legally.
Quitting, but continuing to end of term is likely to be fine, though the head may need to scramble to fill any teaching slots for next term.
Other than consideration for students who will be impacted I don't see a lot of issues, provided that your contract isn't too restrictive.
If your pay is pro-rated in any way, then some adjustments might need to be made but probably more likely in your favor than otherwise.
For the administrative details a month seems reasonable. For student and especially advisee outcomes it might be more complicated.

I have a postdoc that his contract ends in 3 months and he is now only at the stage of writing papers and one PhD student that JUST started . I have talked with one faculty that he is happy to have the student to work with him. I have also mentioned few times to the chair about things that are not working well for me in the department.

Try to assure the doctoral student is amenable to a change.

@Para2x Too late now, but you really shouldn't be recruiting PhD students when you're looking for jobs outside academia.

I totally understand. But truly the decision about the recruitment happened months before my decision for looking for job outside academia.

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How to determine similarity score of new manuscript against own yet-to-publish manuscripts?
Considering the ethical and professional implications of self plagiarism, it is very useful to check new manuscript against old ones (which are under review and not yet published) to decrease self plagiarism. In a white paper by ithenticate (download from http://www.ithenticate.com/self-plagiarism-free-white-paper), one way to avoid self plagiarism is to significantly paraphrase those text which are need to be used in new article. However, I have difficulties in identifying the similarity percentage of my current work against yet-unpublished works. Online tools (that I know) check the manuscript against published works. I have 3 journal papers, 1 is published, 1 is under review, and 1 is under preparation. Now, I need to check the third one to see the similarity score. Any suggestion?

Thanks all of you for your fruitful suggestions. However, I need to check now, because I am in a situation where I need to check what is the similarity score. I checked recommended tools in sourceforge, but no clue. They are just not working. thanks for help.

First suggestion: Never copy-paste material from earlier works, always write everything from scratch.
This prevents you from moving critical passages from one paper to the other. It is of course still possible to end up with a similar or even identical sentence by accident, particularly if you describe a method or something similar. If you end up using the same method for several papers it is also possible to simply reference your original description in subsequent papers. The Ithenticate white paper mentioned by you provides good advice. Yuo can slso visit the COPE (Committee On Publication Ethics) web site and search for self-plagiarism.
Second suggestion: Use the softwares such as iThenticate,  turnitin or the like depending what you are looking for. But, I would not blindly just look at percentages of overlap but focus on where the overlaps occur. If it is in the methods section describing a series of steps ina  process it is clearly not as critical as if it is in the discussion or conclusions. If you find overlap and you can identify what it is, then go to my first suggestion and critically review if you need to say it again.

Does the paper make an original disciplinary contribution to scholarly knowledge?
Has any reused material been rewritten from scratch?
Has the reused material been cited in relation to the paper under review?
If so, it should be fine.  The first one is the big one, I assume that people with a doctorate in their discipline should know whether this has been achieved.  One nostrum I use is meeting at least one of the three: new evidence set, new theoretical tools, new analysis.
As an example of this nostrum: Case A organisation demonstrating with Marxist class analysis concept Q.

Case B with Marxism demonstrating Q is novel
Case A with Patriarchy analysis demonstrating Q is novel
Case A with Marxism demonstrating R is novel

Short Question: "One nostrum I use is on of the three" <- do you mean 'one' or like 'on all'?

Certainly new manuscript are logically providing original contribution, however, it is time consuming to write some general text from the scratch, so people just copy and paraphrase it. It is good idea to support the text with reference to the under review paper. However, having a tool as Anthony mentioned to check the score would be fine.

@T.F. I've expanded the answer and hope this assists.

it is time consuming to write some general text from the scratch, so people just copy and paraphrase it. — But of course you didn't do that.  Right?

@JeffE, No, I DID Not. If I did, I could not publish in top journals (though you are not really fan of journals). I am fast in writing (Though English is not my first language) and do not need to copy & paste text from old papers. I dislike to copy and paraphrase old sentences since every time I write, the texts are more cohesive and interesting. But (my) brain sometimes generates similar sentences. That's why I need to make sure such identical sentences do not impact on my writings.

Sourceforge offers a few free tools aimed at detecting plagiarism (see http://sourceforge.net/directory/os:linux/freshness:recently-updated/?q=plagiarism) for various platforms.

I check these tools and found them useless in the domain I need. They are not free and their plagiarism is checked against published papers in the literature. Not what I need.

Some of these tools also include a hidden agreement in the registration process, that uploaded papers can be used by the company that owns that tool. This is for example true for the 'Viper' tool. Be cautious!

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Forgot to Anonymize Paper for Double-Blind Review
I recently submitted a paper to a conference, and I realized six days after submission that I forgot to remove the authors' names. The guidelines clearly state:

"All papers will be double-blind reviewed and must present original work. Authors’ names and affiliations should not appear in the submitted paper. Authors’ prior work should be cited in the third person. Authors should also avoid revealing their identities and/or institutions in the text, figures, links, etc."

The review process for this conference is about one month long. What should I do now? Is there a high chance of rejection?
Should I write an email to the editors?
Any advice would be beneficial. Thanks in advance.
Edit: I got an desk reject. It was only couple of hours after sending an email apologizing for that mistake. I got what I deserve.

I wrote an answer, but I realized now that I'm not sure what you mean with "forgot to anonymize": did you just leave your name in the front page? Or something more subtle, like a reference to previous work in the body of the paper?

@Andrea: I left the names on the front page. That is all about it. Does it change anything?

My answer then stands. If you don't do anything the paper will be rejected; send an email and hope for the best.

This question is similar to: Will my submission be rejected if I accidentally submit the non-blind version to a conference with double blind review?. If you believe it’s different, please edit the question, make it clear how it’s different and/or how the answers on that question are not helpful for your problem.

From my experience as a reviewer/PC member, it is likely to be desk rejected (i.e. the paper doesn't get sent to reviewers) since it has already been six days.
However, it doesn't hurt to reach out to the editor/chairs (whoever supervises the refereeing process), explain your mistake, and provide an anonymized version. If you're lucky, they may replace your submission with the anonymized one and send it out for reviewing.

So writing an email is necessary? Maybe the email is pointing them to my mistake and make it worse?

Thank you. Is there a chance to get not rejected writing an email or is there no chance.

@Max If you don't attempt to correct your mistake, you are relying on the conference to fail at one of their main duties. If you do send the email, you are relying on the good will, experience, and advice of the people that run the conference.

The conference has only two choices: Anonymize it themselves, which is not going to happen, or not sending it to reviewers. So, it is going to be rejected. (I assume the deadline has long passed.) But it is better to apologize so that people in your field build up good will towards you. Having to reject a paper because of a mistake is not pleasant for the PC.

@DavidS: I did tell them and apologized. Now I hope for the best.

@ThomasSchwarz: Is it really so bad. I have seen other posts here that were accepted without any issues.

Good conferences try to be fair. Those that go for double blind typically have these long set of rules, like the conference to which you submitted. What you did is an understandable error, but just saying, as you did, "I goofed and sorry about this", is a good way making sure that no-one develops bad feelings to you. You might be very lucky and run into a PC chair that lets you anonymize your paper, but that PC chair would need to make sure that you did not improve the paper when nobody was looking. Fairness is very important, and as a PC chair, I can assure you that you catch some flak.

I would not advise any PC chair to send a paper with author information to referees and pretend that nothing happened.

Actually, unless the deadline for submission is imminent or has passed, it is possible that no one has yet noticed the issue. Had they done so with time to spare, you would probably have been told to prepare and submit a revision. I don't think it is as dire as Andrea's answer suggests, and you would probably have been notified by now of a desk reject.
Send that email and prepare the proper version.
And no one here can decide for the conference committee what will be done. That is up to them and only them. Don't waste time.

