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Graduation rates
And so, at the faculty senate meeting (at a large public university) an administrator is gloating how the graduation rates have soared by anywhere from 5 to 50% (at different colleges of the university) within a short span of a few years (1-3). This came after the administration made very strong pronouncements that "we must increase graduation rates..." I sarcastically suggested we patent the method of getting such a great surge in success rate. All other faculty were silent and it appears to me that this is a national trend. Nobody seems to care about quality.
Surely, to have these graduation rates surge, some variables need to change. None of them did -- same poorly prepared students, same faculty and no revolutionary education discoveries. Conclusion -- good old grade inflation and social promotion is the cause, but here prompted by a snap of fingers of the corporate executives and executed gladly by compliant faculty. Am I missing something?
Questions: How is it that faculty (and tenured faculty at that) seem to not give a hoot about the quality of education, rather seem to be perfectly content with this corporate drive to convert universities into blatant diploma mills? Why are students willing to pay for a piece of paper that has no backing?
Any serious explanations?

It would be great to hear from people who dislike my questions.

I can't see a real question in there, it's just a rant. Unless your question is "why do less-good universities still get students"?

@scaahu  Hope it is better now?

@nengel  Is a special paragraph titled "questions" enough to point to questions?

No. I can read, that was not the issue. The problem is that those "questions" presuppose a large part of the answer (e.g. that faculty do not care about quality of education), so there is no way to answer them other than "yes, your anger is valid".

@nengel  It would be great to hear from people who contradict my assumptions. That would be one way to answer it. p.s. I do not get mad, I get even.

LOW graduation rate, Low interest to study there. Low income-

-1: Your story is hard to follow due to unusual grammatical structures and excessive parentheticals. You’ll be much more comprehensible if you write in a straightforward manner. Your questions also seem like a complete non-sequitur from the preceding story.

Ay my institution, administration lowered standards, the faculty union filed a lawsuit, and that court case was lost. Nowadays, administration has legal carte blanche to do whatever they want. Faculty can't stay enraged forever for nothing. See Ginsburg, The Fall of the Faculty: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education

When the Dean of the engineering school retired at the Uni I was at - he was clearing out his filing cabinets and came across a final exam from 30 years ago - when it was looked at they realised that the current final year students would not be able to solve the questions : too long and too challenging - but, they say standards have not changed...

An improvement in graduation rates in a short time could be accomplished by better identification of students who have met credit requirements or are missing a class or two and helping them finish up.

I am not clear that this is grade inflation. A lot of my students' matriculation is driven by finances. Perhaps they are better able to finance their education in the current economy climate and are therefore completing more rapidly.

It's difficult for individuals to resist societal trends.
The grade inflation is in no way driven only by colleges seeking to make a quick buck - they are responding to a higher demand for graduates. The "knowledge economy" plays a role in this, but also employer degree inflation - it seems like many companies these days will only hire people with a university degree for jobs that were in the past done by high school graduates. In essence, these days, in terms of getting a job, a college degree is the new high school diploma. (Which answers your question of why students pay for them.)
That means that you now have not only the top few students of a year, but a much larger group to educate. The average high schooler probably didn't get massively smarter though (but probably has to work more hours on the side than in the past to pay to be there), so you necessarily have to lower your standards a bit. That doesn't mean that the degree becomes 'useless': they will still learn things in these four years, just not quite as many as a class made only of valedictorians would.
That's for the societal trend that drives these developments. Individual faculty see their individual students, having taken on large debt, struggling to get somewhere. Now, they can give them a failing grade, or not.
They probably feel compassion for their students. They are surely aware of the general trends, and realize that the neighboring universities one or two places up or down the rankings are giving similar students a pass. Why would they want to punish these students in front of them in particular, that they have grown to know and like, and condemn them to a life of burger-flipping, when they are no less deserving than their peers?
They also probably think their university (and their research, which has its own inflationary pressures forcing them to concentrate less on their teaching) has value, and don't want to see it close due to lack of funds because no students want to risk studying there any more. If the faculty don't act as a cohesive group (insert herding cats joke), an individual faculty member faces additional pressure because they are suddenly giving worse average grades to the same students than their fellow teachers,  which leads to awkward questions from students and the administration. Faculty are as susceptible to peer pressure as anyone, and somewhat likely to think that maybe they are doing something wrong in that situation, not everyone else.

+1 I feel sad but I think what you say is quite true.

+1 so sad but so true. I wish that you had references also.

@SSimon: hah, me too. I have no idea how accurate this is - I'm in CS, I don't have the social science background to even know how to evaluate that - it just feels like it's true.

@nengel, thank you for an attempt at answering this rather complex question. I am a tad surprised that a few of you want to kill it. I think it is a question of fundamental importance. Surely universities are taking on more and more students which (many colleagues) know will not make it, even after reduction of standards. To my query, an administrator replied that "students have a right to fail". What about patient having a right to die, even though you know a way (however hard) to save them. Do we have ethical obligations to the society.

@nengel Would one be happy to be operated on by a physician who had gotten their diploma with reduced or non-existent standards? In this respect, do universities of today differ in quality from internet diploma mills from a decade ago? Surely, we can pretend that these are issues one cannot discuss, yet if we do not, things will become even worse than they are now. In my research, only 30% of random US population (school to PhD diplomas) can add 1/2+1/3. Is that something to brush off and wink away?

@Rado: That's ironic, just yesterday I was reading about how medical entrance exams are getting harder and harder. Because there are more applicants, the top universities, and the most highly attractive fields, actually have an even better top bracket. This answer is all about average unis and average-interest fields. Harvard doesn't have a problem getting a class of valedictorians!

@Nengel the example University I used has its share of Nobel prize winners among its faculty in a number of fields; it is a huge public university. Yes, I hear this "argument" that "because our top achievers are so good, we cannot be that bad..."  Then you look at the winners of math Olympiads and realize that a) A number of them are increasingly home schooled, and b) almost all of them are first generation Americans -- their parents coming from "former Soviet Union", China, India, and all.  More than half of Mathematics PhD's are foreign educated, and not coming from our public schools/univer

@ In other words, tiny size places like Harvard are getting their feed not from educational institutions that are supported by public money. Thus the question arises as to whether such huge expenditure on our education is justified, if all it does is churns the diplomas. I am horrified by the fact that these kinds of discussions are a taboo in our society, not unlike an incestuous or abusive family where the abuses are a ferboten topic. It is similar in education ("research") publications that seem only concerned about feeling good, and self-praises. You have hinted a bit at the causes.

@Rado: it hasn't been my experience at all that "these discussions are taboo". I didn't come up with this answer based on personal observations from three semesters of grading after all. Maybe you are talking to very different people, or maybe (as happened in this question) you are going into these discussions with such an aggressive attitude that people don't want to engage with you?

@Nengel, after 30+ years of teaching at (mostly) top universities across three continents and about 1/3 of my research publications in education, you would think I know what I am talking about. I have heard of these deep conversations about the taboo topics but I do not remember ever hearing them at faculty or similar meetings. And that is 30+ years we are talking about. But since you have different experiences, kindly direct me to the place where these free and deep conversations about quality of our education are happening. I clearly need to frequent such places. I would definitely appreciat

@Nengel Do not take me wrong, I appreciate your input, even though I may not find it completely honest -- at least you are engaging. The others chickened out and shut the conversation down with various excuses. I have an ongoing monograph with a reputable publisher and one of the chapters is on what I term "commercial education". As for my "aggression", I wish it were true;  these matters require aggressive approach. Else, your characterization of "aggressive" confirms my claim of taboo. I am sure the Queen would consider an attempt to shake hands with her an aggression/status quo challenge.

@Rado: I don't know what the queen (which one?) has to do with anything, but I'm sure it would help not to go into conversations implying that the other person is uncaring and venal and ethically lacking. Principle of charity? Humanity? One of these. When your first move is to attack, of course you will only get defensive reactions.

As for the where, I've discussed the topic/seen it discussed both in individual conversation and social media. I'd think for an exploratory conversation (since you profess to seek understanding) you'd have more luck over drinks at a conference social event than at a faculty meeting.

@nengel, sorry if you felt I was "attacking" you. I of course have nothing against you, since you are only a string of 0 and 1's to me. But nonetheless we at least had some conversation about the topic that has been bugging me. We did not get anything on the account of ETHICS which is my main issue, but life is not perfect.

