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Asked to be part of Editorial Board. How to evaluate journal?
I am a postdoc researcher (more than five years after PhD) with an average publishing record. I have been contacted by a journal asking me to become part of their editorial board. I am, however, unsure whether I should accept. In particular, the fact that the publisher’s journals are unknown (at least to me), and appear to be of very recent foundation, which may suggest that they could be disreputable or predatory. Also, I am not an established professor, so offering such a role appears somewhat premature. On the other hand, being a board member is a recognized career title (at least where I work). More broadly, I am asking how to evaluate such offers, as I may be contacted again in the future by other publishers.
Other things to consider:

I have searched the publisher's name through Beall's list (although this is less useful now, as it is no longer actively maintained) and other similar sources. Recently, I have received similar requests by publishers who are listed as predatory; of course, I ignored such requests.
I have contacted the only board member whose name I recognized (he is a professor at another university). He confirmed he was a member, but he admitted having accepted mostly as a form of courtesy, as he knew little about them.
Being of very recent foundation, they have a limited online footprint. Only a handful of papers are available on their website; I do not know the authors, and I find it hard to evaluate the quality of said papers, since they are not within my specific field of expertise (although the broader scope of the journal on the whole is compatible with my research).

I am worried that being associated with a predatory publisher may impact my credibility. How should I proceed? Note: I have read this previous discussion, but in this case I have no evidence that the publisher is untrustworthy. This discussion is also relevant, but it appears somewhat outdated. Some suggest contacting the editor in chief, but I do not know them personally.

To clarify my preoccupations: being a member of an Editorial Board is not just a matter of prestige, but also a necessary step in an academic career (at least in my field). At the same time, being invited by top journals appears out of reach unless you are already a professor. My worry is that, if you have never had a presence as an Editor for any journal, it becomes less likely that you will be invited later on, so you have to "start from somewhere" in a sense; however, I may be mistaken on this.

Has the board member you contacted said anything about how long they have been in this position and how many papers they handled (I would guess zero)?

@Wrzlprmft that's a very good question that I forgot to ask. Thanks for the suggestion

"He confirmed he was a member, but he admitted having accepted mostly as a form of courtesy, as he knew little about them" This is very much how recruiters work on LinkedIn as well. Get a big network, look imposing. That none of the contacts is worth a thing is something a lot of people don't realize.

Is the journal open access at the expense of the authors (and if so what are their charges?) or is it free to publish there? In the latter case you may want to know who supports them financially but they're quite certainly not predatory.  How good is your knowledge of researchers in your field? For me personally a major criterion would be the number and quality of other names on their board. That you know just one doesn't look promising to me.

I'm going to differ from Ethan Bolker and say you should consider it. It's not a concern that you are invited even though you're not a professor, because there's no rule that says only professors can join editorial boards. There is a requirement that you be an expert on your field, and sufficiently senior postdocs will be an expert on their field (I'd even argue that fresh PhD graduates are experts on their field, it's just that "their field" is very narrow so the scope of papers they can handle is also very narrow). Furthermore, as you write, you have no evidence they are untrustworthy. All new journals start by forming an editorial board, which matches what you're seeing.
That said, you should evaluate the offer similarly to how you evaluate offers to collaborate (which is effectively what this is). Things you should figure out:

Are they an open access publisher or hybrid (fully subscription publishers are practically non-existent at this point)? If they're publishing subscription content, the chances of them being predatory (in the traditional sense of the word) plummets, arguably to zero. However, the fact that you could read the papers on their website suggests they are open access.
What do they expect from you? Are you only handling papers, or are they expecting something else (you to submit papers, represent the journal at conferences, attend editorial board meetings, set the journal's strategy and direction, lead some special issue, etc.)?
How many papers do they expect you to handle? You need to know this to estimate how much time commitment is required. If you've never edited before, it can be hard to tell, but get a concrete articles/month number and you can consult a more senior academic to convert that into a time estimate. For new journals it can be extremely hard to provide this estimate (because new journals struggle to get submissions), but you still need an upper limit beyond which you simply cannot spend more time on the journal.
How much support do they provide? On one extreme you have publishers which pretty much do everything and expect only a decision from you. On the other extreme you have publishers which expect you to do everything, and they only start getting involved once you decide to accept a paper. Needless to say the latter is much more time-consuming for you, but the peer review process will generally be less controversial because you have direct oversight and you can be expected to do a better job than the publisher.
What benefits do they provide you? If you're one editorial board member among many, it's highly unlikely they will pay you a substantial honorarium, but they might offer other benefits (e.g. travel grants, waived APCs).

You also want to evaluate:

Who are you talking to? Most probably it's another editorial board member, or an employee of the publisher. In both cases, you could have a serious conversation with them. You could ask them what kind of niche they see the journal occupying, what competitive advantages the journal will have, how they plan to compete with established journals, etc. These are all difficult questions that tell you how serious the journal/publisher is & how experienced the journal leadership will be.
In the same vein, if you're talking to an employee of the publisher, you might be able to find out more about them from Google. Another thing would be to see how straight they are with their answers. If they're using vague language & it's unclear if they understand you, then communicating with them in the future could be frustrating.

The point of this is that starting a new high-quality journal is a very difficult thing. If the person you're talking to doesn't realize how much of a challenge it is, then they can't be very experienced with publishing, and there's a high chance the journal will fail. I would be more inclined to decline then. Also, you can email the editor-in-chief even if you don't know them (they will be receiving quite a few emails from people they don't know, asking about the submission process).
Once you have all the information, then you can answer the question: given what they are asking from you and what they offer in return, is it worth taking up the offer? This isn't that dissimilar from an offer to collaborate on some research project - they both take up some of your time and offer something in return. It's up to you to decide if the 'something in return' is worth the time you'll need to invest. If you're still unsure, you could try talking to your postdoc supervisor about it.

Aptly put. +1 ... All new journals start by forming an editorial board ... starting a new high-quality journal is a very difficult thing

Allure seems to break down OP's request ... I am asking how to evaluate such offers || I'll chip in, also check the content of the invite. Chances are if it's sloppy, the journal might as well be also

@semmyk-research the content of the invite seemed average, but with automatic translation these days, style is less reliable as an indicator of seriousness

@Allure "If they're publishing subscription content, the chances of them being predatory [...] plummets" Possibly OT: why would you say so? I know that most predatory publishers are open-access, but are all of them OA in your experience? Obviously, nobody wants to pay to read rubbish, but being accessible or not isn't really an issue for them (after all, the main role of such journals is simply to publish pretty much anything, no questions asked)

@Allure in any case, I confirm, they are indeed OA

also of note: one of their journals---a more established one, apparently---is listed by DOAJ

@GioMott "nobody wants to pay to read rubbish" is the big issue - you cannot publish "pretty much anything" because you don't get revenue if your content is worthless.