Thank you very much. I sent the email. I am new to this, but learned my lesson. I expect to be rejected, nevertheless.

" I am new to this,...". In Taiji we have a rule that learning begins after 10,000 repetitions.

I hope I do not need to have 10,000 repetitions to finally exclude the authors:). Do you have any experience with whether the email will actually get answered?

Not precisely, but the committees I worked with and served on were pretty conscientious. It is a matter of personality and workload, of course.

Thank you very much.


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Mathematics subject GRE - getting raw score from scaled score
I took the April 2023 exam. I have a scaled score. How do I convert it to a raw score?  I hear there is no negative marking for skipped or incorrect questions.

Do they not report the raw score to the exam taker anymore?  They did to me many years ago.

Change of frame: why do you want to know?

How do I convert it to a raw score?

These conversions are different for every instance of the test, and the chart is not released. So, there is no way to find out exactly how many questions you answered correctly. For an approximate conversion, there is this chart.

I hear there is no negative marking for skipped or incorrect questions.

This is correct, and a recent change.
All this information, and more, is available on the ETS website.


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Can I reapply for a master's degree If I already failed a master's degree?
I heard that if you fail a master's degree, you'll have a tough time reapplying for another one. Is that true? I had a really bad experience with the one I'm doing currently (Artificial Intelligence msc) which I might fail, and I was wondering if I would be able to apply to another university afterwards in case that happens? I already have an undergraduate degree with first class honors in computer science (with plenty of AI modules I did really well on). I'm doing my masters degree in the same university I did my undergraduate in. Would I be able to hide the fact that I failed a masters?


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Is my PhD application for a famous university over for a bad letter of recommendation?
This year, I decided to apply to a top program in my field in a very good university.
Part of my application needed to include 3 to 4 letters of recommendation, one of them from my advisor / co-advisor.
My co-advisor told me she would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me. I trusted her, and added her email to my application. However, she told me she wanted to read my research proposal. I sent it to her, and then, she told she could no longer support me with such a proposal. In addition, she told me she didn’t receive the link to recommend me. I made the corrections she told me to do, sent the new proposal to her, and didn’t hear back until I sent her an email saying that she could sent her letter to a general email address in case there is an issue with the link. Then, I received an email from the university system saying she had submitted her letter with the link she told me she didn’t receive. Then, she wrote to me to say that her letter will remain confidential because it « gives more weight to your application » but that she supported this new project.
However, I am not sure how to think of it. All my other professors asked for my resume to write my letter and told me things like « it was a pleasure to write for you », not her. I got a very high grade to my dissertation, but there were tensions between me and my advisor due to different character so I didn’t ask him for a letter.
As I trusted her initially, I also talked to her about my doubts for PhD applications, whether or not I wanted to stay in my country etc so I am afraid she would speak of that doubts in my letter.
I have really good grades all along my bachelor and my master (+3.9). But do you think my application could be sink by ONE bad letter of recommendation by my co-supervisor and three glowing letters from professors?
Thank you

I think you are jumping to conclusions - it seems this person was willing to take the time to give you real tips and help with your proposal (probably made it much better) and then was happy enough with what you did that she wrote you a letter. I don't know why you think it would be bad.

There was a gap between her saying she did not receive the link and her submitting it via the link. During that interval she might have received the link, found it was in her spam folder (some I have received ended there), asked them to resend it, or something else.

It is fruitless to speculate. There is no formula for evaluating letters, and you don't even know what your co-supervisor wrote. It could be that her letter was fine and this is much ado about nothing. In general, faculty will decline to write a letter rather than writing a very negative one; indeed, writing an extremely negative letter may make the recommender look worse than the student.
But to the larger question, whether one letter can sink an application, it comes down to the overall impression that is created. If the negative letter is vague, or a rant, and is generally incongruous with the rest of the application, then is unlikely to have much impact. On the other hand, if the negative letter is clear and specific, if it gives the impression of being fair and written by someone who knows you well, and if its strong negative comments do not contradict the positive comments from the other letter-writers, then the effect could certainly affect the outcome.

Thank you for your answer! Yes it’s true that it would not be good for her too… it’s just that I don’t understand why she wrote me it would remain confidential. I didn’t even think about asking the university to read my letter so why did she specifies it and none of my other professors? Thank you for your answer.

@Cctte That is not uncommon that professors do not share what they write in the LORs to students. Sometimes, they are expected not to do it.

@Cctte take the advice from the first sentence: you have done what you could. Now it is time to forget that this exists until you hear back from that university. Thinking about it will only hurt you. Do something productive instead.


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Is re-using an idea from a research proposal considered as self-plagiarism?
It is known that re-using oneself idea in his/her published work without citing is considered self-plagiarism. In school, submitting an assignment which uses certain amount of works from a previously submitted assignment without mentioning it properly can be considered self-plagiarism. If one submits a research proposal which contains original research idea, and later proposed another proposal (let's say, for applying graduate school)containing significant parts of ideas from the previous one without mentioning it, can this be considered as self-plagiarism?

Plagiarism is mostly about written words in such situations. You should not copy-paste large chunk of texts from previous published material, but reusing ideas (especially if developed further) is common, and in certain forms necessarily. Imagine if you should write about something completely new, entirely different every single time you talk or write about your research. That would be incomprehensible. Ideas are continued, built upon, re-approached.

Is re-using an idea from a research proposal considered as self-plagiarism?

No: You can re-use ideas from research proposals which you haven't executed upon, i.e., ideas that you haven't advanced (e.g., because the research proposal was rejected or that part of the proposal was never addressed or ...), they're still fresh ideas.

Even if you have executed an idea, if you realize part of the way through executing it that you need more money, what else are you going to write on the grant applications for it? It's not like you can use money earmarked for investigating idea B to investigate idea A.

@nick012000 what else are you going to write on the grant applications for it? Study A advanced our understanding to X, this new study will build upon those results to delivery Y. (Mentioning that you're uniquely qualified for the job, as the leader of Study A, probably helps.)

I would add the following: key in calling something self-plagiarism is taking fresh credit for a novelty that is not really new because you already did it elsewhere (but claim it is new). That's precisely why it's not the case in the proposal (as @user2768 correctly says).

@Captain Emacs So no matter how many times it has been drafted, proposed, or shared among a small group of peoples, if this is the first time that piece of idea gets published, or formally presented, it is considered by peers as new.

@AlanLao Well, the point is to check - what do you get credit for? You can not get credit twice for the same idea (unless you have a copyrighted piece of music/literature/etc. and then you do not get credit, but money). So, as long as you haven't claimed your credit (and there is no credit for a rejected proposal), you can reuse it. Otherwise, you have to cite, but that's fine, too.

A caveat I would add is that I think it would be unethical to submit multiple grant proposals in parallel for the same idea. Certainly you could submit multiple proposals for funds target at the same project. But if you're seeking funding for precisely the same thing twice, that could get messy.


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When a University changes name after students graduate
If a University change its name after graduation, should graduates use the original or the new name of the school in their CV? Sometimes even countries change their names, again should graduates refer to the original or new names in their CV if that takes place after their graduation?

This actually happenned to me. My university was "Universite du Maine" when I graduated and is now named "Le Mans Universite". I agree with everyone else that indicating both names seems the most appropriate for a CV

Related, if not duplicate: How to refer to a university that changed its name?

Just use both names.

I think a good rule of thumb for this situation is to list both names for the sake of clarity.  I would use the new name first and then list the previous name.  For example on your CV you could write:
BSc Biology - 2018-2022
University of Unicorns (previously Unicorn's University)

Actually using the new name (the "after graduation" name) first  is confusing. It implies that you were given a degree by "University of Unicorns" when the diploma says otherwise.  I still suggest listing the name as it was at the time the degree was given, then a qualification that it has since changed. Not a hill to die on, but history matters.