@Rado: I'm not actually faculty, I'm still a PhD student, so I didn't feel you were attacking me personally, just that you were being tremendously unfair to people like my advisor who I've generally found to be good, honest people doing their best. As for ethics, unless you literally work for a university that would give your cat a degree if it paid the tuition, I don't think that deciding to go down in degree quality a little is actually immoral. There's nothing inherently unethical about being a not-so-good university - they can't all be at the top.

@Rado: of course, there are fields where it's more of an issue than others (medicine, civil engineering, maybe law?). But in these jobs where lives literally depend on how good you are, I don't think they just let the fresh graduates loose to do their worst. And what's worse, a poor nurse or no nurse at all? It's far from being the kind of clear-cut situation where a "what is WRONG with you" attitude is warranted.

@nengel I did not think you were faculty nor that most of the stack exchange people are. The reactions of faculty and non faculty to these kinds of inquiries are often recognizably distinct. I am afraid that I disagree with you on the point of little slips of quality and then OK for some fields, not so OK for others. Standards and quality are RIGID categories, otherwise they do not exist.

@nengel As for the honesty of faculty, sure I have not heard a single faculty member (and throughout my career I have known no less than a thousand) that would not claim to be the greatest educator and the most ethical educator. Yet, we have a population that is exceedingly illiterate and innumerate, with or without diplomas. Who educated them? A faculty who has tenure must have been either a) at a university that does not pay attention to teaching or b) he must have engaged in wholesale social promotion of students. I knew no exceptions to these two possibilities.

@nengel Big part of the problem is that there is no QUALITY control in education. Nobody checks whether students acquired any knowledge throughout their schooling and, most importantly, whether they acquired the most important ability, namely ability to think. For high school students it is clear to everyone that (barring a handful of schools) this is the most wasteful expenditure of taxpayer money one can think of. Twelve years of schooling and, for the most part nothing to show for it. Very similar situation is with pre PhD "education"... GRE, oh man, major problem! Hell, why???

"Ability to think" is untestable. For the rest, as someone who did high school & undergraduate in France, where there are nationwide standards & exams set by the government and yet the problems are exactly the same, I can only say you are very wrong about that. Also, source on illiteracy rates going up??


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Gamified course: how to deal with the massive amount of grading needed without using specific software?
I've been trying to give gamification a go for a while, but I'm struggling on how exactly to implement it.
I teach an introduction to programming course, and as I'm part of a team including a couple other teachers and we have too many students, our course is usually divided in two parts: one teacher explains the concepts and then I help students solve problems and exercises. That is 2 classes a week. When the semester is about to end, we have an exam (actually, 3, as the students have 3 chances to pass the exam). No additional activities, no projects, etc., as we usually have about 50 students to grade each semester.
I'm already trying a flipped classroom approach by providing videos they can watch at home before they come and try to solve exercises during my class, but still would like to add some gamification. However, I'm struggling on how to propose this to the rest of the teaching staff.
I've read a couple of books on gamification, watched videos and read about other teacher's experiences online, and I pretty much have an idea of what I'd like to do, and one of those things is replace grades with "experience points" and levels. The more XP points you get, the more levels you gain. Students that reach a certain level will pass the course.
The problem is: how are XP points awarded? In most cases I've read about, every activity is awarded XP, be it exercises the students solve, youtube videos they have to watch, projects they make, quizzes, etc. The thing is: how do you grade (or award XP) all of that? If every activity has to be reviewed by the teacher it would add a huge burden on the staff. Also, when students do their regular exercises, as they are so many, it would be impossible to give them individual feedback on each exercise, so those would not earn them any XP.
Maybe some online quizzes could help, but with programming there's a limitation there, it's not as simple as throwing multiple choice questions (at some point they will need to be coding). I know there are a couple sites that offer programming challenges with automated tests, but then there's the thing of knowing which student actually attempted to solve them, and which ones succeeded (I should add that I really need to keep my gamification proposal at $0 budget, as I know there is no way the administration will pay for software licenses or any equipment other than what we already have).
I thought of a scenario where the teacher would be some kind of "game master" and the students are trying to level up their characters by defeating "monsters" (exercises) and maybe working in guilds (peer reviewing their work). I pretty much even have a story created and some other details I'd like to add. But I can't do any of that unless we increase a good deal our work time so we get to grade students on many more activities other than just the 3 exams we already have.
So how does everyone else deal with this amount of grading?

How many students are involved here? How many "instructors" including TAs, graders, and such?

Thanks for the input. The "not teaching weird" is what I've been doing for the past 10 years, that's why I want to try something different. Usually the young students we get (freshmen) are not always too keen on learning and more keen on passing the course. I'd like to try something else to motivate them and get them involved during the course and not just 2 weeks before their exam. It's not an easy task, I can say that for sure!

@CJ59, Actually, the teacher behind the movie was Jaime Escalante, and he didn't have to deal with 100 students.

@buffy we usually have around 50 students and about 3 teachers (one for each class -theory and practice classes- and one more helping out and assisting the other two).

What subject area? You might be able to use a program like the open source WeBWorK to help with grading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeBWorK

Most gamification experiences I've seen involve a lot of automatic grading. For example, some gamified activities are in fact Moodle quizzes in disguise. For a programming curse where students are expected to actually code, something like Hackerrank may help.

I'm a former gaming engineer (many years ago), now college CS lecturer. Personally, I resist attempts at "gamification" of courses -- in short, it seems to me like a corruption of the gaming concept, and something that weakens both sides of the enterprise.
It sounds like you're struggling to get your arms around a desired major overhaul of the course. I think that many "reform" proponents would suggest that you take smaller steps, trying out some small single component in a course, assessing how well that works, and then iterating. Also consider: Will future courses use this gamification approach? Or should you be preparing your introductory students for the expectations of "normal" college courses with which they will be interacting in the future?
My top suggestion, as a first step, would be to work in some programming assignments which the instructors do manually grade throughout the semester. Feel free to make the assignments fairly simple and standard; directly from the book is fine. Have programs that take obvious input and output some kind of deterministic result -- write a simple batch file to compile and help test the functionality. Run them through an automated plagiarism checker (Stanford Moss). Also read the code and give feedback/points for proper style. I do this for ~8 assignments per semester, ~25 students per section. If you have double the students, then maybe halve the number of assignments.
Personally I think that you've got to commit to some kind of personal assessment of actual code for a proper programming course. Students that don't get that and wind up in my programming 2 course very much struggle at that level. Yes, this is more work than just one or two exams alone. But if students can't write code, then you should probably fail them, and if you want to think of those grades as your academic "gamification", then maybe that will help you out.

This doesn't really depend on gamifying the course, but it would work there as with any flipped classroom situation. I'll assume here that you will drop most "lecturing" and students will "cover the material" when not face to face using some combination of printed and other materials, including, perhaps, interactive materials. Students are, without limit, allowed to work together when exploring course materials and will even have access to some exercises that they might use to help them know when the "get it".
The face time in the course will be taken almost entirely with activities that produce some "product", a program or an essay or a proof of a theorem - anything. These products are what is graded and you can use a wide range of techniques to do so, from formal marking to just counting up successfully completed small tasks or having a program pass a test.
Note that you can reduce the grading by a factor of two by having students always work in pairs. Pairs share a grade on their paired tasks. Pairs rotate frequently and do peer assessments to help solve the free rider problem. Peer assessment must, however, be made non threatening. A simple peer assessment form asks for (a) your own primary contribution to the work and (b) your partner's primary contribution. It doesn't ask for a "quality assessment" but for a contribution. Of course, you sometimes get "none" for an answer, which gives you a bit of evidence that will accumulate over many interactions.
Sometimes you form the pairs, possibly randomly and possibly by design, and sometimes you let them choose partners. Of course, you need to teach students how to both be engaged in a paired situation so that no one is really allowed to be a spectator. Two minds on every task.
Pairing has other, more important, benefits than just reducing grading effort, however. It has been shown that students will, when allowed, and especially when paired, answer one another's questions. It isn't often the case that you have a strong student who dominates a weak one (switching helps avoid this) but that one will have a key insight before the other and can share it. In a lab where everyone works alone, it has been observed that many students raise their hand for help and simply wait, passively, until it arrives. Unless there are a lot of lab assistants, it may take a long time for that help to come. In paired situations this rarely occurs, so instructor time is better used and will be focused on more important issues.
You can manage the data produced simply by having each pair, for an individual interaction produce an index card with both names and the name of the task. They can produce individual cards for the peer and self assessment. You can mark outcomes on the cards and can also use them to make notations when you interact with an individual pair. These are collected and collated at the end of the exercise.
If the course meets for a total of 45 hours over the term, you could have up to 90 such bits of information for each student, assuming you swap pairs every half hour.
More than two working together is less efficient and often leaves someone out, but four people who work together, but always pairing can be made to work on larger projects.
For a complete discussion of pair programming specifically see the book Pair Programming Illuminated.