If they have established a journal already, that's a good sign since there's a much better chance the new journal will be successful. See if it's indexed by Web of Science though, since that's the real hurdle.

@Allure thanks for the explanation. They do not appear to be indexed by Web of Science, although that is not in general a definite proof of untrustworthiness.

Say no.
I get these "please join our editorial board" invitations all the time.
The (new) journal wants to be able to advertise a significant editorial board.
The journal may or may not be predatory. Doesn't matter.
I think your contact who accepted "as a courtesy" made a mistake.
The position will add nothing useful to your cv.

Thanks for the answer. Essentially, your point of view is that I should not accept any such invitations, unless they come from a journal that is undisputably respected in the field, is that right?

Yes, that's what I'd recommend. Until you are yourself better known you probably won't be invited by those journals. If, later in your career you and some colleagues get together to found a new journal to fill a gap then join that board.

"I think your contact who accepted "as a courtesy" made a mistake." this is the big point, agreed. Once someone you know is inside, it'll look more reputable, but if it's not a real affiliation (as in this case, since it's only a courtesy), then the effect trickles down like a snowball. "Oh, there is someone I knew, I should join too" without any other substantial reasons (if there are, then that's good, but there are none from the description at the moment).

@EthanBolker thanks for the suggestion and for the clarification. Thing is, as noted by user Allure in another answer, "starting a new high-quality journal is a very difficult thing", at least in my field

@GioMott "Starting a new journal" was a tongue in cheek way to say "wait until you're established". I'll stick with my advice to say "no thanks".

@EthanBolker OK, I see, I did not get the joke

The response by @Allure is measured and raises many good points. However, I think that your specific situation is much simpler: if you don't know anything about the journal that offers you a place at the editorial board, don't ever consider the offer seriously. This is why I believe this would be the case:

The fact that you don't know the journal tells you immediately that this is either a journal quite far from where you normally read/publish, or a new journal.
If this is an established journal outside of your normal reading/publishing circle, just ask yourself, how much would you trust a judgement of someone who entrusts editing responsibilities to a person completely outside of the same reading/publishing circle. It could just be someone very careless, but a more likely explanation would be that this is a publication by a predatory publisher who are in it to make money, not build reputations.
If this was a new journal, the situation is a bit similar. Just imagine yourself deciding to create a new journal and trying to get a good team of editors. Would you send cold letters to anyone qualified, or would you try to get people you trust professionally? Even if you are trying to fill a very specific niche that cannot be covered by people you have immediately available, you'd probably attempt finding the right person via your network of contacts and not just send cold letters around.

I also have some good news. It does not matter very much what you do. Getting onto a board of a journal, even if comes from a shady publisher, is not going to damage your reputation. It does look a bit desperate to be on the board of one of these "vanity" journals, or to have such positions shown on your CV, but I often see established researchers on these boards and I've never heard anyone being seriuosly criticized for having these positions. There are two reasons for this:

Vanity is a common human trait, and working in academia does not make you immune. This makes predatory publishing possible, but it also means that you would not be judged too harshly.
I've seen people making a good job out of such positions, despite all the downsides of a new or a fake journal. Sometimes, people publish good research in all sorts of strange places, for all sorts of reasons, good and bad alike.

Would you send cold letters to anyone qualified, or would you try to get people you trust professionally? Why not both? Especially if you're starting a new journal in a field you are not an expert in, you might not know anyone professionally, in which case you have to start with cold letters to anyone qualified.

@Allure, "if you're starting a new journal in a field you are not an expert in" - my point exactly!

@introspec "It does not matter very much what you do" is an interesting take; I was considering this possibility myself


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Should you conform to journal formatting requirements for the initial submission?
In my past experiences, I have almost never typeset my manuscripts according to the formats required by the journals to which I would like to submit. I leave my manuscripts as produced by the LaTeX article documentclass.
Recently I am wondering: Would such a behavior generally give handling editors a negative first impression?

A negative first impression, probably.  But as long as the paper is professional-looking, usually not a big deal.  Of course if the paper is accepted, you will have to re-do it in their format.

While the page limit might not be as tight in journals as in other types of venues and thus this point in favour of using the required format is not as important, you may want to specify what you mean by "format". Some parts of the styleguide that describes the "format" reach into how you structure your contents. For example, some "formats" discourage or disallow the use of footnotes, some formats require introductory paragraphs to separate a heading from a sub-heading, while others forbid exactly that, etc.

I consider it a good thing if a journal has a template that they wish you to conform to, as they will usually supply one that simplifies things for you, especially if using LaTeX. I see it as taking format/typography decisions out of my hands, so it is one less thing to worry about. Just use their template, and it's as they want it.

My recent experience suggests that sometimes a paper won't even be accepted for review unless it fulfills the necessary typesetting requirements.

Some journals make it explicit that this is not necessary.  For example, Transactions of the AMS describes the use of their style files as something to be done after acceptance.

For what it's worth: I've never bothered, and it's never mattered.

I think @Chou deserves a lot more up-votes for this question: reading through the answers and comments below, there appears to have a remarkably strong and passionate divide in how different fields think about this question.

A reason not to format according to the journal is when you post your paper on a public repository or your web page (which should be strongly advised in fields where journal usually allow this). If you post a firt version in journal A's format, get your paper rejected there, and finally publish in some other journal B, it would be weird to have the preprint formatted as if it where a paper in journal A.

The market for software to handle this is getting crowded, e.g. https://typeset.io/ and https://www.overleaf.com/

Speaking as both an editor and reviewer, I am definitely prejudiced against a paper that fails to follow prescribed submission formatting (which may or may not relate to the final published format).  It is simply a matter of professionalism and prior correlation.
As an editor and reviewer, you see a wide range of material submitted.  Some is really good, and some is really bad.  I've even gotten a few that were outright insane.  The vast majority of the papers that failed to follow prescribed formatting were definitely not good.
Making a good-faith effort to follow formatting requirements generally isn't hard to do, and especially when doing so just means using the journal's LaTeX package rather than the default.  Neglecting it means that the author is being sloppy and unprofessional at something easy.  This doesn't necessarily impugn their science, but if they don't care enough to follow professional standards on something easy, it's a good indicator that they are likely to be unprofessional in other places where it matters more as well.
One exception: I am likely to give a pass to particularly aged/emeritus types who have a solid track record but are clearly not comfortable with modern word processing technology.