On a CV I would always put both.
Also in terms of filling out digital CVs where the school auto-populates I would always ask if they prefer I put whatever name they have listed (new or old) or if I should fill in "school not listed" instead. Sometimes I get told to put the school they have, sometimes I get told to put that it is not listed.
(I have had an issue where my college's school name from many many many years ago still auto populates for some reason).

This happened to me, and my CV contains the university's original name.  I suppose I could add the new name and the reason for the change. (The University of Detroit merged with Mercy College and became the University of Detroit Mercy.) But the current form of the CV, with only the original name, has worked without problems for many years, so I don't see any urgent need to change it.

For a CV it is easy enough to list both names. This happened to me. Name the degree (MA, or whatever): University of the South, now named University of the Universe. Give the date of the name change if you like, but I never do. It lets people find you as needed in old records and is completely honest.

Your CV is a promotional document, aimed to sell you as an employee, therefore you should use whichever name is best known or most prestigious. If you are unsure listing both is a perfectly reasonable option, but it is probably unnecessary since a google search for the old name will find the new.
Really the only situation where it might cause difficulties for you is if they ask to see your certificates as proof of qualification and the names differ between CV and certificate. However, it seems extremely unlikely that any employer is going to change their decision on whether to hire you or not if you tell them the university changed name and you used the new one when you hand them the certificate.


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Do arxiv papers matter at all while applying for a doctoral program in Physics?
Consider an applicant in a Master's program with a fairly good application in terms of LORs, GPA, research background, and standard tests. If this applicant, who is applying to a doctoral program in Physics in the US, also has a collection of writings in arxiv would this add any more value to the application?
In other words, can arxiv papers boost an application's value in any way since they might show the self-study activities of a student?

They certainly do in theoretical computer science.

Yes, they might be a benefit, but, since they aren't refereed, it might be limited unless it they are remarkable in some way. If they are also submitted to a journal as well, then it would be worth more.
It would, however, require people examining your application to take a look at the papers and make some judgement. They might be willing to do this, or not. They might be impressed, or not, depending on what you have there.
But, as you suggest, self-study, and especially research have value for doctoral applications.


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Is it fair that a PhD student should be allowed to review a research paper?
I really can't understand why an inexperienced PhD student should be allowed to review a research article written by researchers of considerably more experience and expertise.
How do journals/editors select referees for submissions?

Are you seriously suggesting only the most experienced researchers should be allowed to review?  I suspect Stephen Hawking might feel that he has other things to do than review your papers.  Also, a fundamental premise of publishing is that you publish so that everyone can review it.  Research with rules about who is allowed to review it is highly suspect.

@MBentley, I'm not suggesting that only professors should be reviewing but I do think the system needs to be more regulated and more formalised in terms of training the less experienced-perhaps through certifications, etc.

Note that the majority of users of this site are PhD students. Answers up-votes and rank will likely reflect that.

@John: I should remark that one common way for an editor to find a referee is for the editor to look through the database of authors who have published in the same journal.

I feel like what's really being asked is "Some reviewer gave me a crappy review because they clearly didn't understand my work and I'm upset because I'm sure it was some snot-nosed 2nd-year PhD student and my work is good, dammit." Which I completely understand.
But that means the question should really be "Why isn't there a standard method at Journals for reviewing reviewers? Why isn't there more oversight of reviews by managing editors? Isn't allowing any random PhD student to reject a paper out of hand bad for the state of the literature?"

This is the world law professors live in (except there it isn't qualified PhD students but any random college graduate who couldn't figure out what to do with his life yet got high enough LSATs to make it into law school - and for the past few years, that bar is even lower).  I'd say that whether it is "fair" or not is irrelevant - probably not even well-posed.  What matter is if it works - and I'm not sure whether the law review example is pro- or con- that proposition.

In my experience, I started getting requests to review after I submitted my first or second paper and presented at a conference, but before I started my PhD (but after finishing BS). Obviously credentials are not weighed as heavily as personal impressions either through written work or in person (probably to the editor or editorial board).

If you got a bad review the paper wasn't as good as you thought it was. I

Fair for whom? Fair on the students for having the opportunity with supervisor support? Fair on the students for having it imposed on them without adequate oversight? Fair on paper authors for being judged by somebody viewed as "beneath you"? Fair on authors for being judged by somebody (potentially) inexperienced?

@D.W., but those responding to a book also know that they are responding to a static document.  Isn't it appropriate to indicate when and how a question has been edited so that those replying to it aren't retroactively made to look foolish?

@LSpice, no, generally speaking, you shouldn't be editing the question in a way that invalidates existing answers -- if you're doing that, you haven't put enough thought into asking the right question before you posted it.  Anyway, this isn't the place to debate it; I'm just sharing the general advice on Stack Exchange.  See http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/127639/160917 and http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/182673/160917 more detailed discussion; I suggest you take any further discussion there.

I'm voting to close this question because it is basically a rant followed by a question that is different from the title question and unrelated to the ranting.

Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences.

Yes, this is an old question, but would the next question then be: Is it fair that a PhD student should be allowed to write a research paper?

Yes, it is fair.

The quality of reviews written by highly experienced researchers is low.
Many manuscripts have obvious flaws that should be spotted by the inexperienced.
Reviewers are (in theory) supervised by the editor.
Novice reviewers are more enthusiastic than experienced reviewers.
If the paper cannot be understood by a PhD student, it will not be useful to very many people.
PhD students may have more specialized expertise because they work on fewer projects, as compared to senior researchers (per @nayrb)

Of course, it depends on the individual PhD student.  Some are better prepared to review than others.

I agree with the overall sentiment of your answer, but pretty much all of your bullets are at best heuristics. Obviously not all experienced researchers write bad reviews, and there certainly are valuable research contributions that will fly over the head of an average PhD student.

"The quality of reviews written by highly experienced researchers is low" - from my experience this is sometimes true, but I would not take that for granted. Of course this depends on the PhD, researcher and definition of quality.

@xLeitix Is there a non-heuristic way to select reviewers?

@Bitwise inter-rater reliability is a measure of quality.

I recently reviewed a paper. I wrote 4 pages of review, about 40 questions/comments. The other review, way more senior than me, wrote 4 lines. Novice reviewers are more enthusiastic than experienced reviewers. I definetly secund

@AnderBiguri It's a little worrying that you seem to know who the other reviewer was.

@DavidRicherby I didn't know who he/she was, but I know it was a senior researcher, just that.

You should also mentioned that many PhD students have greater expertise in a subfield due to specialization than the majority of postdocs or even professors.

I disagree entirely with bullet points 1,5,6.

In many disciplines of science, asking Ph.D. students to review papers is considered to be fair by the community. I can only speak for computer science here, but the following arguments may apply in other fields as well.

When a Ph.D. student reviews her/his first papers, this is typically done for his/her advisor. Advisors often check the reviews before turning them in, and thus avoid highly unfair or imprecise evaluation of the work of others.
Reviewing work is one of the best ways to get started with writing your own work. You get to know first hand what can make a paper weak and what you want to read as a reviewer. This is very valuable to the student.
A single review on its own is seldom the reason for acceptance/rejection of a paper. If there is a strong disagreement between the reviewers, then this is normally discussed in the case of conferences (which are prime publication venues in CS), or the editor has a look and will gather further information.
Ph.D. students often simply take more time to review a paper. Thus, they can find flaws in papers that senior researchers overlook in quicker reviews.