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Can an author claim sole authorship if the hired statistician writes half of the paper?
The paper in question is an analysis of government statistics to answer a question in sociology. The analysis was applied to a single government survey of a large population.
The sociologist has limited knowledge of statistics. He wrote the introduction, literature review, part of the discussion, and the conclusion. He also listed the variables to be analyzed by a hired statistician.
The statistician wrote the entire results section and a summary for the discussion in his own words, accounting for about 50% of the paper. He designed the analysis and ran all of the calculations.
Is it ethical for the sociologist to list himself as the sole author of the published study? What is customary and ethical in this case?

Did the statistician run any calculations/models and did the statistician design the statistical analysis?

The statistician designed the analysis and ran all of the calculations. The sociologist listed the multiple variables to be analyzed. The analysis was applied to a single government survey of a large population.

Odd, I didn’t realize there could be such a thing as a sociologist with no knowledge of statistics. Live and learn.

Some sociologists specialize in qualitative research. But perhaps I should have said "limited knowledge of statistics."

I am just a passerby from Hot Network Questions, but there is another issue at stake: in some jurisdictions (at least a few European countries to my knowledge), misrepresenting authorship in this way could be illegal under copyright laws.

A statistician could however give up authorship contractually.

@Eggy several countries (and academia in general) tend towards the view that the moral rights of the author can't be assigned contractually, only permission to distribute. There's no reason the statistician couldn't publish pseudonymously if he wanted though

Closely related: When does a statistical consultant become a co-author or collaborator?

Can you update the question with the information from comments (as comments may be deleted at any time)? (But without "Edit:", "Update:", or similar - the question should appear as if it was written right now).)

So far we have the description from one side of the dispute.  Perhaps hearing from the other side would affect our answer.

It would not be ethical to claim sole authorship in this case and the statistician should be listed as an author. It's always a good idea to get authorship sorted out as early in a project as possible to avoid problems later.
In the fields I'm familiar with (STEM) anyone who made a substantial intellectual contribution to the paper should be an author. Their contractual/payment status shouldn't be part of this decision. The Guidelines for Authorship from the University of Cambridge, and the references cited there, elaborate on this.
From a personal point of view, if questioned on the details of the statistical part, answering that you would need to check with the person who did the work would feel pretty awkward to me if they weren't an author. At least if they are an author they share responsibility for the results, otherwise it's all on you.

Assuming the facts as stated, it would be plagiarism to claim sole authorship.

Similar to the concern raised by atom44, the author could be questioned about the statistics in a job interview and find himself unable to answer.

"In the fields I'm familiar with" I think you should state what these are, since the OP asks for what is customary (besides ethical). In the law and in econ both my personal experience is that statisticians junior to the main author often prepare their section of the paper and don't get authorship.

@Hasse1987, I clarified this in an edit. That is actually very interesting about law & econ. It may be worth elaborating on this in an answer.

@Eggy If the sociologist is expected to understand the statistics involved, that could be an issue even if the statistician is listed as a co-author.

@Hasse1987 In my limited experience (on the econ side of things), I think it's common that a hired research assistant who conducts a routine analysis under specific directions does not authorship, but I don't think it would be well accepted if an author hires someone to design the whole empirical strategy without giving authorship.

The statistician has a very good case for being included, but not absolutely clear-cut.
The British Sociological Association (BSA)  lists a number of criteria for deserving authorship. The BSA criteria are quoted below (emphasis mine). They are similar to the Vancouver Protocol, which relates to medical research but is often referred to beyond medicine.

Everyone who is listed as an author should have made a substantial
direct academic contribution (i.e. intellectual responsibility and
substantive work) to at least two of the four main components of a
typical scientific project or paper:
a) Conception or design.
b) Data collection and processing.
c) Analysis and interpretation of the data.
d) Writing substantial sections of the paper (e.g. synthesising findings in the literature review or the findings/results section).

Everyone who is listed as an author should have critically reviewed
successive drafts of the paper and should approve the final version.

Everyone who is listed as author should be able to defend the paper
as a whole (although not necessarily all the technical details).

If a contributor fulfills each main criterion, they must be included as author.
If a contributor does not fulfill each main criterion, they must not be included as author.
If a contributor fulfills some criteria but not others, they should be acknowledged. (This is how I interpret the clause "all those who make a substantial contribution to a paper without fulfilling the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged.")
Paraphrasing from the question and comments:

The statistician wrote half of the paper
The statistician designed the analysis and ran all of the calculations

The statistician clearly fulfills criterion 1, as they contributed to design, data processing, analysis, and writing.
Since they contributed a crucial component of the paper, they arguably would be able to defend the remainder too, as in criterion 3.
It's not clear whether the statistician approved the final version, as in criterion 2. But it seems likely.
Obviously, the statistician should at least be acknowledged, since they fulfill some criteria. But all things considered, the statistician has a pretty good case for being included as co-author as well, in particular when comparing their contribution to that of the sociologists (which I have not done here).

While this is a good post, I'm not sure it address the question of the OP (at least not my initial interpretation). While based on what you explain the statistician qualifies for authorship, it doesn't mean he should be listed as an author (it's written "everyone who's an author should have done this", not "everyone who's done this should be an author"). The way I interpreted the question of OP is if it's ok to leave him out of the author list. Ethically speaking, I don't see it as a problem as long as there is a clear agreement between statistician and the author.

@cinico What may be an ethical problem is if the author conceals the fact that none of the statistical analysis/write-up is due to them.  It seems to me particularly problematic that the author wouldn't have written the Results section themself.

@cinico fair point. I'll revise this later.

@cinico, I think your interpretation is incorrect. Everyone who qualifies as an author needs to be listed. I'm not certain that the statistician has made an "intellectual" contribution to the ideas of the paper, but if they have, they must be listed. Otherwise you are committing plagiarism. Contractual work might or might not rise to the level required, but if it does, list them as author.

The statistician has definitely made an intellectual contribution to the ideas of the paper.

Henning, I believe you have pinpointed why this situation is difficult: the guidelines I've seen all have several criteria that must be met for authorship, but this statistician's involvement ended when he delivered his report, so the criteria of final review and responsibility aren't met. And yet, common sense tells us there's a fairly severe ethics problem here!

It seems that the statistician satisfies criteria 1.a), b), c) and d) but maybe not 2. and 3. The sociologist on the other hand does not satisfy 1c) but can claim 1.a), b) and d) as well as 2. and 3. So by these criteria the sociologist should be the sole author.

@cinico et al. I've revised the question. It should be clearer now.

Quarague 5, your analysis of who did what is correct, but there's still an ethical problem. Plagiarism is passing another's work off as one's own without acknowledgment. But work that is acknowledged in a note ("Joe Chan reviewed an early draft of this paper) is considered secondary. Here, the statistician's work was primary. The statistician's contribution was greater than the sociologist's. So common criteria for authorship like the Vancouver Protocol aren't infallible, don't cover all possible circumstances. Here, the criteria for sole authorship may be met, but an ethical problem remains.

@Eggy when you (all too) rigorously apply the same criteria to the sociologist and the statistician, the paradoxical outcome will be that neither deserves authorship. To avoid that conclusion, it makes sense to compare both would-be authors' contributions along the criteria above, as you suggest in your comment. That's also what I allude to in my last sentence, and one would have to conclude that if it can't be the case that there is no author, both have to be authors.

Henning, very good point that when viewed rigorously possibly neither deserves authorship. I noticed that too and I think it's a curious situation. In fact I think it's possible that this paper shouldn't have been undertaken, especially if the sociologist doesn't have the ability to understand the statistician's work.

@Eggy I wouldn't go that far! Interdisciplinary collaboration is important. I'd rather say that both deserve authorship, since the only other remaining conclusion, when all contributiors are held to the same standards, would be absurd.