The impression I get is that people often feel the formatting requirements are unnecessarily hard to follow, and take up far too much time to do before you know the paper is going to be accepted. Given that basic Latex is very readable (and sometimes more correct than the journal format), why waste everyone's time?

@JessicaB In my experience, if you are using LaTeX and BibTex, that is simply not true.  For pretty much every journal that cares about submission format, either the journal provides its own LaTeX package or somebody else has created one for it.  Switching from basic latex to use such a package takes only a few minutes, and the package then handles all of the nit-picky formatting requirements (the macro-requirements, like section structure and manuscript length, you should be complying with in any case).

"It takes only a few minutes":  In theory maybe, but in practice it is often more involved than that.  You may find that the journal's package clashes with some other package you are using, or their margins cause your equations to overflow lines, or any number of other issues.  It certainly can be a nontrivial amount of work to convert a paper into the journal's style, and I agree with @JessicaB that it seems like potentially wasted effort since the paper may be rejected.

@NateEldredge some journals (American Institute of Physics ones for example) recompile the submission using revTeX - which has clashes with some packages.  The recompiled version is what the reviewers see.  In that case there won't be anything to review if you don't use the journal's packages, so if you're targetting those journals you have to do it their way.  Equation wrapping can be dealt with later if necessary though.  Just don't get me started on bibTeX support or lack of it (never mind bibLaTeX).  On the plus side if you can compile it using revTeX it's easy to compile it without.

@NateEldredge Different experiences, I guess --- my own experience has been that such conversions are fairly painless, but perhaps that is because I do not tend to use particularly fancy or unusual LaTeX packages.

@NateEldredge: "You may find that the journal's package clashes with some other package you are using" - that is even one more reason to use the journal's package right from the start, because like that, you won't spend any time and energy on meticulously designing some special element of your paper using commands from a package which, in the end, you realize you cannot use because of clashes with the journal class.

@O.R.Mapper: As I just commented on Bill Barth's answer below, which is "the journal"?  I don't think most people know "right from the start" which journal they are going to submit to.  And even if you do, it could be rejected from that journal, in which case you are back in the situation of adapting your paper to work with the next journal's package.

@NateEldredge: Indeed, academic environments may well differ there. I'm from one of the almost-only-conference fields of CS, so I admit my experiences are probably quite different from OP's who is asking about journals (myself having been "academically brought up" to never start writing before I know exactly what CfP + deadline I am aiming for, and with the knowledge in mind that a resubmission somewhere else means a 50% rewrite, anyway, as a new format will most likely give me some more pages of space, or take the same amount of space away, automatically requiring extensive restructuring).

I agree with Nate Eldredge.  I have submitted over 30 papers, never using journal-specific format, and I have never had any complaints.  However, after the paper gets accepted I often have to mess with the journal's style files, which often takes an hour or more (and sometimes correspondence with the journal).  Why waste my time on this before acceptance? I also agree with @Anonymous's answer: as a reviewer, I find it a bit presumptuous when a submitted paper looks like it is already ready to be uploaded to the journal's webpage.  Most papers require more than cosmetic revisions anyway...

I am tempted to downvote this answer. I think it is ridiculous (and unprofessional) to be prejudiced against a well-formatted, readable paper just because it does not follow the journal's formatting requirements (unless the journal insists on that in the submission guidelines, which I have never seen for initial submission). And I agree with the comments above: reformatting a paper has never taken me just a few minutes.

I've never found reformatting a paper a burdensome task. It doesn't take a few minutes, but in less than an hour can be done, and given that reformatting is a rare event, I think it can be considered acceptable. What I really find annoying is that several publishers do not maintain an updated LaTeX system, forcing the authors to employ obsolete packages.

@NateEldredge: Addendum, as I don't like to leave my claims unsourced: I am used to conferences with statements such as "Submission formatting and templates: All papers must be formatted according to ACM proceedings style.", "Files submitted (...) that do not use the submission template will not be considered for review." or "All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines.".

@O.R.Mapper conferences are a different game altogether. A major reason many of them insist on a formatted initial submission is that they have strict page limits too. But the question is about journals.

@SashoNikolov Many journals have strict page limits as well...

I cannot think of a journal in which I have published that had submission guidelines. Most of the journals have LaTeX classes, but all that I ever submit is a PDF I have created - I submit the LaTeX only if the paper is accepted. I believe the journals would accept a scanned typewritten document, or even a mailed typewritten document in some cases!

@OswaldVeblen Here is an example of a journal with strict submission guidelines.  This is quite common in IEEE, ACM, and other computer science / engineering journals.

@jakebeal: fortunately for me, I don't have to deal with those journals (in mathematics, we seem to always do these things after acceptance).

@OswaldVeblen There is clearly a strong divide between field cultures here...

Certainly. In the format of this site, the only way I seem to have to point out when an answer is very different from my experience is via comments.  I think it would be possible to clarify the answer by specifying which field(s) you are referring to. @jakebeal

While the answer makes sense for mathematics, physics and the like, it excludes the majority of academic papers and manuscripts by focusing exclusively on LaTeX. I think most of the papers are written in Word, as only a minority of all academic fields use LaTeX. In Word, formatting can take much longer time to change. Half a day is not unusual in my experience...

@RichardHardy I believe this still holds for other fields as well; my experience with biology submissions (which are often in Word) is that the submission guidelines tend to be very loose regarding typesetting.  If they do ask for something, though, they still generally care, e.g., if they ask for double-spaced lines and you decide to ignore it and single-space, it may not even make it to the editor before the pre-review QC checkers throw it back to you.

@jakebeal, I did not formulate my comment carefully enough. I only meant that the part regarding how much work it is to tailor a paper to the journal's format may not apply all that widely. The rest of the answer I have no problem with.