Indeed. To your list, I would add that some PhD students have already published, so they do have experience concerning scientific publication. Also, if unsupervised by advisor (point 1), the editor might know them and consider their student status while looking at their review.

Agree: the time I most spent reviewing a single paper was during my own PhD

Thanks for your comments. It is true that students do take more time in reviewing the articles.

@Emilie +1, in my field, half of the PhD students already published an article during their Master.

The assignment of referees to an article is not a random process where a computer draws a random number and matches it to "active researcher X" in the community. At least in my field the editors play a huge role in asking the "right people" to referee the article.
By making the focus on "inexperienced graduate students" you are focusing on the wrong things. An inexperienced graduate student who, nevertheless, has done research in similar fields and therefore has the expert knowledge to say something meaningful on the manuscript is certainly a much better referee than Prof. Dr. Messenberg whose recent research only overlaps with that of the manuscript in so much as that they use the same species of animal subjects.
The question you should ask is: "Should utterly unqualified persons be allowed to referee journal article submissions?" And the easy answer is, "No, since it is called peer-review not random-Joe-Schmoe-review."
You ask then: "How do we know whether someone is qualified?"
Answer: "You trust the editors; if you don't, don't send the manuscript to him/her/that journal."

As an aside: there are two ways that I've seen where Graduate Students come to review a paper.

The graduate student is passed the paper by his or her advisor to referee. Good advisors will only do so for appropriate papers, and may even provide guidance on how to referee a paper. Bad advisors are, well, bad (if an advisor gave an unsuitable paper to a student to referee, do you really think he himself will write a good referee report?)
The graduate student has independently came to the notice of the journal editor due to a previous interaction (conference presentation, paper submission, research discussion), and the journal editor feels that the student can fill the duties of the referee.

Exactly!  If you submit a paper to a journal where you don't trust the editors to choose good referees, then you are doing it wrong.  I can't imagine any plausible scenario in which you would trust the editors' judgment with the one exception that you fear they might choose a graduate student.

I agree with the points you make, but, out of curiosity, how would you address the same question for conferences? E.g., in CS, which is mostly conference-driven. Since the PC changes every year, the "trusting the editors" parts is a much weaker point (or so it seems to me).

@ClementC. : I would shake my head in your general direction and give you my condolences, while secretly having a bit of schadenfreude at your expense. Or more seriously: I have zero idea how conference-driven fields like CS are run. But if a field has systematic issues where one cannot necessarily trust the conference chair (is that the right term?), that issue should probably be addressed as a higher priority than the symptom of whether graduate students get to review submissions. But that's just my knee-jerk reaction, since I have no experience nor expertise to answer your question.

Fair enough (for the sake of clarity: I do not claim or even mutter there is an issue; only was curious as of how your argument would carry). Additionally, I had no clue what "schadenfreude" meant prior to your comment.

@ClementC.: I'm so happy to be able to introduce you to Avenue Q. Yes, you're welcome.

@ClementC.: To mirror the words of the answer: In CS, the conference chair is not a "random Joe Schmoe", either, nor a lonely master who makes all decisions single-handedly. Rather than that, there is a program committee, which is typically populated by more or less experienced researchers with strong connections in the community; the "higher" the conference, the more well-known will various of the program committee members be. Hence, there is not really a trust issue there, either.

In the journals I use, a referee is not free to pass the paper to anyone they feel like. The paper is confidential. I cannot believe it is different for any journal. The supervisor may suggest their student as a replacement reviewer to the journal editor.

@RobJeffries: it is not unheard of for advisors to "subcontract" the referee work to their students. Whether this is always done with the approval/consent of the editorial board is unknown to me.

Of course it is great practice for the student (critical reading improves writing as other pointed out).
But it is also fair for the authors of the paper. In general PhD students, specially towards the end, are (or should be) highly specialized in their specific (sub-) subfield and should know the literature better than anybody else. While this does not make them apt to review any paper, they are often the best person for reviewing something very related to their field.

Why isn't there a standard method at Journals for reviewing reviewers?

There are some standard methods at some journals (e. g. keeping track of response time and such) and also there are the editors who keep track of the quality of reviews. Any standardized method on reviewing quality of reviews will most likely be flawed, however.

Why isn't there more oversight of reviews by managing editors?

I don't think that this question is based on a right premise.

Isn't allowing any random PhD student to reject a paper out of hand bad for the state of the literature?

Reviewers do not reject papers. Reviewer suggest rejection. Editors reject papers. Editors don't select random PhD students.

Why isn't there any formal training required (e.g. certification) before a less experienced researcher is allowed to review journals?

Who would you like to grant a reviewer certificate? Experienced and reputed researchers probably. These researchers should be able to judge the quality of reviewers and then decide which reviewer could be qualified to review a paper and should choose stronger reviewers for more critical/potentially ground breaking papers and less experienced  reviewers for more "standard" papers. Oh wait, that's exactly what editors actually do these days.

You are asking:

Is it fair that a PhD student should be allowed to review a research
  paper?

Yes:

It should be checked that a paper is written in a clear enough way that anyone with a reasonable background in the research area should be able to understand the paper.  A PhD student is more likely to pick up “assumed information” that should be included in the paper, but is not, then someone that is a leading researcher in the given subfield.
A Phd student can also check that the “logic” in the paper is correct etc, and is more likely to rework all the proofs then someone with less time.

But if you had asked:

Is it fair that only PhD students should be reviewing a given research
  paper?

No:

It needs an expert in the subfield to know all the past papers on the subject.
It needs a long standing expert to know how a paper relates to what is being done in other fields.

Therefore a mix of reviewers is needed.

Would the down voters like to comment, as my answer seems to be getting as many down votes then upvotes.

The title and body of your question are asking different things. The title asks whether it's fair for PhD students to review research papers, which I think is certainly the case.
The alternative would be for full participation in the research community to require formal certification. For example, should a figure well-known in a field, with decades of experience (say, as an engineer), be refused permission to fully participate in the research process simply for not having a PhD? Otherwise, would they cross some arbitrary threshold of "experienced enough"? What if that figure used their savings to self-fund a PhD? Would any existing permission be revoked, since they're now a student? What if they abandoned it half way through, would they go back to their prior status? These kind of issues seem like an unnecessary administrative burden, for a restriction which needn't exist, and would seem unfair to me, so in general I would say that it's fair for PhD students to review research papers.
The body of your question asks something different: whether inexperienced PhD students should be allowed to review research papers. I think the other answers tackle this well, but I would also say that performing reviews is one way of gaining experience.
For the record, I am currently a PhD student, I was following work in my field for years before I started, and I have performed reviews.

When I got my first review to do (as a fresh PhD student a few months after graduating with my Diplom [Master]) my professor said: "Well, your Diplom means that you are a qualified professional with all professional rights and duties as a chemist." I'd say the Diplom or Master is a quite formal certification...

Your question is simply ambiguous. You ask:

why an inexperienced PhD student should be allowed to review a research article?

This can be read as one of the following two different questions:

"Why an inexperienced researcher (that is by chance also a PhD student) be allow to review?"; or
"Why a PhD student, which I assume in advance to be inexperienced, because all PhD students are inexperienced, be allowed to review?".

For the first interpretation, the editor or program committee should take the inexperience of a reviewer into consideration. For the second interpretation, it lies on a false premise, and so is wrong.

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


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Do conferences accept entry of those who didn't register before the deadline?
A relatively big conference will take place in my neighborhood, but I haven't noticed of it until now. I'd like to attend some lectures done by young researchers who recently made a breakthrough.
Unfortunately, the deadline of registration is over. Thus, I have this question: do conferences accept entry of those who didn't register before the deadline?

There is nothing for it than asking the organizers, really. No one except the conference organizers / committee will be able to give you a definite answer. A polite request and explanation of your situation/motivation may be helpful.