ICJME (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html) expands their criteria a bit more in details: *"The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3 [drafting/revising and final approval]. Therefore, all individuals who meet the first criterion [contribution to study] should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript. "

I do not know what the standards are in sociology, but the contribution of the statistician looks quite substantial to me. Without even looking at standard guidelines as other responses do, from my gut impression that the contribution you describe is well above the threshold for co-authorship.
Leaving them out feels quite wrong, even mentioning it in an acknowledgement them feels like a downgrade. It is perfectly fine for not everyone to be expert in everything and for different people to providing complementary contributions, but leaving them out is just plain wrong.
There is a reason why interdisciplinary research usually has a hard time being justified - one often either drastically over- or underestimates the expertise contribution of the neighbouring fields, leading to a distorted view of the intellectual value of external contributions (in both directions). [yes, I know, statistics is well established in sociology, but the present question precisely reflects the classical
interdisciplinary dilemma]

In some cases the conflict is that the statistician wants to be given co-authorship and the other author resists. In this case the statistician has not asked for co-authorship to the best of my knowledge. The concern here is the sociologist's ethical obligation as a scholar.

@Eggy Good point. Authorship is also about accountability, so it's not only a right, but in fact a duty. Of course, if multiple people work together to produce a work under the name of a given company, it's the company's brand at stake, but research is far more individual. Of course, one could end in a dilemma where the statistician does not want to be named, but the sociologist wants to publish. For such an issue where one side wilfully puts the other into an ethical dilemma (assuming the work itself is perfectly scholarly, and not just shoddy rough work), I do not have a good answer.

I personally think an authorship-entitled person blocking a perfectly acceptable piece of scientific work from being published would itself constitute an ethical breach by that person, but I didn't read that into the question and it would constitute a separate issue.

At this point I will offer what I think is an authoritative answer to the question. I consulted with a senior sociologist who conducts quantitative studies. Here's what he told me: (1) It's common for sociologists to hire statisticians because they don't have and aren't expected to have advanced skills in statistics. (2) Normally the statistician only prepares tables and charts. The statistician does not write a long, publication-ready report. (3) If the latter occurs, the statistician would be a co-author. (4) What is more expectable is that the sociologist has the skill to read and interpret the statistician's work, and then the sociologist writes the narrative results and discussion sections. In that case the sociologist takes sole authorship and might credit the statistician in an acknowledgment. (5) Claiming sole authorship in the present scenario would be plagiarism and it would invite other serious risks, like being unable to discuss the study intelligently in a job interview. (6) In order to claim sole authorship in the present case, the sociologist would need to substantially rewrite the statistician's report, not publish it verbatim.
The senior sociologist questioned why this study was undertaken in the first place, since the junior sociologist has so little knowledge of statistics. There's a case for that, but I also think a junior sociologist could begin working with statisticians to increase skills and learn the ethics of authorship. Not having statistics skills is a handicap for a sociologist, since the answers to many pressing questions in sociology are contained in government statistics.
I'm satisfied with the senior sociologist's answer. It doesn't refer to any formal authorship codes, but it's a good answer from the field. I appreciate everyone's input on this. Thank you!

I agree that this is pretty common. For instance, my university has a “faculty research support center” with staff that do work like this. The staff will consult on methods and code up the analysis, then hand off the tables to the faculty. They will also review and edit the write up. They may write bullet points as well. So basically the OP example is this model taken to an extreme.

Just to add a search term to the discussion:
Not including someone who did make a substantial intellectual contribution to the study/paper is called ghost authorship and is as such unacceptable.
Academic ghostwriting is not just a matter of the rights of the ghostwriter (who in many jurisdictions can legally agree to their name being excluded from the author list), but

it leaves the remaining authors misrepresenting their contributions as including those of the ghost author. This is plagiarism (even though the text is novel and original).
it can hide possible conflicts of interest.

cbeleites, I stongly agree and appreciate you adding ghost authorship to the discussion. The issue you raise is my main concern. Ghost authorship meets the definition of plagiarism as passing another's work off as one's own.

The BSA criteria for authorship seems like a solid starting point. Indeed if the statistician processed the data, wrote a substantial part of the work and presumably devised the analysis method themselves,it would be a case for acknowledgement or even authorship. But it depends:please take a look at @henning 's criterion no. 2 : the statistician should have seen/ approved of the final form of the paper.It seems trivial but what if someone hires you, a specialist in your field, to do a certain analysis- and you do that , and presumably receive everything, including authorship and some form of remuneration but never get to see the final work? Maybe they used the information you provided in a context you feel it is not correct. Maybe they "load" you with some opinions and interpretations you disagree with, maybe they would misuse your work, or draw the wrong conclusions from a good analysis. And you could potentially be called out for something in "your" paper that you did not effectively sanction -because you never had the chance. So I make a case for "acknowledgement" not "authorship" if the (major) contributor did not have any..editing options, as in rejecting or requiring modifications to be made so as to reflect their own opinion and analysis.

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text:
Why does the application portal ask 'To what other programs/universities are you applying?' while applying in US universities?
I am applying for higher studies in US universities. Every time I fill up the online form, there is a section where they asked which other universities or programs I am applying too? Why do they ask these questions? Do they check where I am applying?
What if I wrote a university name but later drop the idea to apply?

Do you mean the online application of an individual university or something more general? There are generalized portals for application, but I thought they were used primarily for undergraduate applications.

Does this answer your question? Why do graduate school application forms ask applicants to name the other schools to which he/she is applying?

Also related: PhD application asking what other insitution I am applying to, how to answer?

I think they're much more likely to use the information for internal statistics and for grant applications rather than the reasons mentioned in the Q&A linked by GoodDeeds. There might be some consideration of whether applicants are likely to go someplace else, but I don't think programs are going to play those games much when they think a particular student is a good fit. Maybe a bit different if you spend your entire interview talking about how great Harvard is.

The questions referenced by GoodDeeds covers most of your question - the why. For the rest:
In the US it would probably be impossible (illegal) for one university to query another about a student's application, so, no, they don't check.
And there will be no consequences if you list a school and then change your mind.
Don't feel any special obligation to answer such a question. I actually doubt that they use such a question to determine whether to accept you or not. It could be counterproductive for everyone.


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How likely is it that a UK or EU PhD in STEM has to be self funded?
I am an EU citizen interested in pursuing a physics PhD in either a UK university or an European one. It looks like PhD fees for UK universities are so much higher than EU universities, so my issue resides more with UK universities.
How likely is it for a physics PhD to be self funded? Do most PhDs get funded by the university or other third party funding? Are there any statistics on this since on average, £20,000 a year for 4 years is not an option for me if I have to pay these fees myself.
Any thoughts on this?

I think it is reasonable to be expected to be funded for a PhD. Your superviser as well as your uni should have some stake in you being successful. I recommend not to do a PhD at a place where people do not think you should be funded.

At least in the UK, some of this becomes self-fulfilling. If a potential student doesn't get funding after all sources are exhausted they either 1) drop or delay their application or 2) self-fund. Note also the large divide between fees for home (and currently EU) resident students and others.

In my UK-based lab, the majority of the PhD students are EU citizens, a couple are not, and two are British citizens. Every single one of them is on a bursary (PhD is not salaried in the UK) and nobody is self-funded, while one of the domestic ones is additionally employed part time (10 hours / week) from one of our lab's industry partners.

'Self'-funded STEM students in the UK are most likely not from the EU (they may be funded by foreign scholarships or government funding, for example). Do you want to include that case in your question or exclude it?

Here's the thing: Doing a PhD - perhaps not in every single discipline, but certainly almost always in STEM - is a form of employment. You would be a junior researcher, with a measure of independence and a measure of supervision, and with bosses, a department and a university to answer to. You'll need to be on campus most of the week (albeit with the possibility of remote work depending on specifics); you may be required to teach if the university needs you to; you will be subject to all rules and regulations the senior academic staff is subject to, etc.
In those EU states where this is recognized, an "self-funded STEM PhD" is like "volunteer work"; universities can't rely on its existence, and if they want PhD's they have to shell out the money to pay them their wages. Not that you make a lot of money, but it's something. There are sometimes collective labor agreements which govern PhD employment.
In other states - including, AFAICR, the UK - PhD candidates are not recognized as employees. In those states, self-funded PhD are more of a recognized option, but still obviously very rare, as few people can afford to do full-time volunteer work for years.
And thus...

How likely is it for a physics phd to be self funded?

Very-to-extremely unlikely.

Do most PHDs get funded by the university or other third party funding?

This depends on the state in the EU, the university and even the individual researcher, there is no general answer. Also, it sometimes happens that you're funded by the university for some parts your PhD and by a third-party source for other parts - or even that, at the same time, both the university and one (or more) third parties fund your employment (or "stipend"). Finally, third-party funding sources sometime get pooled at the departmental or university level, so that "university-funded" can mean money from different sources.

£20,000 a year for 4 years is not an option for me if I have to pay these fees myself.

Indeed it is not, and please don't try to do this kind of volunteer work, because you'd be hurting your fellow PhDs by legitimizing such a practice.