I'll venture a minority opinion (I'm in mathematics, where the culture is very possibly different than in other fields).
As a referee, I have an instinctive negative reaction if I know that an author has taken the time and effort to conform to a particular journal's style. The grounds for this is that most journals employ typesetting staff for this purpose. Especially considering the very high price of many (if not all) journals, for authors to refuse to do this suggests to me a principled refusal to waste their time.
That said, I can see that many people hold the exact opposite opinion, and even that my own feelings may be a little bit silly. So I certainly don't actually hold this against authors when evaluating submissions. (Indeed, if I receive something formatted, I never know if it is the author or the editorial staff that has formatted it.)
My impression is that most (but maybe not all) mathematicians wouldn't hold it against you if you don't bother. Moreover I believe that most mathematicians in fact don't bother with such formatting guidelines.
I have never heard anyone voice @jakebeal's opinion before. Of course, counting the upvotes, he speaks for at least eight other people! You might take this as evidence that the answer to your question is dependent on what your field is.

I believe that our two views are actually compatible: please note that I refer to the prescribed submission format.  When a journal handles its own typesetting in detail, it typically does not prescribe a particular submission format.  This is typical of biology and chemistry (and apparently mathematics, by what you say).  Many major publishers in engineering and computer science, however (e.g., IEEE, ACM, AAAI, Springer), minimize their typesetting workload by specifying a particular submission format and providing appropriate templates.

Using a template is not that difficult as most mathematicians would think.

"Moreover I believe that most mathematicians in fact don't bother with such formatting guidelines."  I think so too, and as you say, the few who do look a bit naive.

I feel it is presumptuous to put a paper in the journal's format before the paper is accepted - it suggests that the submitter thinks the acceptance is a "done deal". Also, see the comment by Benoît Kloeckner above.

@Greg: like most mathematicians, I have put numerous math papers into LaTeX templates for journals, and I know how hard it is. For me, it usually takes about an hour or two of time, sometimes a little more. It requires fussing with packages, citations and (taking more time) tables and line breaks. But revisions the referee suggests will also require fiddling with line breaks in many cases. So it is more efficient to wait for the paper to be accepted, when there are no more changes, and then put the paper into the format for the journal that accepted it and fix the lines breaks only one time.

I use macros in my latex code to shorten (non-standard) things I type often. I strip these out with copy/paste before sending the code to a journal, but doing so before acceptance would be an annoying way to have to use my time.

(responding to the answer) I'm confused, I really don't understand your reasoning for considering an author's effort to follow a particular formatting style to be a strike against them. You say something about "refusing to do this", but what is an author who follows formatting guidelines refusing to do?

I am puzzled exactly for the same reason as @DavidZ: what is the this authors are refusing to do that elicits your negative reaction (I'm asking because I'm a very obedient person so I always at least try to conform to submission guidelines when they are provided by a journal)?

Here is an example of the kind of instructions which I advocate ignoring: http://worldscientific.com/page/ijnt/submission-guidelines For example, they specify that footnotes should be a, b, c, but in some other journals the footnotes should be 1, 2, 3, or there should be no footnotes at all, and I think it is common for authors to worry about this only after the paper is accepted. Moreover, in my experience the detailed instructions linked at the bottom are moderately time-consuming; I had to follow them once, but only after my paper was accepted there.

@Anonymous I see why you would advocate ignoring the guidelines, but still, I don't see why the fact that an author chose not to ignore them would give you a negative impression of the manuscript.

Not really negative. Negative in the same sense that I might get from a grad student who insisted on wearing a suit and tie every day -- i.e., very minor, and I would consistently remind myself that it is their preference, that it could be viewed in a positive light, and that it would be unfair to hold it against them. I hope my answer has not unduly spooked anyone; I very much doubt that there would be any negative consequences for any mathematician who chose not to ignore the guidelines.

Beware of what the journal styles put into your paper. For instance, Elsevier's style file elsart (recommended for instance by this journal in my field) contains a footer with the words "preprint submitted to Elsevier". If I haven't submitted it yet, I don't want to write a false statement on an e-print on arXiv. The recommended style file for this other journal in the same field inserts the text "Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd." on the manuscript, which is outright false and borderline criminal in my view.
So you'd better not use documents created with these classes for  anything beyond journal submissions (e.g., preprints, which at least in maths are basically a necessary step, or sending manuscripts to a colleague). This means that if you use them you need to prepare at least a second version.
My experience is that changing LaTeX format can be time-consuming, due to various package incompatibilities. So I have started submitting papers using the style which I am already using for the preprint (and for my internal notes --- I typically start to write down a manuscript much before deciding to which journal I am sending it). No one has ever complained (editor, referees...). More recently, Elsevier explicitly authorized this practice on many journals by launching an initiative called Your paper Your way.
So my suggestion is just forget about journal styles unless someone insists on them.

What a great answer.  The "Your paper Your way" thing is nice: the evil giant really does throw us a bone every now and then, it seems.

Unfortunately, I have an update to "no one has ever complained". A journal has recently written back to me that I had made the terrible mistake of putting the references before the appendix (instead of after), that they couldn't send a manuscript in this state to the referees and that I should change that. All this one month after the submission. And their guide for authors did not mention appendices at all. Just to name and shame, the journal is APNUM (Elsevier). :(

What reason might there be for not using the journal's format?  Here is the one I have heard of.
If your papers are always accepted by the first journal you send them to, then  you might as well format them for the journal.  (But it probably means you are aiming too low!)
On the other hand: if you sometimes have a paper rejected by one journal, then send to another (and another, and another...), why should you have to change the formatting for each one?  In cases like this, the author would prefer to do the formatting once, for the accepting journal.  Sensible journals would allow this.

Not surprisingly, the best way is to follow the instructions. But, if you for some reason do not then keeping a manuscript very simple is the best second approach. Simple, generic, typography, 1.5-2 line spacing, figures and tables separate from the text works in most cases. As an editor and reviewer I find evidence of special formatting most annoying. It distracts the reading and is also completely unnecessary since the journal will likely reformat the article during type-setting.
There are some aspects where you should try to put some effort in: try to make sure you adhere to the journal's standard fro referencing and make sure your reference format is correct. It is really annoying when references are not complete or the reference list is haphazardly put together. The key is in the details so make sure you get the details correct. You do not want the editor or reviewers to get annoyed by inconsistencies in details, make sure they can read a well prepared manuscript with little effort and disturbing elements.
So, if you cannot follow the exact instructions, just keep it very simple and avoid inconsistencies.