Usually they will not check for badges on the door, so if there's just one or two talks you want to attend in particular...

@NickAyres, many conferences in my field have badge checkers at seminar room doors or on the hallways that have all the parallel sessions on them. It can be a bad idea to try to sneak in.

I have been at certain conferences that even checked IDs before people could enter. These are unusual, but they do exist, and you certainly couldn't sneak in there.

Most large scientific conferences will allow you to register at any time, even while the conference is running.  In this case the "deadline" is instead one or more deadlines for getting reduced rate registrations: they charge you more, the later that you register in order to get most to register early and have a good estimate of attendee numbers.
Some conferences, however, have size limits or require advance planning of other sorts, and so actually do have a strict deadline.  This is more often the case with small meetings than large ones, but the only way to know for certain for a particular conference is to check their website and, if it doesn't have information, contact the organizers.

I am not sure if it is completely ethical or not, but for meeting people you can just go there and see the couple of lectures or friends. As long as you are not using their food and etc. I know you might make couple of presenters very happy with your presence or feedback. Most conferences are very sensitive about making sure people do not by-pass registration on their first day. Dress professional and have business cards just in case, and you will be fine to go see friends.


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Is copy-editing/typesetting the only step in the publishing process where someone other than the author makes changes to the manuscript?
I have not published a scientific paper before. I am trying to understand the publishing process.
As far as I understand, no changes are made to the manuscript by anyone other than the author(s) until the paper is accepted, and only after the paper is accepted, copy-editors do formatting/grammar-checks/typesetting. Is this correct?
In particular, if I am correct, it means that the editor does not actually make any changes to the manuscript, but only makes decisions about whether it is accepted or not, and the reviewers also make no changes, but only give feedback.

Related (or possible duplicate): What does the typical workflow of a journal look like?

copy-editors do formatting/grammar-checks/typesetting an increasing number of academics get accustomed not to have any of that service done by journals and yet are happy to pay an "article processing charge". A sad state of affairs.

In general, you are correct: in general the editors and reviewers can only make suggestions for changes while only the author actually makes the changes.
In practice, however, good and thorough reviewers (and occasionally editors too) may often make highly specific suggestions for changes (e.g., "Delete this sentence", "Change phrase X into alternate phrase Y", "Cite papers A, B, and C"). Authors are strongly motivated to accept these changes in exactly or close to their stated form, for two reasons:

Doing so is likely to please the reviewer and increase chances of acceptance.
The reviewer often has a good suggestion and there's little reason to choose an alternate phrasing.

Finally, note that in some cases copy-editors do significantly more than just formatting/grammar-checks/type-setting.  In particular, for publications with very broad audiences, it is sometimes the case that the copyeditor will actually significantly modify the words and phases used by the authors in order to make the text more accessible and more in keeping with the publication's preferred "tone."  In this case, though, the authors always have a chance to review the suggested changes and make corrections in case they introduce errors, though objections to style may not be accepted by the journal.

"Change phrase X into alternate phrase Y" can actually end up meaning that your X was so confusing they misinterpreted it as Y, when you meant Z, so using the reviewer's exact wording is by no means guaranteed even if that's what they tell you to do.

It reads "only the editor actually makes the changes"

@Philosopherofscience Fixed the typo, thank you.

The procedure goes as follows:

The authors submit a paper
The editor decides whether the paper merits a review (is aligned to the journal topics, is well written, etc.). Then, he selects reviewers and sends the review requests.
The reviewers get back with comments. Usually, these comments/corrections/suggestions are mandatory.
The authors make these corrections, new tests/results, etc. asked by the reviewers and return the corrected paper.
Points 3-4 are repeated until all reviewers are satisfied, or the procedure reaches a maximum revision number (set by the journal usually) at which point the editor makes the call (accept/reject)
Upon acceptance, the authors submit the source files of the paper according to the journal rules (latex, docx, etc.).
A copy-editor formats the paper and tries to make it look better, checking for typos, grammar, etc. Then, the paper is sent back to the author for one final check. The copy-editor is usually not a specialist in the field, so some times the mathematical formulas could get screwed up.
The final paper goes for publication.

These are the steps according to my experience as author and reviewer in the field of electrical engineering.

Note that there isn't a 'back and forth' review process with the copy-editor... In one of my papers, in the first version some of the images were too small, I asked to enlarge them. They went overboard and it uses half a page on the final version.... Be complete and precise on the comments on that step!

@FábioDias that's quite worriesome. Copy-editors only give the author one shot at reviewing the proof? that's very strange; I would expect that the author would always get to review the final version.

I suppose that I could ask to submit a new version, but IMHO wasn't worth it. I didn't mean to imply that you can't change the paper anymore, just that this step is usually done only once, which is kind of counter-intuitive..

@FábioDias: When I got my first paper accepted, after we replied to the copy-editor, we got back an e-mail with an updated proof for final approval. I suppose they would change it more if I had said that it is necessary. So it probably depends on the journal.

Publishers send final PDF version of typeset manuscript to corresponding author for approval and addressing copyediting queries. If author feels correction are quite extensive and second review is needed, authors can request for revised version be sent to them for approval. Most of publishers would send revised version for author approval, if requested while sending correction of initial typeset proof.

authors: Валерий Maйоров


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My paper is not shown in my Google Scholar profile
It has been a month since my paper was accepted and published. The paper is not yet assigned to any issue in the journal, but it is published and available via springer.com. The paper is in the Google Scholar list of papers for the corresponding author, but it is not yet shown in my list of papers. When I search for it, no result is returned
What is the problem?

Google Scholar's automated indexing algorithm makes mistakes.  It can overlook some of your papers and it may also list some papers in your profile that are not yours.
To add a paper, press the "+" button and select "Add articles" to add articles off a list of possible matches Google found.  Or press "Add article manually" to enter title, authors, journal, etc., manually.
To delete a paper that's not yours, click the checkbox beside it and then click "Delete".

I have the same problem. I added the paper manually, but when I click on the paper link it does not take me to the actual link of the paper. I tried searching for the paper by pressing '+' and 'Add Articles', and it shows that the paper is already in my profile, which is confusing.

Google scholar takes quite some time to update the database. Anyway, you can always add your articles manually.

Why the corresponding author has the paper in its list?

Maybe you have a slightly different name in the article and your Google scholar.

Then why by searching its name it is not shown?

Probably because the corresponding author added it manually


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Motivation for getting good grades in graduate school
Okay, so in grade school, in high school and also in college, a long face from my parents would scare me, so it would in most part act as an extra motivator for me to get good grades. In grad school though, I always have the option of getting a job and fending for myself. If I want to learn something, I always have MOOCs covering me up. I can have the education without constantly thinking of being admitted to a good school or dealing with social pressure.
Now as I am into grad school, what specific points should I think of while studying? I really love studying, and enjoy the company of smart people; but sometimes I lose the extra impetus (which I used to get because of the fear of dealing with social embarrassment) in order to get good grades. Can someone just shed a different angle on the importance of getting good grades which does not include social stigma or the prospect of having a good job?

Good grades are part of a strong application to any scholarship you're eligible for.

possible duplicate: How important are my grades to the rest of my PhD career?

This is not so much an answer (hence the comment) but I think it's important to mention nevertheless; if you need to find reasons besides acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out your research, then you've missed the point of graduate studies IMHO.

I'm a PhD student, and a recruiter for Google contacted me through linkedIn, and asked for an informal transcript. It may not be a generality, but some people will apparently try to assess you through grades. So... it may be worth keeping them up. However, I completely agree with other posters who said that you should not need this motivation.