"you'd be hurting your fellow PhDs by legitimizing such a practice." I don't see how anything here hurts other PhDs, can you explain what you mean by that?

@AaronHall It's a form of social dumping.  Why would a PI pay premium for good quality PhD students if others are willing to work for free?  Minimum wage in general and collective bargaining agreements specifically set minimum (and often fixed) wages and salaries for a reason. A PhD supervisor I know (in a country where PhD students are employed, unionised, with paid time off and good pensions, even earning enough to buy an apartment) once turned down a self-funded PhD student because he didn't want to lead a group with two tiers of PhD students, as it may create a bad group atmosphere.

"Doing a PhD ... is a form of employment" - legally speaking, that is completely false in England (don't know about Welsh Universities, Scotland has a completely different legal system).  PhD students are not employees. [Later] Oh I see, what you are trying to say.  Very confusing wording.

@gerrit: "Why would a PI pay premium for good quality PhD students if others are willing to work for free?" Why do people eat at fine restaurants when they can get food much cheaper at McDonalds? Quality. There may be a few, rare, excellent PhD students rich enough to self-fund themselves, but I think these people are rare enough there is no real danger they will drive down PhD stipends.

@MartinBonner: 1. It's not confusing wording, it's oppressive legal status... 2."completely false" - but is it, though? Can you link to relevant UK labor law regarding criteria for employer-employee status?

@PeterShor: 1. People don't eat at fine restaurants, mostly. 2. I don't see PI's paying industry-level salaries to get high-quality STEM PhD candidates. And the correlation between being a highly-qualified PhD candidate and being paid more than your peers is, as far as I can tell, limited to negligible. No, it is universities who are the significant actors here. They want to keep labor costs down, which they're already doing quite well unfortunately.

@einpoklum: 1) How come all those fine restaurants are still in business, then? 2) There are a number of American STEM departments that the best PhD applicants they think are the best outrageous signing bonuses or stipends (outrageous compared to other graduate students; still low compared to industry salaries).

I said "mostly" - we're talking about the common case here 2. What kind of bonuses, and how many people get them every year? 3. This question is about Europe.

It's very uncommon. It's so uncommon that I've heard of two cases where the student offered to self-fund and the professors were surprised enough to respond with, "are you sure?" One professor even said "I don't know if our department allows self-funded students, let me check".

And this is in the UK?

@user134132523 one was in the UK, the other in Germany.

How likely is it for a physics phd to be self funded?

As mentioned by others, this is extremely uncommon (in the UK, but also elsewhere). In the UK, when applying to a PhD in a STEM subject you’ll usually apply during a recruitment round. These invariably come with funding (from the University or an independent institute), otherwise this will be clearly marked.
So don’t worry, as long as you are applying through the normal process you’ll have funding secured for the nominal PhD duration (3–3.5 years).

This isn't true for non-Europeans. I (US national, unfortunately) had several offers for PhDs in UK institutions. The supervisors were enthusiastic, but I came with a 20k£ international tuition price tag. STFC simply isn't set up for us. Europe was the answer!

@lafemmecosmique What's STFC?

Science and Technology Facilities Council - responsible for funding UK PhD students (at least in astrophysics and particle physics). They grant N scholarships which can apply to UK or EU students (I believe). But since the cost of a non-EU international person is 3x that of British or EU students, there's not much funding left for us unfortunately. NB: Maybe the rules are different for non STFC-funded fields

@lafemmecosmique Everybody in England pays tuition (non-EU citizens pay more, true) but it’s included in the stipend. But, true, not all funding agencies fund non-EU foreigners.

I’ve heard of a self funded astrophysicist who funded his PhD through tutoring. Self funding does happen and it sometimes gives more freedom in terms of research direction. What you lose in cash, you gain in terms of research direction choice. An industry funded position might provide an application for research, and it’s great if that aligns with your own desires.
I can’t give you a complete overview like the other answers, but I’ll add some resources that I’d use if I was looking for a PhD position in the UK. I’m in the UK.
You can find some current positions on jobs.ac.uk. As you can see, some list a salary (a "stipend", which can be tax free).
It’s also worth checking out the websites of individual institutions, where they will list any conditions associated with funded positions. Sometimes it has to go to a UK citizen (I’ve seen engineering positions advertised that request this and it might become more prevalent with Brexit looming).
It’s also worthwhile checking out the Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme. These are industry positions but the academic partner will look to sign the associate up for an academic qualification, sometimes an MRes, sometimes a PhD (where the funding is long enough). Funding for the fees comes out of the KTP budget. You can see the salaries for this are higher than the stipend but you’ll pay tax on it, so the difference isn’t as big as it seems.

The majority of PhDs in the UK will be funded by the UK Government. Most commonly a Lab head will apply with a project to the funding council and if allocated a studentship will advertise for a student to fill it. There are also some cases of PhD programs where the program will advertise for many students at once, and the students will choose the lab from a selection associated with the program. This second route is much rarer however. In STEM it is rare for students to be funded by the university, and even rarer for students to be funded by the lab head (most grants forbid spending the money on students).
Note that in the UK, PhD students are students and not normally employees. They do not get employement rights, they are not covered by health and saftey at work legislation, but conversely they can't be sacked or made redundent. Legally, they are under no obligation to do what their "boss" (i.e. supervisor) says.
PhDs funded by the UK government are only open to UK or EU nationals (or at least those funded by the councils I have knowldge of: Biology and Biotechnology research council, Medical research countil, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). After the 29th of March 2019, when the UK leaves the EU, it is likely they will only be open to UK citzens.
Students from outside the EU are generally COUNTED as self-funded. However, most often  this means that their government or a charity in their country has given them the money, and they give it to the university. We do occasionally have overseas students from wealthy families who are genuinely self-funded. Both types of self-funded student are usually very welcome as there is no limit on what the student can be charged, both in tuition fees and in the "bench fees" that cover the cost of experiments (such bench fees can often form a significant part of the reserach income for a whole lab).


text:
Job Market paper: what are the criteria?
I am going to apply for a Post-Doc position, in Business Economics. One of the required application documents is a "job market paper". I have searched about what a job market paper is and specially there is a good post here Clarification needed: Job Market Paper.
However, I could not find any answer or hint to resolve my current problem. Concisely, I have written 3 papers for my PhD thesis, and these papers are closely-related to each other, such that the second one is based on the first, and the third is based on the first and second. Now, I don't know how to choose one among them.
While the first paper is for broader audience than the second one, the latter has higher quality and more significant contribution to the field, in my opinion. However, this second paper, which has higher quality, is very difficult to be understood for broad audience. On the other hand, the first paper is a good showcase -show off indeed!- of my quantitative skills and interdisciplinary knowledge of economics and machine-learning.
May someone please help me to choose between these two? Shall I consider the broader audience and less contribution, or high contribution on a very niche sub-field?
P.S: None of the papers has been published yet.

Ask your advisor and other professors in your department.

I do, indeed I have meetings in the coming week, but I found no harm to ask people out of my department, so I wrote here.

My impression as a complete outsider is that the conventions in economics are so weird that a non-economist is more likely to give you a bad answer than a good one.  My experience of my own field (mathematics) is that preferences for this sort of thing vary greatly depending on subfield and specific personalities.

I agree with @AlexanderWoo--ask people in the field that you know.  However, this also seems like a situation in which it might be useful to construct a new paper that combines material from the first and second paper.  Don't make it too long, though, and get people in your field to give you feedback before sending it, if possible.
You also might want to use different papers for different applications.  Think of this as a an addendum to the answer you referenced.  If you're applying for a postdoc, is it a postdoc with someone who is working on similarly technical material, with a lot in common with your research?  Or are they hiring a postdoc because they lack expertise in your area and need someone in that area as a collaborator?  If you think that the people likely to evaluate your application are capable of understanding paper 2 on its own, then maybe you should send it.  If not, maybe it would be better to send paper 1, or the hybrid paper I suggested.

great comment @Mars . I was thinking about doing such hybrid paper. However, nothing specific has mentioned in the post-doc description. It has been emphasized on the "teaching duties" for the post-doc applicant, but nothing has mentioned about the research. Also I am working on a new paper and I have written a proposal based on it, and I don't know whether this proposal helps.

Might be helpful to see who's in the department. If the postdoc is with one person, s/he's the only one who matters, or if it's in a specialized field, then the opinions of those in the field may matter more. Strictly speaking, I feel that something called a postdoc should be mostly about research, even with some teaching, but some postdocs are really teaching jobs. In that case it may be helpful if the paper is easier; it's evidence of your ability to explain. But sometimes a teacher is needed, yet the faculty wants an interesting researcher to talk to. Note that I'm not in your field, fwiw.