I am aware of the habit of separating table and figures from the main text in some fields, but doesn't this make the paper harder to read? Using any docuent preparation tool that will cleanly position the figures and tables and wrap the text around would be best, wouldn't it?

Sadly, many journal submission guidelines still request an archaic format in which the figures are all placed at the end of the manuscript.  Often the figure captions are themselves separated from the figures. This may have made sense in the days of hard copy submissions, but is pointless -- especially at the review stage -- given current technology.
As a reviewer I find this format intensely annoying and it is possible that my review quality suffers as well; I sometimes read through several figure references before flipping back to look at several figures at once. My personal opinion is that authors' highest priority should be to submit their work in a format that minimizes effort on the part of the referees, and if this conflicts with house style requirements, the author has every reason to ignore those requirements.
This is not to promise that every journal will tolerate such a decision on the authors' part, but I have never seen a harsher consequence than a relatively polite request to reformat.

I think there's a balance to be struck here. Some reviewers will be annoyed if there's no room on a printed version to scribble their notes about the paper. This means that typical IEEE/ACM two-column, single-spaced formatting might annoy some people. The argument from them pretty weak if your formatting conforms to the journal style rather than being some tight format that you made up.
On the other hand, using the journal style generally gives you a reasonably readable presentation designed, more or less, that way. It was probably also designed in the age of print to get the most words on the page, so it's not perfect.
The worst thing you can do from a reviewer's perspective is to come up with your own formatting that looks slapdash, unprofessional, sloppy, or is hard to read. Almost no matter what you do, someone will be grumpy, but if you use the journal template, you'll engender the least complaints.

Thanks, I missed some necessary information. If possible, please be referred to the edited question :)

If you're doing it LaTeX already, just use the journal's template from the beginning.

That assumes that you know from the beginning which journal you are going to submit to.  In many cases that decision isn't made until the paper is already finished.  (Or, maybe you did know which journal you would submit to, but it was rejected from that one, and now you have to convert it to use a new journal's format...)

@NateEldredge. Yes, that's true, though typically applying a new template isn't that hard. I still recommend that you do the work to put your article in a journal's style before you submit. This is especially true if there are upfront page limits. If your field is like mine, almost everyone uses an IEEE-like or ACM-like two-column format even if they aren't them.

@Bill Barth: as I wrote somewhere else here, I would view it as presumptuous to submit a paper already in the journal's format. I just submit a PDF made in plain LaTeX. If there are tight page limits, or other special circumstances, that is different. But I am more familiar with journal submissions where the page count is very flexible.

@OswaldVeblen, why? So many journals and conferences want submission in their format upfront, it seems very punitive to associate proactive formatting with presumption on the author's part.

@Bill Barth: it turns out that is a very discipline specific thing. In math, I cannot remember any journal I have submitted to that requires a special format before submission - see the comments below jakebeal's answer. (And, if I use the journal's format from the beginning, what do I post on the arXiv? A format that names a journal that may reject my paper?)

@OswaldVeblen, it's clear from this thread that requirements are very discipline-specific. Given that, I would hope that those who have a bias against pre-formatted articles would learn to be a little more open-minded. As to arXiv, you can do what you like within the journal's guidelines, but you might just eliminate the journal name from the template. IEEE and ACM templates, as well as Wiley and others, are generally generic to the publisher and the specifics are filled in as a variable in the template.

If you are writing your paper in LaTeX, then you should use the LaTeX template provided by the journal (I have yet to submit to a journal that does not provide a LaTeX template).  This will take you a few extra minutes.
The LaTeX output is what both the editor and the reviewers will see.  Why would you not want to ensure this looks professional?  Are you submitting to so many conferences you do not have an extra 20 or 30 minutes to polish your submission?
I don't check for adherence to journal standards during reviews, but I've gotten several papers where the author(s) didn't see what the LaTeX file would look like in PDF form.  These papers almost always have other issues, and reading through a poorly formatted PDF discourages me from giving the paper the extra attention it might need.

This seems an unrelated problem. If someone is bad at LaTeX document preparation, they will create a poor document no matter what the style is. If anything, hastily converting to the journal style file before submission can only make things worse.

As you've likely spent months researching for this paper, I don't understand why you would not take an extra 30 minutes to ensure your submission will look professional

I don't understand why a journal would take an extra 30 minutes to impose pointless, nonuniform, and occasionally self-contradictory formatting requirements on submissions pre-review.

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text:
There is some indication that I am not that good at teaching – should I still strive to become a professor?
Since I was an undergraduate I have been a tutor many times, either a drop-in tutor or a private tutor. However, somehow these students politely turned away from me for reasons I do not know. In all conscience, I am very meticulous in preparing lecture notes and every class. I thus am tempted to think that if it is possible that I just have no that kind of teaching charisma.
Is it still possible for me to become a professor?
Please first let alone the other various necessary conditions for becoming a professor.

I am not sure what you mean by "drop-in tutor". Would you please give a brief explanation?

Oh, by "drop-in tutor" is meant just a short-term one-to-one private teacher.

I am really confused by the question.  What does it mean to "insist on becoming a professor"?  Do you mean, to yourself?  Second, you are asking for counterexamples to the claim that you do not have teaching charisma?!?  I don't see how people on the internet could possibly answer that question.

Thank you. I am just editing my question so that it is more readable. Is it?

I am still unsure about "drop-in". Did they hire you? Or their school/parents hire you as a tutor?

@scaaahu: Yes! Someone or his parents hires me as a tutor.

@scaaahu Many schools have rooms where students can "drop in" for tutoring without an appointment. Students who have been hired by the school for this purpose wait in this room to offer their tutoring services to any of their peers who might stop by.

@Jeff I know what you are talking about. But, what the OP is saying is not this case. He has a footnote: "a short-term one-to-one private teacher hired by a student or their parents".

@scaaahu: In fact, both forms apply. I was a drop-in tutor at university and a private tutor.

@scaaahu: Please see the edited version.