You are confusing cause and effect.  Good grades should never be a motivation for a truly good student (in graduate school or elsewhere).  Rather, good grades are a byproduct of engaging deeply with the material of a class.
When I was a graduate student, there were some classes that I was quite happy to get a B in, because they were far outside of my main area of work and taking them really stretched my mind; the B was a good reflection of the reality that I am not suited to be a theoretical mathematician, but that I had learned well from them regardless.  There were other classes that I would have been frankly ashamed to get anything other than an A in, because they were totally in my wheelhouse; if I had gotten even an A-, it would have reflected a real waste of my opportunity in that class.
In short: forget about grades in graduate school, except insofar as they are feedback on whether you are screwing up your education.

I agree with the message of this post especially given the way that the OP has framed the question, but I think the alternative perspective is that there are many real world consequences of grades (perhaps less so in grad school): scholarships, admissions to courses, ability to attract a good supervisor, job opportunities, etc. So they do have some intrinsic value independent of learning.

authors: Жамбыл Айтубай


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What to do if my former master’s advisors gave my PhD topic idea to other students?
At the beginning of the year, I sent an email to my former advisor to ask him for advice on PhD topics. I sent him several ideas, one of them was a four pages research proposal (with methodology and sources) on one of the topics. However, over the course of my research, I discovered this topic might be difficult to research because of foreign languages, so I told my advisor I put it aside. I had other research ideas but I realized all of them are even more difficult to work on.
Nevertheless, I pursued my research on the first topic and discovered that plenty sources were available in English, sufficiently enough that I could work on. At the same time, I have discovered that a less-advanced student - still doing her master - was working on a very similar topic for her MA since the beginning of the year (she is at the same institution).
I am afraid my advisor sent her the idea since I told him I put it aside because of language issues. I suspect this because we didn’t have a good relationship (I got a very good grade for my MA, but he has a very difficult personality. He only supervised seven people for PhD in 20 years and one of his students switched advisor), but due to of Covid, I could not meet other professors. That is why I wrote to him nevertheless. I know he also shared my initial idea with my co-advisor working at a different institution (who is working in the same field so even her can give it to someone else) in an email because I was in CCd.
I would really like to work on this topic for myPhD - I used the same methodology for my MA but the topic is different - but I am afraid I can't it anymore. I also applied to another PhD abroad without telling him (only my co-advisor, who advises me to apply and recommended me for it) but the topic I would work on is not interesting me and there are funding issues.
What can I do ? Since I told him I put it aside due to foreign languages, did he has the right to give it to someone else ? Did he was not supposed to protect my ideas as he was my advisor for 2 years? Can I send him an email to tell him without looking like I am the problem? (I guess it is normal for students to doubt between different PhD ideas).
Thanks

First, I don't see any misconduct from your advisor or the student. Ideas are free. You may be due an acknowledgement in any resulting paper, but it is impossible to judge from here.
You can certainly work on the same topic if you like, but will need to respond if you are beaten to publishable results. Perhaps you can extend those even.
But, you also need to satisfy the demands of any new advisor. They may be interested it guiding you as you work on this topic or not. It is pretty hard to work independently toward a degree, especially under such conditions.
I suggest that you prioritize the long term over the short. If you get a doctorate then things open for you. Not just the old ideas you once had, which may still be viable or not, but new directions as well.
What your position is for co-authorship or acknowledgement depends on a lot of things. The other person has to avoid claims of plagiarism, but suggesting a problem that you don't intend to work on is fairly weak as those things go. Now if you proposed solutions, it would be different, of course.
Figure out how to get a degree and leave the smaller questions aside for the moment.

Thank you for your answer. Yes it is true that I should focus on the outcome and not the present time. It is just that I feel very stupid. I gave my idea, said I put it aside and finally I want to work on it again…


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Submitted to journal, rebuttal period now ongoing but no feedback from referees yet
I submitted a paper to a journal in January. According to the journal web site, the rebuttal period is the present week of February 20 to 24. It's February 20 everywhere in the world and actually February 21 in parts of the world already, but I received no feedback from the referees yet. I checked my email, including the junk folder, it's not there. None of my coauthors mentioned receiving anything either. I logged into the journal's submission system, and again I see no indication of any referee feedback being available -- I've been logging in to the system now and then, and there has been no new information since the day I submitted the paper.
I'm worried my paper has somehow been "forgotten", and unless I take action now, deadlines will be missed and the paper won't be published, assuming of course it would have been accepted. Maybe they'll "remember" to send me the feedback only on the last day of the deadline, and then I'll have to rush the writing of the rebuttal, and be at a disadvantage since others may have had the full week to do it. On the other hand, contacting the editor may (or may not -- which is why I'm asking) break anonymity and irrevocably taint my paper.
How should I proceed? Should I contact the editor? If I do, should I do it from an email which reveals my name/affiliation, or create a throwaway account? Should I mention my paper's ID/title specifically, or just say that I submitted a paper and didn't receive feedback yet?
EDIT: moving some information from the comments to the main question.
The journal in question follows a hybrid journal/conference model, so they have strict deadlines for publication of each volume so they can be presented in the conference later this year (whose date, of course, is already set in stone). The journal/conference website pretty clearly states February 20 to 24 as the rebuttal period.
Also worth mentioning is that, if I contacted the editor directly with my name, they would know exactly which paper I submitted.
UPDATE: referee feedback was just released. Thank you all for your comments.

Is this submitted for potential publication in a special issue?

@Dawn please see extra information in a comment to Buffy's answer.

@athrowawayaccount All relevant information should be in the post, not comments. You can [edit] to include it.

Does this venue advertise double-blind or triple-blind review? The concern with emailing the editor would only be a concern if the review is triple-blind. I

Yes, you need to contact the editor. I think you have likely misinterpreted something about the "rebuttal period". Perhaps they were writing about "typical" schedules for such things, but it is even possible that no reviewers have even been selected yet, making rebuttal impossible.
From January to now isn't very long. If the editors aren't employees of the publisher, but academics, much of January may be vacation weeks, which some people use for vacation. And most of the reviewers are probably academics in any case.

The journal in question follows a hybrid journal/conference model, so they have strict deadlines for publication of each volume so they can be presented in the conference later this year (whose date, of course, is already set in stone). The journal/conference website pretty clearly states February 20 to 24 as the rebuttal period.

As for contacting the editor, any comments on my other questions regarding how to avoid breaking anonymity?

In my field, there is no expectation of anonymity with the editor, only the referees.

If they expect rebuttal without feedback they have failed in their basic task. Ask for clarification and for when you might get feedback. Something may have happened that caused a failure of communication.

@Dawn also worth mentioning is that, if I contacted the editor directly with my name, they would know exactly which paper I submitted. Unsure if that changes anything.

Echoing @Dawn, yes, editors know who you are. It is only reviewers who are anonymous and they may know who you are as well except in double blind review. It is usually the reviewers that are anonymous, not the authors.


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If I saw a sentence, kept the words in a certain order to make it more succinct, is it plagiarism?
This is a sentence I read from a previous student's thesis:

Chemical products were measured by loading x μL of reaction A on a gel
(3-10% w/v, depending on your need and availability of machine)
containing 0.02% (v/v) compound B (Acme corporation), and run for ~45
min at 130 V (~10V/cm) in Buffer B (list of compounds). Results were imaged with tool C and analyzed with software D.

I did the same experiment, but with different quantities of reagents and the sentence in my thesis is:

Chemical products were measured by loading y μL of reaction A on a 3%
gel containing 0.02% (v/v) compound C (Beta corporation), and run for
~40 min at 200 V in Buffer B (list of compounds). Results were imaged with tool C and analyzed with software D.