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text:
How relevant are (journal) papers for the valuation of one’s work and results?
I am a PhD student at an engineering department in Europe. At my department, and at most others in my university, research papers are the main benchmark of a scientist’s productivity. It seems like this is also true in other institutions.
For instance, last year the faculty considered the number of journal papers for each department a key performance indicator, and when a PhD student is at the end of his/her studies, he/she is often judged by colleagues based on how many papers they have published.
There is no threshold of a number of papers required in order to obtain a PhD or a senior position, and conference papers are also relevant and encouraged, but counting journal papers is the key point. In the end, a PhD thesis is just the sum of published papers during the PhD studies, and itself is not that relevant.
Naturally, I feel pressured to publish and to have lots of papers to support my upcoming degree. It seems to make sense - if you have a result, why wouldn't you publish it in a journal? Why wait for the thesis, when it's not really published and nobody will read it? And after all, submitting research to journals and conferences is also beneficial for getting a review of the research from someone who is outside one's department.
However, recently I realized that a friend of mine, also an engineer in a related field, received a PhD from another university with 0 journal papers, and just 1 conference paper where she was a second author. Her university is well regarded, and on almost all world rankings in the top 100. She was accepted for a post-doc position at another top university. I have seen a few other similar cases, and other people just not caring about papers.
I cannot judge the work presented in her thesis, but I found this shocking, and it made me reconsider. How can one be well regarded with hardly any publications? Why would anyone choose not to publish (not counting the thesis as the bare minimum)?
Hence my questions: How relevant are (journal) papers in terms of valuation of a fresh PhD, and for their future career?
EDIT
I would like to thank everyone for their reply, especially @Superbest for the edit (sorry, I am not a native English speaker), I didn't expect that my question would generate such a discussion.
I'd like to clarify some things:

In my field conference papers are less relevant than journal papers, and are used to present research in progress in order to get comments and advices.
The graduate didn't publish a revolutionary paper which is worth like 10 other average papers. We are talking about a zero. I see no reason why would anyone choose NOT to publish at least one paper about a PhD.
Even if the graduate had very good recommendations, why would anyone in academia, which depends on publications, hire someone without any publication record? Why would a professor think that the graduate would suddenly start to be productive?

Note that in some fields (e.g. Computer Science, and my particular area of engineering), conference papers are actually much more important than journal papers.

how relevant are (journal) papers... for future career - depends very much on the career.

how can one be well regarded without almost any publication — Surely that depends on the quality of the published result, no? One conference paper proving P=NP (correctly, of course) would be worth more than hundreds of journal papers making incremental improvement on problems nobody cares about.

@ff524: Of course, in such fields, conference papers are viewed in the same way as journal papers in other fields.

@ff524 Even that isn't consistent across Computer Science. In the US, conference papers seem to be much more important than in the UK, for example.  (The UK's main evaluation of university departments typically submits the best four papers of each member of faculty over a four-year period; "best" almost always means journal, rather than conference, even in CS.)

A related question referring to importance of journal vs. conference papers in CS. In some CS departments, conferences count as much as journals. In other CS departments, journals count more than conferences. I believe it depends on the politics of the department (i.e., are the metrics of the department compared with other departments in a science/engineering faculty, for example, as per the OP's comment).

Have you asked her about it? "My department really emphasizes journal/conference publication even to graduate. How'd you manage to escape? Do you have more currently under review?"

@badroit: you forgot the case where conferences count more than journals.

@ff524 That's a bit of a moot point, since the question's example obtained a postdoc (and presumably research-heavy) position at a university. I can't imagine a career where publication record would matter more.

Your anecdotal evidence does not tell you much. Consider how there are several tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates who never even got a college degree, and there are many folks with BS, MS and PhDs in computer-related fields who never become successful in the tech business. Does that mean college education is irrelevant for success in the tech field?

@JeffE, that's true, but your example is an extreme.

@ff524: agreed, but I am not in computer science, and conference papers in my field are for "work in progress" and to attract attention and comments.

How much people rely on your publication record to judge you depends on how much they understand your research.  The further they are removed from your area of study, the more they will depend on "the numbers".  People who work in your subfield will base their opinion on the actual quality of your work and on your reputation in the community.  Fortunately, the most important evaluations (i.e., reference letters) usually come from people in your subfield.
Not all publications are created equal.  Let's say I'm hiring a postdoc.  Candidate A has 10 publications with almost identical titles all in low-quality journals.  Candidate B has one publication that describes a significant breakthrough and is published in a good journal (I don't mean Nature or Science, just a journal that is widely read by people in the field; e.g. (in my field) SINUM or SISC).  Who would I hire?  Almost certainly candidate B.  Indeed, Candidate A's publication record may actually be a negative factor.
Publications matter most in academia.  A mathematician friend of mine took a job at Google after graduation.  They didn't really care about his publication record; they hired him because he had created the Cython language, which was purely incidental to his research.  If you go the academic route, your publications will be a critical factor in your evaluation for getting a post-doc, a tenure-track job, and tenure.  If you go to industry, they may not matter so much.
Publishing norms vary by field.  In mathematics, for instance, people may sit on a result for years while they refine it or try to develop it further.  Senior people may just put their papers on the arXiv.  In other fields, it seems like new developments must be published within a week, and you're expected to write vast numbers of papers each year.

For 2), you forgot to add whom you would hire. Although, it can be easily guessed..

@DavidKetcheson, thanks for your thoughts. I would like to comment your 2). In this case we are talking about 0 publications. So the candidate did not have a single paper, not even in a low-quality journal.

Further, even if one has a good recommendation, why would he/she be hired without any publication record? Why would a professor think that such person would suddenly start publishing?

@63bit That is a good question, and I agree that I haven't answered it.  I tried to answer the more general question that appears in the title of your post.  Perhaps you should ask another question with the title "Why would someone be hired with no publications after the Ph.D.?" or something similar.

Published papers (either as journal or conference papers, depending on your field) are an important metric in measuring a candidate's output. However, one important thing to note is that many graduate students publish a substantial fraction of their papers close to the end of their degree programs, so that their publication record may look quite sparse. More importantly, the publications may not be published in time for them to actually graduate, but may be finished up in the period immediately afterward. For instance, I wrote six papers as a graduate student, but only two were published while I was a student—the other four appeared the year after my degree was awarded. This is an entirely normal state of affairs.
Another thing worth noting is that, at least in engineering (and particularly engineering in Europe), a substantial fraction of projects are financed by industrial contracts. In such cases, the primary "fruits" of the project represent proprietary information which cannot easily be published. Under such circumstances, publications become quite difficult, and the quality of the work becomes much more significant.
Finally, while publications are important, at the level of a postdoctoral position, they are equally as important as the interview and letters of recommendations from colleagues. Somebody who comes to me highly recommended from people I know well and trust are much more likely to get the position than someone with the same credentials and quality of recommendations from people I don't know as well.

I generally agree with the other answers so far. I will just add that as a PhD student myself my supervisor put it like this:
Its not strictly necessary to publish many papers as a student but it makes writing and defending your thesis much easier. Your thesis must show some novel work. If you have some peer reviewed papers then this work has clearly already been accepted as novel, which basically ticks that box. Secondly you base your thesis on your papers.
Indeed I know some people whose thesis is basically 3-5 papers stapled together with an introduction and conclusion and maybe a bit of editing to make it flow better.

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text:
How to get cited and how to boost the impact of one's work?
Six years ago while I was working in a company outside academia, I had been involved in improving a process which was hot in academia. I have developed a new method which, among other notable advantages, improved all previous methods by deriving better results. Although some time passed, today it can still be considered as state of the art.
Despite I was not in academia, because of the quality of the results, I have managed to publish a paper about it in a top journal in that field. I hoped that the paper would get popular, and it would get cited many times, but today, after 4-5 years of being available, to my surprise, the work is still not cited. I see that new papers that come out and that are related, still refer to (lesser) methods, as though mine doesn't exist at all. As I am following the papers in that field, and despite a large number of related papers, I still don't see much improvement over my work, so it's pretty much current.
The paper uses proper keywords and wording (so it's easy to find), the journal is a good one (so people must have seen it), and it cites all other related papers (so I guess that relevant people in the field who have Google Scholar would be aware of it existence if they get notified of new citations). And still the paper didn't take off. The only reason I could think of is networking. Since at that time I was not in academia, I did not go to conferences to get the work (and my name) "advertised". But I refuse to believe that this was the critical factor.
The questions are: How to get cited and how to boost the impact of one's work? And did I do anything wrong?
I am now in my PhD, and I would like to learn how to boost the popularity of my upcoming papers.