There are many possible interpretations of why the students turned away from you. You should not jump to the conclusion that you are bad at teaching. For example, it is possible, judging from the information you gave in the comment, that the students simply did not wish to have a tutor, despite the good intention of the parents who hired you. This is especially common in certain East Asian countries where competition for educational resources are fierce. Moreover, depending on the type of students you tutor, your experience may not speak to your potential as a professor at all. After all, the academic need of a high school student is quite different from that of a college and graduate student. Your teaching style may work well for college students, but not so much for the high school ones.
Finally, even if teaching is not your strongest suit, the experience you gain as you finish grad school and post-doc should help you build the necessary skills (yes, teaching can be an acquired skill, not just an innate charisma). So depending on where you are along your education, there may still be time for improvement. Also, depending on the type of university you work in, the relative importance of research and teaching can vary considerably. So even if everything else fails, working in a research-oriented university should help a bit with the problem.

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text:
What to do if your editor does not reply and there is no one else to contact?
The situation is like this. I made a new submission to a journal via their website; I am under the impression that an author would automatically receive a copy of the generated PDF file for review and the acknowledgement of receipt, just like many journals more or less do. However, after one business day, there was still nothing about this matter that came into my inbox (used in a generic sense, including spam). I thus wrote to the editor in chief regarding this matter. The editor has not yet replied for a day (which is unusual according to the editor's known pattern in dealing with submissions). There is no email for the editorial assistant that I can find on their website, even if the position exists.
Now the question is how then a safe next move would be like. I cannot just wait indefinitely; potential possibilities are fading. But it also seems that it is difficult to make the intention to ``set a deadline for response" sound innocuous. I am asking if there is a relatively common practice our there or an all-considering well-rounded strategy regarding this matter that could serve as a signal for the editor to know my intention without tearing anyone's face.

Wait a lil bit!

See if you can download the PDF from the journal submission website. The editorial management systems I'm familiar with will take the author-submitted source files and generate something, which can then be downloaded by everyone (including the author). In fact, some editorial management systems will generate a preview for the author to approve before the submission is formally registered. If you've not received a "submission received" email, there's a chance that it hasn't been submitted right.
Otherwise, it has only been one day. One day really isn't a lot of time (especially since it's currently a weekend). Even if someone usually responds in one day, he could be ill or on leave. I would wait a bit longer - maybe 2-3 more days.
If the manuscript was submitted correctly and there's still no response from the editor-in-chief after 2-3 more days, I'd email the publisher. You mentioned you can't find an email for the journal's editorial assistant, but you might still be able to find a "contact us" link on the publisher's website, and they'll be able to redirect you to the right person.

Hi, thanks for feedback and tips. I tried; unfortunately they do not work in this case. Is there any other way other than waiting? Thanks.

What exactly did you try and what didn't work?

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text:
What is a wise way to deal with a student of this type?
This question is inspired by some real-life experiences. I came across two or so private tutoring teenager students that give me a feeling that they did not pay enough attention to the contents and instead constantly unjustly judged me in mind. For instance, one of them was self-righteous such that he was always like you-say-yours-I-do-mine and he never showed some outstanding, impressive ability by which my anger would be alleviated. For now I cannot provide a specific example of how this lead me to think he was a judging student (it seems too difficult for me to describe literally); but let us consider the case if he was. It took me nearly a year to reach a temporary conclusion against his behavior. What annoyed me is that such a student ignores his own lack of knowledge or thinking quality and focuses on judging his teacher.  In fact, I guess I am an "introspector", meaning I introspect myself on a regular basis. For the matter under consideration, I looked inside and felt that in such a case my annoyedness does not come from my insecurity, if any; and it cannot even be from my quality of "preaching" (this is not a statement of pride.). In passing, a useful fact would be that overall my students were respectful and more than satisfied with my tutoring; many of them still keep me posted.
So I would love to know a wise way to handle a student of the type, i.e. a student such that his understanding of the subject is below-average and he judges his teacher, without being annoyed. I am after a generic answer such that it applies to most "sane" people; it need not be specifically for me, and hence my detailed personality information may not be needed in order to post an answer.

I've cleared most of the comments. Please take further discussion to either [chat] or [meta], as appropriate. Further comments on this question will likely be deleted.

@YngwieMalmsteen - Sure, but please take the advice to heart. People here are trying to assist and are giving good feedback.

Do not try to take any action based on your assessment of the student's attitude. Such judgements are very error prone, and impossible to prove.
Instead, focus on actual behavior and outcomes. For example, if you set some exercise such as writing an essay on a given topic, does it get done on time and to an appropriate standard? Is the student's work improving?
If those things are happening, there is no problem. Just carry on.
If they are not happening, first discuss the lack of work/progress with the student. If that does not result in improvement, and a third party such as a parent is paying you, also discuss it with them.


text:
How to represent and cite a patent using BibTeX?
I need to cite some patents for a paper in BibTeX format. Google Patents provide me a BibTeX like this one:
@misc{spangler1988method,
  title={Method and system for measurement of road profile},
  author={Spangler, Elson B.},
  url={http://www.google.it/patents/US4741207},
  year={1988},
  month=may # "~3",
  publisher={Google Patents},
  note={US Patent 4,741,207}
}

I do want to cite Google as the publisher. Rather the patent is from the US Patent and Trademark Office.
What is the correct way to do this?
Note that this patent, e.g., is expiate due to failure to pay maintenance fee.
NOTE
I have found this instructions on IEEE:

Patents
Basic Format:
[1] J. K. Author, “Title of patent,” U.S. Patent x xxx xxx, Abbrev. Month, day, year.
Example:
[1] J. P. Wilkinson, “Nonlinear resonant circuit devices,” U.S. Patent 3 624 125, July 16, 1990.
NOTE: Use “issued date” if several dates are given.

Firstly, BibTeX is more or less a data structure. You can populate its fields however you want, as long as it captures the essential information.
Now, there is an @patent{...} type which, while not standard, is supported by many styles. Check the documentation for the citation style you are using for details. As you would be using either the @misc or @patent types, you should try to populate your fields or configure your styles in a way that the compiled output from BibTeX matches the expected style of the document that you are trying to prepare.
For example, IEEEtran's BibTeX package supports that @patent type and you can read their documentation on what fields should be populated and how. In particular, they support the number field which you should populate with 4741207 and the nationality field which you should populate with United States, instead of the Google output which put those information in the note field. The publisher field is actually ignored in the IEEEtrans style, so you don't need to do anything about it, and the url you can just drop, since given the United States patent number it is relatively easy to find it on the USPTO website.
If your publication follows the Chicago manuals, here's how they prefer it to look. Note in particular it does not show any "publisher" or "url" information.
If you use biblatex, this TeX.SE q/a gives a pretty good sample of acceptable use.
In short, like most questions about "how to cite blah", the answer is:

The point of a citation is to give an unambiguous reference to previously published material. Many publishers and societies have established conventions and styles and the practical suggestion is to follow their guidance in how to style your bibliographic information. Absent that, use your own best judgment about how much information is sufficient to identify the reference.