I thought using the sentence structure and condensing it was okay when drafting my thesis because I only ran one type of essay throughout my research and it worked fine. I thought it was not plagiarism because my content was different, but as I'm now about to submit and I look back, I have different thoughts. My professors and assessors didn't flag this when they reviewed my thesis, nor did our school's plagiarism tracker... so I'm not sure what to do.

I think you misunderstand plagiarism. If you take the work of others, no matter the words, and attribute it to yourself instead of citing it, then you commit plagiarism. It isn't about the words, or their order, it is about the underlying ideas.
If you are describing your own experiment and use similar words to describe your result, then it isn't plagiarism. You aren't claiming that their work is yours.
However, since you are doing the "same" experiment as that of another, it would be proper to cite the earlier work. This is a further protection against any claim of plagiarism.
It is understood that science advances on a web of connections to earlier work. We cite, not just to honor the earlier scientists, but to assure that any result can be examined within the full context of its development.

However, the experiment being described in the specific excerpt quoted is so standard, that it would be almost impossible to track down the original citation. Its something that any biology undergrad would do 100 times in practical classes, and may even have done at high-school.

@IanSudbery Well, OK, but the student should cite the source used. "I repeated the experiment of [somebody] and [someone-else], (1889) Chemical products were measured by loading x μL of reaction A on a gel (3-10% w/v, ..." and accompany it with the appropriate bibliography entry.

@BobBrown Theoretically, yes, but citing the first person to run an electrophoretic gel every time you did it would be like citing the first person to use a for loop every time an algorithm included one.

@IanSudbery I wasn't clear; I'm  sorry. The student is using a prior student's thesis, and should cite that thesis.

@BobBrown It was the same experiment by name (i.e. analyzing PCR amplicons on a gel), but not the same experiment by protocol (i.e. ran a different percentage of gel for a different time, voltage) and this student was not involved in my work at all. Since the meaning of the sentence changed and I can't credit him for PCR, I thought this was fine. Does this logic flow or am I missing something?


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Correcting mistakes in PhD thesis that examiners missed
I finished my thesis defense and my examiners recommended minor corrections, all of which are based in the lit review and results chapters. However, after they approved the corrections I made, I spotted mistakes they overlooked in my materials chapter. These mistakes were accidental and they included things like incorrect amounts of chemicals and ambiguous directions. These are things that I have intimate knowledge of. Before submitting to examiners, when I spotted overlooked mistakes in other results chapters, I only told my advisor and corrected them with his OK. I thought it would be embarrassing to confess to examiners that I had made silly mistakes when my destiny was in their hands. Why would anyone make an exam harder than it needs to be?
In hindsight, should I have told them about these mistakes I corrected even though they only specified corrections needed in other places? Correcting descriptions of methods I used isn't going to change my results. I've read online articles that recommend students not to change parts of thesis that examiners don't ask you to change. However is there a chance that I could get called out in the future, while perusing my thesis, for making changes that they did not approve?

"I thought it would be embarrassing to confess to examiners that I had made silly mistakes " I would have viewed it as a good professional attitude to have corrected them and added them to the list of corrections.  We all make mistakes, it is no big deal, the best recipe for mistakes is thinking you don't make them or being unwilling to admit and correct them (which can put you off checking for them).

Lol at the idea that your examiners are perusing your thesis in the future! (Not to mention that they would notice changes in amounts of chemicals!)

It's your responsibility to make sure that your work is correct.

Yes you should have sent them a summary of changes. No it’s not a big deal. They almost certainly wouldn’t have looked at it, and they’re very unlikely to have judged you badly for it anyway, everyone catches errors when they reread stuff.

In a dissertation you are unlikely to be "called" in the future, assuming you made corrections and didn't add errors (unlikely). If your advisor is knowledgeable in your field and approves of what you did you should be fine.
It is likely that the examiners just missed some things that should have been fixed. It's good that you caught them. They aren't perfect, of course.
Note that the work is yours. It doesn't belong to your examiners.


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Found mistake in analyzing experimental data after submitting PhD thesis; what should I do?
While flipping through my thesis to look up details in writing a postdoc application, I realized that I messed up my reaction rate quantification of one protein covalently bonding with another on a gel. The error I made here is that I assigned too large an intensity value for an unreacted protein control.
So here's the thing: I've already submitted my thesis to the library and none of my supervisors or examiners caught this mistake. For instance, I had to really pause and look close at the bands itself to notice that the unreacted band was actually smaller in size before going back to review my own work. Now this result was part of a bigger experiment that simply didn't work and will not be published. This was one interesting result that meant to show how two parts of a protein reacted similarly, despite one being heavier. If this result was not there, it would not upend the key conclusion of my thesis, although I would have 2/3 less of a figure.
What should I do at this point? Should I tell my supervisor immediately or file a correction? Or should I just go on with my life with the notion that no one will likely read my thesis? I feel like my advisor is glad to have me out of the lab, but I don't want to be accused of fabricating data years down the line.

Has the degree been awarded? Or at least finalized?

I passed my defense, been awarded my degree, but haven't had my graduation ceremony yet.

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25804/what-to-do-when-you-discover-a-mistake-in-the-archived-copy-of-your-phd-thesis?rq=1

If you assume/hope that nobody cares about your thesis, what did you spend the last few years doing with your life??

@Sneftel to get the degree. some people just need that PhD degree for a teaching position, for example. (also, it's my current belief that it's indeed the case that most PhD thesis are not read in the future, perhaps only 1-2 interested individuals)

Whenever you are tempted to shrug your shoulders at a scientific inaccuracy. Please remember the oil drop experiment. I am not saying that you will be as famous as Feynman, or that your experiment has the same impact but... its worth keeping in mind, that a grossly wrong answer that was published first can take years to fix and cause problems.

Not to worry. Things like that happen. Tell your adviser.
Your university may have a way to add a note to your dissertation on file explaining the (small) correction. If so, take advantage of it. If not, count on the fact that it's very unlikely that years from now someone will read your thesis and draw conclusions from this data.

Ye, but perhaps someone will read it in the near future and get confused by the error, or even waste many hours assuming the dissertation is correct. It would be considerate to do something about it. If the university does not have any way of adding a note, I think OP should think of another way, e.g. put it on their homepage, or publish the correction as a one-page article on a pre-print server.

If it is such a small error, just write an extra piece of paper titled "Errata" in which you describe the error very shortly and what would be the correct thing and put it in the thesis in your library. Alternatively, put it on your homepage. Honestly, if it is such a small error, akin to a typo, no one really cares, but rather expects it to occur. NO single thesis is without these small errors! I would regard myself already as happy, if there would be not more than one of these errors per page, which makes a lot of errors for a 120 page or so thesis. Because that is, what will happen, when you read your thesis again. You will certainly find the next error. And then the next one. And another one too. And so on. So stop reading your thesis! :)

@ Iridium, thank you for your invaluable feedback. I might have to agree with some of the commenters below that it may not be a small typo. I re-measured my bands lately and found that my conclusion, in the text, remains the same but a few points in the graph I displayed as a figure will shift slightly. If it's not as small of an error as you understood, would your suggestion above stay the same or change?

Essentially I would still say the same. Science is a human activity. Every human activity produces errors. It is thus nothing special. Scientific papers are not meant to contain everlasting truths. Math papers might be the only exception, but even they only tell you the current state of affairs. Galois did invent group theory, but he possibly would not consider this himself from reading a modern group theory text.

Science is in constant development and improvement, either by the author of an article or by his readers following up on his research topic. Today there is too much time wasting about meaningless ethics discussions, when the time should better be spent to create new research instead of always running in circles around old one. Move on. Let history clean up the messy parts. You did your best, at this special place and time, now do something new. Try to learn from your errors and instead of correcting them try not to repeat them in the future. That's enough.