"as mine doesn't exist at all." I think you meant to write "as though mine doesn't exist at all".

Although I'm unsure of how prevalent this aspect is for what you are experiencing, some new ideas challenge the established framework in such a way that simply acknowledging them will not be in one's best interest for both current projects and future funding opportunities.

My first thought on reading this is to cite yourself and those papers and demonstrate how your methods would have improved them and then try to get that paper published. If you're deemed correct by others in your field, you'll increase your number of cites by one, and perhaps more quickly earn the attention of the other authors.

I have managed to publish a paper about it in a top journal in that field — If this is a computer science paper, you made a tactical mistake by publishing in a journal directly instead of at a conference. To first order approximation, computer scientists don't read (and therefore don't cite) journals.

this might be relevant (how to write a theory paper people will cite) http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/Ellner/CitedPapers.pdf

I can see a few reasons why your paper was not cited as much as you hoped it to be:

Networking indeed does go a long way towards being cited. In my experience this is especially true for areas where many competing approaches are being published (which, by the sound of it, is true in your case). Even if your paper is published in a good venue, this alone does not guarantee that you will find a critical mass of readers to kickstart the process. Citations are in my experience somewhat viral. Google Scholar, which for better or for worse, is used by many researchers for searching for literature, returns results ordered more or less by citation count. Hence, papers with a few citations on them are much easier to find on Google Scholar than those with 0 citations. Hence, you need to "bootstrap" a bit before citations start coming in more or less by themselves. The best (ethical) way to do this is to network - tell other researchers that might be interested in your paper about it
You should not per se exclude the possibility that you overestimate the value of your contribution. Maybe the things your approach was good at are not valued as highly by the other researchers. Maybe you underestimate the qualities of some papers that are cited over yours.
Even if your paper was really good, maybe this was to hard to see at first glance. In an ideal world, every researcher would strive to fully grok each related paper. However, in the real world (especially in busy fields), you have to assume that a reader will at first only casually browse over your paper (and only really read it if it seems very strong to him at first glance). If your paper does not seem strong at first glance, people will not cite it.
Maybe you are overestimating the value of the venue you published in. In many busy fields, papers published in a "good" venue (as opposed to "the best there is") already have a hard time getting cited. Further, check whether your paper is available with the standard subscriptions that most universities have (e.g., for CS that would be IEEE, Springer, ACM, ... depending on your field of course). There are some non-predatory publishers out there that are simply not available in the subscriptions of many libraries.

Excellent answer. Many researchers tend to overlook the importance of advertising (call it "networking" if this use of the term offends you). There are tens of thousands of papers published each year, and it's easy for something important to be lost in the noise. Assuming your work is actually good, you'll have to sell your work loudly and convincingly for it to be adopted.

To add to the last point: If the journal allows for it, publishing on a preprint (e.g., on Arχiv) may circumvent the problem of the paper not being available to some potential citers.

@eykanal: "There are tens of thousands of papers published each year."  Yes, about 250 tens of thousands in science alone, to be more precise: http://www.cdnsciencepub.com/blog/21st-century-science-overload.aspx.

The first person who should cite your work is actually YOU. If you simply abandoned your work and you expected others to pick up on it, it mostly does not work this way, unless your work is really ground-breaking. When I search for something on a area I am interested in, it is easy to pick up papers with more citations (which you do not yet have) or authors who are more prolific in this area (which you are now not, since you only published this one paper). Also, people tend to be suspicious when they see "amazing" results, when they are not followed by further work on this area, since that might be some indication that those results were a bit "fishy" to begin with. In this sense, you are the one (at least initially) who should pick up your previous work, improve on it, compare with the newest methods and promote it.
If you asked some years ago, I would not believe in networking either. But the fact is that it works. If you go to some conferences and talk to some of your 'favorite' authors (who are also your main competitors) ask about their published work, talk about your published work (but DO NOT reveal unpublished work), perhaps ask to share methods, do a polite follow-up email soon, you will see that most people respond positively, not because you are sucking up to them but because they see that their work has actual impact. In most of the cases, they also want to improve their methods and see "the polite competition of today as the possible cooperator of tomorrow". So, understand that networking is not just PR but as appreciation to what others and you can offer to the scientific community.

Excellent point about the fact that if you don't follow up on your own work, it might be considered by others "abandoned by the author", and thus not worthy of their consideration.

In many fields, the literature moves faster than most people can follow. A journal article can easily be missed. The chance of it being seen now that 5 years have passed is virtually none.
The best way to get your work known in many fields is to get out there and personally evangelize it. Give talks at conferences, talk it up to colleagues, etc. Getting someone else to start using your method is key.

I'd just like to add, even if your methods and results were real game-changers, you don't necessarily have a good paper. Writing skills are critical for increasing your citation count. You might consider looking closely at highly cited papers, and see what the authors did differently. As others have noted, networking has a big role too..
Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded is a good resource.

If it is software related and there are no available source codes (or even executables at times!), or the code is very poor in ease of use, I will usually not cite it given an alternative.
Another way to put this in more general terms: to what extent have you made it easy to reproduce your research?

Go to conferences, give talks on your work, highlight unexplored questions, extensions and applications.  Work gets cited when you convince other people there's something interesting to do, and they then write follow up papers.


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How handicapped am I in graduate admissions if I graduated from a lower tier university?
Due to a combination of factors, I ended up going for my undergraduate studies to a relatively unknown university that was close to me geographically.
Let's say that I have a relatively standard background for someone trying to apply to top tier schools for graduate studies (some research experience, some low to medium quality publications, very strong grades, good recommendation letters). Then how much does the alma mater have an impact for someone like me? I obviously know that it is still possible to be accepted, but how much of a disadvantage am I looking at exactly?

FYI: Dataset of grad admission acceptance rate based on undergrad school

You don't mention what field you're in. At least in the social sciences at my R1, we look at various factors. The admissions committee knows that people have to choose the college that they went to for various reasons other than just academic excellence.
One of the factors that I look at is trajectory. Someone who went to a public high school, then a community college, and then transferred to a public university, with perhaps middling grades the first year but then quickly ramps up to stellar grades by the time they graduate is very interesting to me -- much more than someone who got all As at a good school but doesn't seem like they pushed themselves very hard.
With the portfolio that you describe for yourself, I'd say you wouldn't be eliminated in the first round, but you'd struggle in the second and third rounds to stand out. How you stand out is up to you. I'd work on a stellar statement of purpose -- one that strongly articulates why you want to go to graduate school to study what you want to study.
Again, this is in the social sciences at my school (a large private R1), your mileage may vary.
Part of this is because brilliance by itself isn't enough for grad school in the social sciences. Perseverance and autonomy and the ability to get knocked down and get back up are also critical.

My impression after being accepted and discussing this with senior faculty was the following:
A large, top tier graduate program receives applications. Some fraction of these (say a quarter) are entirely unqualified and will be discarded.
Another, very small group are fantastically qualified, with great research experience and superb academic credentials from the very best schools. These few will almost definitely get in, but may not accept.
Finally, the largest group consists of people with credentials that are no better or worse than yours (maybe they attended a better school, but their record is slightly worse, or their recommenders are more prestigious, but the letters are less personal). If you are in this group, you should do everything you possibly can to improve your application, but ultimately you're playing the odds.
The biggest obstacle you will face at the top tier schools is that they receive so many more applications that the acceptance rate might only be a few percent. This means the odds are very unfavorable that any particular top tier school will accept you as a solid, but not extraordinary applicant.
This is how it was explained to me anyway. So, I don't think your school is a serious handicap, but it probably does exclude you from the "Oh my gosh, must accept and give all the money!" pile. You might consider applying to more programs to compensate.
EDIT: As Ben Webster pointed out, "Apply to more programs" is incomplete. You might consider applying to more high quality programs.

I would disagree on the "apply to more programs" advice. Currently, more PhDs are being produced than can be consumed by academia and industry -- this is definitely true in the social sciences and humanities, and quickly growing to be a problem in STEM fields. At this point, you should be thinking of either getting into one of the top ten universities in your field for a PhD -- or thinking of alternatives such as going straight into industry.