Many tanks. I haven't found the @patent in the documentation, better so and... Yes: I need it for IEEEtran.

I found the other answers a bit challenging for some random format. Here's what I did:
@misc{name,
 title={Best invention ever},
 author={Edison, Thomas Jones},
 year={U.S. Patent 1 234 567, Nov. 1969}
 }

This appears with the correct formatting, even though it probably not the technically correct way to do it. Not proud, but I need to move on.

This is the perfect hack & thank you for focusing on results rather than perfection. For my needs/bib style, I preferred to add the patent number in the title instead so that it would not appear in the year parentheses.

There is a bibtex @patent entry.
This is what the documentation says:
"@patent A patent or patent request. The number or record token is given in the number field. Use the type field to specify the type and the location field to indicate the scope of the patent, if different from the scope implied by the type. ...

Required fields: author, title, number, year/date
Optional fields: holder, subtitle, titleaddon, type, version, location, note, date, month, year, addendum, pubstate, doi, eprint, eprintclass, eprinttype, url, urldate"

However, the @patent entry might be treated as an @misc entry, and therefore, depending on the LaTeX citation style you use, you might want to use the @misc keyword instead, as indicated in the question.
Finally, I would suggest to use WIPO Patentscope instead of Google for your url references.

Add the nationality as per IEEEtran.bst as described in:
ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/IEEEtran/bibtex/IEEEtran_bst_HOWTO.pdf

In addition all you need is authors, title, url, year, date.
So if submitted to the United States this is what you would provide as the nationality or U.S.
Also as mentioned above use WIPO patent search not google for accurate dates and years on patents.


text:
Multiple paper submission deadline extension (three times in few days)

Important Announcement – Paper Submission Deadline Extension
The paper submission deadline has been extended to May 25, 2015 June 1, 2015.

This is the third extension of the deadline for the meeting where I have submitted my paper.

To May 1, 2015 May 18, 2015.
To May 18, 2015 May 25, 2015.
And now, to May 25, 2015 June 1, 2015.

I do not know what think. I have submitted the paper on the afternoon of May 18, 2015. That evening I saw the second extension (like Cinderella, not at midnight but close).
Now I have seen another extension, and I am concerned because I have worked very hard in this project.
The question is: there is a concrete risk that the conference could have had a few submissions and could be canceled?

Is that indeed the deadline for an entire conference, or just for one of the sub-events integrated into a conference (e.g. a workshop)?

No, this is the deadline of the full-papers submission. One extension is normal, not two. Three is very strange. In the conference there is a only one deadline.

Yes, fully agree with your assessment. I only wanted the clarification because for workshops, it can happen and still doesn't mean the workshop cannot in any case take place at all, there is always the chance of merging workshops etc. ... for the full conference, however, I have no experience with such a situation.

One additional possible factoid you might supply: If the submission system uses a sequential numbering scheme, what number did your submission get (you can specify a range like "80 - 100" in case you want to protect double-blindness of your submission)?

Typically, I have seen two cases of deadline extension:

Some venues have a "customary" extension, which always happens, and thus all regulars know that the de facto deadline is slightly later than the initially stated deadline.
The other main case of extension is when a venue wants a few more submissions and is hoping an extension can drum them up.

Multiple deadline extensions sounds to me like desperation, and you might well be looking at an event that will either be cancelled or accept a lot of trash.  Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it right other than withdraw your paper if you are nervous, which might not help you much either.

Organizers being open toward extending the deadline once if a sufficient number of authors ask for an extension (without generally and automatically extending the deadline on their own) is not another main case? I have seen several situations where deadlines where placed inconveniently in a way that they coincided with another important deadline in the same community, and thus organizers had a strong incentive to exceptionally extend their deadline once they were made aware of the issue.

@O.R.Mapper In my experience, at least, that is a rather unusual case.  Clashing deadlines like that is a) an artifact of rather poor planning by the organizers and b) something that well-organized researchers will also have dealt with in advance.  So yes, it's part of the long tail of extension reasons. It still wouldn't explain a 3x month-in-total extension like the OP reports.

Yes, I sometimes suspect I have picked subfields that essentially happen to be centered around and built upon poor planning ;) Fully agree with the unusualness of the three consecutive extensions.


text:
How can I progress with researching/working with profs with a bad transcript?
I've been asking a lot of questions on here lately (my apologies to the admin for that), but I've become very worried about my future as I've had a terrible semester.
I'm a second year student currently studying mathematics at a Canadian university and as of now, I have two Cs (one in a math course) and an F on my transcript (thankfully, from a non math course). I'm very worried about how this will hurt my application to grad school (in terms of getting research experience and my transcript itself), particularly as a MSc candidate. I know I have a lot of time to make up for my mistakes (academically) this semester, but the way I see it, I'm pretty much out of options until maybe next year when my GPA (currently sitting at ~3.4-3.45) goes up, considering a lot of research opportunities at my school are based on GPA.
I am very interested in pursuing research in some areas of pure mathematics. However, like I mentioned earlier, I know for a fact my school operates research grants and applications based on GPA and seniority, thus because I:

Am a second year student and do not have many higher level maths courses under my belt and;
Have a mediocre GPA and;
Have received lower marks for second year courses rather than first...

it is highly likely I will get rejected by the professors at my school and not get the grant.
My question now is what else can I do to help me gain experience/skills/contacts within the department at my school? My lackluster grades were a result of poor time management and I know I can do better. When I asked a similar question, I was recommended to seek professors to do informal reading with. I am still planning on doing that, however, is there anything else that I can do? I was hoping to ask one of my profs, but I ended up doing much worse in his course than I expected, so I don't know if contacting him would be reasonable anymore?
Anyway, this is a question mostly to see what I can do to redeem myself more than anything. I still have two more maths courses this coming semester I have the chance to do well in, and so far this C would be my lowest maths-related mark yet. Hopefully that doesn't completely take my out of the running.
Thanks in advance for all your help.