There are definitely provisions like this in place at all academic institutions.
This is especially the fact that your error is NOT A TYPO but a CHANGE IN VALUE which means a slightly different outcome, as you pointed out will reflect in the figure - the others on here have not recognized the type of error, but just dismissed it as trivial.
DON'T assume that no one will read it or just let it fly and hope for the best is a good attitude given the TYPE OF ERROR - as explained above
Now that you have noticed the error, write it down and what the new outcome would be had the error been captured. Then formulate this in a correction to thesis (ERRATA) section as an appendment, and then speak to your ex-supervisor to get the course of action needed to fix the submission.
Doing this is a better course of action, especially if you're planning a post-doc position that relies on credibility and honesty of academic research.  period!

Thank you for your insightful comment. How soon do you think I need to reach out to my supervisor to put up this errata, especially if my thesis is currently embargoed? Would you say sooner the better or when this piece of data is needed for publishing?

I am a bit worried that your response to having made an invalid assumption is to think:

should I just go on with my life with the notion that no one will likely read my thesis

What did you just spend the last 4 years (or more) of your life doing? Your thesis topic is (in theory) the culmination of years of work learning how to apply the scientific method rigorously. If your hope is that no one will read it.... What have you done with your time? Most of the professors that I know in biochemistry post doctorate work, and into the majority of the career was related to the work they did in their thesis.
Why am I worried about this?
2 Reasons.

What have you been wasting your life on that you hope no one will read your thesis? It should be a major accomplishment that you are proud of, that will help you as you start your career as a scientist.

As you apply to your first job with a PhD, Every single person you interview with will want to talk about your thesis work. It is the capstone of your PhD.

When you talk to them about your thesis, which do you think sounds better?
"I made a mistake in my thesis, but I assumed no one would notice it and am glad that it is over. You should hire me because that is what I bring to the table... A person  that makes mistakes and hopes no one will notice".
Or "While going over my PhD thesis, after it had been accepted by my universities library, I realized that I had made a mistake. And I then went thru the (however challenging process it is) to file a correction. I am not perfect, but I am honest, I admit when I am wrong and fix my mistakes." It becomes a talking point that you can use when someone asks you "Have you ever made a mistake and what did you do?"
What am I saying?
I don't want to be judgy... But I worry that your question was "Should I hide the mistake I made, or not" instead of "How will this mistake effect me/ what can I do to mitigate the impact it has". It makes me worried because one of these is an ethical question: Should I be dishonest and hide a mistake I made... Or should I not. And one is the question of someone who made a mistake and wants to know what they can do to mitigate the impact it has on their career.
At the end of the day, making a mistake on your thesis, while it would have been better to not make a mistake, is not a big deal. You followed your schools process and multiple people looked at your paper and didn't see the mistake. You are at the start of your career no one expects you to be perfect. But ignoring the mistake and hoping that no one will notice is a big deal... I can guarantee that your thesis will get at least cursory glance by anyone who is really interested in hiring you as a postdoc.

Thank you for your thorough comment. I just want to point out that "go on with my life with the notion that no one will likely read my thesis" is something that many former lab members and non-scientists suggested I do. I never said I agreed with that, nor is that my default mindset. If it was, this post would not exist. I was only trying to show the different opinions I have received thus far in order to set the context for this lively discussion.

If I were you, I'd "take control" of your thesis by uploading the source files (assuming it's in a text-based source format like LaTeX) to GitHub or similar, put a label on the version that got published by the institution, then make a new commit with the corrections and put a description in a CHANGES.md file.  Get the issue out in the open - this won't be the last time you make a mistake in public, and dealing with it openly & honestly, but not necessarily making a big deal about it, is a good habit to get into.
You might need to make sure you have the right to publish your own work like this, by the way, by checking with your institution.

I like your idea. In a time when living documents are the norm, and global inter-connectivity grants us information instantaneously, I was surprised to read OP's question. In the world of software (and by extension in our daily lives), patches are released regularly and there are processes for keeping everything up-to-date. I don't see why academia can't adapt as well. :-)

@Ken Williams I don't really have my own website and my thesis will be embargoed for some time. I'm not entirely sure this option is possible.

@cambelot the first issue isn’t a problem, a site like GitHub is free and would be all you need.  The second issue may well put the kibosh on it, of course.

Thank you all for taking time to offer your insightful feedback. I've re-measured my bands more carefully this time and found that while a few points on my graph will change slightly but the conclusion I wrote in the text is not at all affected. So if I were to issue an errata, it would just be for the graph in the figure itself.
While some of you here have encouraged me to be proactive in reaching out to my supervisor, some of my friends with PhDs suggested I leave it for now, as the thesis is under embargo, and bring it up to my advisor when/if this figure will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. While I am genuinely concerned about how this may affect my career and want to mitigate any harm, I have heard people say that very few people read thesis and focus on published journal articles instead. What do you think of taking this approach? Does it matter when I reach out to my supervisor (i.e. asap vs. later)?
I'm not too sure what it will take for me to add an errata, but I'm not sure if my supervisor will overreact or if this may cause some drama in a  department that he has already left. Please let me know your thoughts.


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Does presenting your work at conferences cause your related publications to be cited more?
Does presenting at conferences increase the number of citations to the work presented at the conference?
I am limiting the scope of this question to disciplines where conference presentations are not publications and are not usually cited.
Statistics or evidence of some kind would be appreciated.

If you aren't active at conferences, it will be more difficult / take more time for others to see and understand your work in the context of theirs. And, the opposite occurs - the more you understand how your work impacts others, the easier it becomes to frame your work and articles in terms that are important (and more likely to be cited) by others. No clue on how to get relevant statistics in this case unless there are various folks who volunteer to be a control group for the next decade or so...

I suspect the answer to this question (if it really can be answered in any kind of a conclusive way, of course) is field and project-dependent, even if we're just considering meetings without published proceedings. In biomedical meetings, at least, one presentation may correspond to at least several different publications at varying stages of completion.

I imagine there is a positive effect.  Probably a little more than based on the number of people in room (maybe affected by people at least scanning the abstract.)  I expect it is pretty minor though.  Most cites probably come from lit searches.  I guess you could do some study where you interviewed some paper writers and asked them what prompted the cites (I bet mostly you hear lit search, not saw at conference).  But sure there is a benefit.  I have even provoked someone to doing a specific study to follow up on me.  So that came from the conference for sure (had a sexy topic).

Of course it is a tradeoff versus staying home and getting more work done too.  If all you do is give talks, you're not progressing the work either.  But some amount of going to talks is worth it for multiple reasons ("reward", learning, spreading the word, finding collaborators, etc.).

Yes, most definitely. The simple reason is that at conference it is relatively easy to pick up on the development of a certain field or ones own interest. And naturally, this leads to a bias towards those studies presented.

First, consider the simple thought experiment that if a) people tend to cite work they've seen/heard about and b) people pay attention during conference presentations then it follows that there must be some positive effect of presenting at conferences. Of course, this isn't very helpful to answering your question.
I don't think that it is possible to answer this with statistics or evidence, because any sort of study would only be able to show correlation between presentations and citations. And surely there is some sort of correlation: consider that prominent researchers often attend conferences because they may win awards from the conference, they are more likely to give keynote presentations, or they may be involved in the organizing/steering committees.
The actual direct effect of gaining a citation because of a presentation you gave must be extremely small. Consider that in the audience you present to, probably only a small amount are directly working on the same problem as you. And if they're already working on the same problem, they're most likely going to cite you anyway, regardless of whether they hear your talk or not.
Last, I'll offer my personal opinion that the benefit from giving a presentation is not that it increases your citations, but rather that it offers a networking opportunity. If you give a memorable talk, especially one that people in different subfields find interesting, they will remember your name and your work, even if they don't cite you.