@RoboKaren I agree that there are too many PhDs being granted and the status quo needs to change, but do you think the burden of such action should really be on applicants, given that they typically know little about academia or the trends? Also, wouldn't it be more equitable to expect all PhD granting institutions to contribute to a solution, rather than allowing the top 10 to continue to churn out as many PhDs as they like?

@Tim: It's not clear that an equitable solution is in the research community's interests if one school does a better job of PhD education than another does.

@Tim I feel like may have misunderstood RoboKaren.  I don't think her point was that it was somehow the student's responsibility to fight the overproduction of PhDs.  Rather, given the intense competition for positions after graduating, getting a PhD from a lower tier could not actually give you much of a chance of continuing in academia, and unfortunately schools don't respond to this by closing their programs.  I think in math, there are many more than 10 programs that will allow you to launch a good career, but it varies from field to field.

@RoboKaren Though actually I would just say that "apply to more programs" is incomplete as advice.  That doesn't mean you should apply a lot of places at random, but that applying to a lot of higher quality programs might be necessary to get into any of them.

@BenWebster I did misunderstand the intent, thank you for pointing that out, and I've clarified that, no, carpet bombing low quality programs is not a good idea.

I recommend reading the following article:

Why You Can’t Catch Up, by Nancy Hass; The New York Times, (August 1, 2014)

The takeaway is that anything is possible, but you're much less likely to get into top tier grad schools with a low-tier undergraduate.

This is much worse than I thought. :(

I would like to note that the New York Times article is called "why you can't catch up", while the author of the paper that is being reported on titles their paper "catching up is hard to do" - which I think nicely highlights the sensationalist bent of reporting. It's supposed to be provocative and upsetting, rather than being designed to properly inform you of the reality in-context. As @Tim nicely points out, it shows nothing of acceptance and only of attendance. While it can be hard to believe, some people do actually get into Tier 1 schools...and choose not to attend.

Just to pile on: it's also very difficult to tease out from the article how much this is just that top undergraduate institutions cherry pick the best students (big surprise).


text:
How should a drop in GPA be presented positively in a Statement of Purpose?
During my undergrad studies, my first two years went fine but in third did not go well as compared to the first two years. Consequently, there was a drop in the GPA. But there was one good project at that time and I and my roommate did some independent research work during this time which we got published in beginning of our final year.
The main reason for the drop in GPA was due to trouble in catching up with the subjects. I just could not handle my studies at that moment.
Though it was the third year when I realised which field of computer science I wanted to specialize in, so since then all my projects, independent research work and even some research work under my professor has been related to that domain.
I must also add that my GPA increased every semester since the drop.
I wanted some suggestions on how to present this in a positive way in an SOP?

Personally, I would avoid making excuses for a drop in grades. They are what they are.
Instead, you should highlight the independent research you did and published. That's a huge achievement for an undergraduate. If it's obvious to the reader that you put a significant amount of effort into that research and learned a lot, that should outweigh the fact that you didn't learn as much in class.
If the grad school programs you are interested in do still have a coursework component, then grades will matter more than they do for a research-only course. But if they're good enough, research experience will make up the rest. That, glowing letters of recommendation from supervisors, and a good interview are worth more than perfect grades.

Don't waste words making excuses. Show you are emotionally invested in your research. Make promises.

Anecdotally, my GPA tanked from A- in my final undergraduate year to B (overall) in the first year of my Master's program. I had a tendon injury and couldn't write for nearly 3 months, so I only just scraped through that first semester with a C average. Way behind on my research project, I put that ahead of my second semester papers and did very well in the research but with average coursework. Those grades got me my dream PhD job, and I haven't even finished my Master's thesis yet. I never mentioned the injury because no-one ever asked about my grades.

Thanks for your advice.
Kindly tell me what do you mean by Make promises ?

@AnimeshPandey By that I mean you should demonstrate why you are motivated, what you want to achieve, and why you're capable of doing that.


text:
What should I do if I found a citation error in a published paper?
I've found a mistake in a published paper, and am unsure what to do now.
I was looking at all cited articles from a paper over 10 years old, and found one that is citing the paper in error.
A variant of a certain protein and a fusion protein made of 2  proteins have been confused, that is the citation points to a paper on a protein which shares an abbreviation but is entirely different - this is a pretty big mistake and suggests they haven't actually read the paper they referenced!
The Elsevier journal published this in 2013 and I don't know how to report it, or what the etiquette is here. I can't see contacting the authors to be of much use as it is already printed, and they could very easily delete my email and forget about the error, whereas an editor or some such person would surely be able to take reasonable steps to address it.
For the record I'm an undergrad and have no professional link/competition/other conflict of interest with this researcher or department!

You'd be amazed how often people incorrectly cite prior research, or butcher their citations.  People have even written papers on it (http://interfaces.journal.informs.org/content/38/2/125.abstract)

You don't say whether that citation being the right one is essential for their results to be correct/meaningful.  An occasional incorrect citation, while a mistake, is often not usually a "pretty big mistake".  For instance: "Previous work on XGrp-beta indicates that it does not interact with NmpR [3,4,5,7]" with #5 actually not talking about NmpR is pretty minor.  "All calculations in this paper were made using the reference diffusion constant of hTsp [8]" with anomalous diffusion being the main point of the paper, and [8] not even being the right protein, is a huge error.

The first thing is to determine whether this error "destroys" the paper which made the citation. If this is some small thing which can be fixed up, rescuing the paper, it is a different situation from the paper critically depending on the blunder being true. Also, is there any ripple effect: is there other work which depends on the results in that paper. How "big" is this, in other words?

See also http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3445/64

@Louis Maddox - I won't name names, but an influential person in my field even cited their own work incorrectly.

Small errors that do not affect the results or conclusions of the paper are normally handled through publication of a correction (or erratum). This is handled by the journal editor, who will be in contact with the authors for confirmation that they agree as to it being an error, and provide for the exact correction to be published.
The journal that published paper should have a policy on corrections, check it out! Physical Review Letters’s editorial policies and practices state, for example:

Errata.— The Errata section contains notices regarding errors or omissions in papers previously published. Besides the standard Erratum, several special categories of documents may appear in this section. In the online journal, each of these documents involve bidirectional links between the original article and the document in the Errata section. The category of the corrective document is indicated in its title and in the link from the original article.
The standard Erratum is a statement by the authors of the original paper that briefly describes the correction(s) and, where appropriate, any effects on the conclusions of the paper.

Thus, what you should do is:

Make double sure it is actually an error.

Then ask someone else to double check it again. Preferably someone more senior, i.e. with some experience of academic publication.

Write to the corresponding author, pointing out the error. Be nice, and make real sure not to assume to worst.
You say “this is a pretty big mistake and suggests they haven't actually read the paper they referenced”: depending on context, it could actually be something minor like a copy-paste mistake (pasting the wrong reference, when they meant another paper)

If you do not obtain a response, or they respond but don't intend to correct the error, then consider contacting the editor.

I can understand why, as an undergrad, you would consider contacting the editor directly without writing to the authors first. However, as long as you remain professional in your correspondence with them, I think it's best to contact the authors first. It's more polite, and they may actually be able to provide you with some explanation you haven't thought of. Contacting the editor before the authors is somewhat overdoing it…

Sometime last year, a colleague of mine and I were writing a paper on scientometrics and reading associated articles. We were closely following a certain paper on preferential attachment in networks and realized that the numbers in the published tables do not add up.
We double checked with each other and then asked our faculty adviser to double check. Upon confirmation, we emailed the corresponding author about this error. The author immediately wrote back with a note of thanks. The major conclusions of the paper were not affected by this error - it was merely a calculation error which should have been caught during the reviewing process but sometimes isn't due to so many numbers floating around in a paper.
Since then, I have always assumed that contacting the corresponding author with a note of caution is always the best way to go.

I think it would be wise to bring the matter up with a researcher who may have the insights you have and beyond. You (two) can then discuss if something should be done and if so what. The error you describe sounds like it is significant but it could also be a typo or have less impact than what appears because of other factors. So getting someone to backing up your observations could be good.
What can be done? Depending on the severity of the problem, it may be necessary for the journal to retract a paper (if the problem negates the results). More commonly you and the researcher you pair up with could write a "Letter to the Editor" pointing out the problem and perhaps detailing the ramafications of the mistake. This letter could lead to a correction being made or lead to a discussion where the author will have to explain how the problem is not one.
So there are several possible outcomes. As an undegraduate you need the support of a more senior scientist since it is unlikely journal will accept letters from persons who are not considered experts in a field (which is what a PhD can signifiy). That does not reduce the merits of your observation but will ensure the observation gets the attention it may deserve.