Honestly, you should take a step back and focus on your coursework first. Research experience is great and often necessary for graduate applications, but it's useless if you don't have good grades in upper-level classes. Focus on showing that you can do well in courses before worrying about adding research to your workload.
Also, excelling in an upper-level class is the probably the best way to connect with a professor and get a research opportunity at this point. If you can get to know a professor a little through class and office hours and impress them there, then it's much easier to ask them after the class is over about research opportunities. The key, however, is that you have to actually impress them, and no professor is going to be impressed by a C or even a B in their class.
It also helps if you are willing to work as an unpaid research assistant or similar. Getting funded positions as an undergraduate can be very difficult, especially in math since it's unlikely you will do any real work. But unpaid positions can still be very valuable and are much easier to obtain.

Do you think it would look badly if I spent the next year with less extra curricular activity than I am currently doing? I'm doing research in a non-math/science dept. right now, but would cutting that out for the net year fare badly on an application or CV?

@Turra I don't think that unrelated research will be valued much, and I don't think anyone will notice if you stop doing it. Even if they do, they're much more likely to notice a mediocre grade in a math class or a lack of math research. If you can continue your current research and get all A's then go for it, but otherwise it's probably in your interest to prioritize.

a lot of research opportunities at my school are based on GPA.

A big reason for this is that doing research consumes a lot of resources: time, attention, mental energy, etc.
At my university, students who don't have a certain minimum GPA aren't eligible for department-funded research positions. The reason for this is that it's not in the students' best interest - if they're already doing poorly in their coursework, doing research at the same time is liable to make things a lot worse.

My lackluster grades were a result of poor time management and I know I can do better.

Great. That's what you need to do, in order to gain access to research opportunities in later semesters: show that you can manage your time, can excel in your coursework, and that a professor who takes you on as a research assistant isn't going to have to worry about you ending up on academic probation because you can't juggle it all.
For grad school applications, too, showing (by means of excellent grades in later years) that you have more than recovered from your not-so-great sophomore year will be important.
I'm not in mathematics myself, but it's my impression that mathematics (more so than most other fields) requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge before you can do meaningful research. Thus, without having done well in your coursework, including higher level courses, it is unlikely that you will be able to do meaningful research. (Even if you have done higher level coursework, some mathematicians on this site consider undergraduate research experiences to be more "experience" than "research," anyways.) See for example Is it common for an undergraduate thesis in pure mathematics to prove something new?. Perhaps one of the math users will chime in with more details.


text:
Is it valid to pad an axis slightly in order to enhance point visibility?
My apologies in advance if this questions is better suited to be migrated elsewhere.
In a standard (X,Y) Cartesian line/dot plot the axis should be placed in a contextually logical place.  In a graph presenting real world quantification with only real positive integers that are possible (>= 0) I am told that the only possible intersection for the axis is (0,0).  Even it seems at the expense of clearly seeing a point at X=0...
I would like to ask if in academic publications there is any validity to permitting your reader to see all your points clearly by applying a subtle shift (padding the axis to the left).  See figure included.

The opposition I am receiving to this concept stems from the inference that the y-axis being placed in a negative region gives rise to the possibility that negative values are possible, even though it's a physical impossibility in this context to go below  0 in terms of having a physical entity.  But because the axis stops (without labels) at the y axis and doesn't carry past it (deeper (except for the tick mark at y=0) into the negative quadrant, it is obvious and better to see the point and it's error bars.  The range is quite significant and so these error bars are hard enough to see.
Here are some of the consequences I see when I plot the axis at (0,0)

Point gets a little hard to see and the error bar almost entirely disapeers
Error bar caps look y axis ticks which make the y axis messy and the error bar almost invisible.  Increasing thickness of error bars looks very messy.
Increasing point size could encompass the error bars in this particular context.

I'm sure some people will argue that this is better suited for [stats.se], and others will disagree. To preempt the flags asking for migration, I would like to point out that given there may be some disagreement and as per this meta post, I'm not going to migrate this anywhere unless it's judged to be off-topic here (not just better somewhere else) and closed here first. (Unless, of course, the author prefers to migrate it.)

@ff524 Thanks for improving the title.  I considered putting in on Cross Validated but I decided to put it here because I already know the letter of the rule. I think the best "advice oriented" publication guidance, and acceptable ways of interpreting these rules and applying them in consideration of the current context to achieve the best possible solution will be obtained here and will be experience based rather than rule based and supported as I might even advise if seeing the question on Cross Validated.

In academic publication, a graph should be faithful and clearly understandable: I find your example failing on the latter point. I'd find a different way to improve the visibility of the point lying on the vertical axis (e.g. play with the axes' thickness and the dots' size).

Have you considered a Tufte range frame (like this)?

I personally would not have any problem with this representation. An alternative might be to have the y-axis on the righthand side instead.

Have you considered putting some white background around the datapoint? The axis line may look gapped in the case, but it might convey the meaning better.

With axes there's the implicit assumption that they intersect at zero. Anything else would be confusing.  But if you have a frame surrounding the plot and the tick marks are put on the frame, this doesn't necessarily have to be so.  There needs to be enough room for everything within the frame, then you put the tick marks as appropriate. Example.  The two examples I linked use the default style of Mathematica. You'll see that in the framed example zero doesn't coincide example with the left frame.

" I am told that the only possible intersection for the axis is (0,0)" Where does that come from?

@CedricH. Ignoring the Y component it's actually the first part of the statement you quote that is necessary for my collaborators statement to be possible:  "In a graph presenting real world quantification with only real positive integers that are possible (>= 0)". So in this particular x-axis when the independent variable is a quantity (not a measure of change) of a real physical entity a negative value holds no meaning then you can't imply that you can have negative values because they hold no meaning. My argument in the question is that I haven't truly implied negative values.

The point of a figure is to convey meaning and to do so in as easily understandable a way as possible. So, if you have a case where you think that the result is clearer if you offset the x-axis slightly, then do it. The guiding line should be: Does it help the reader understand better what you think the important point is than any other way of presenting the data?

Is it valid to pad an axis slightly in order to enhance point
  visibility?

Yes. For example, in the textbook by Neil Weiss, Introductory Statistics, all of the examples including data in the 0-class are treated this way:

Note the symbol // on the horizontal axes in Figs. 2.3(a) and (b).
  This symbol indicates that the zero point on that axis is not in its
  usual position at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical
  axes. Whenever any such modification is made, whether on the
  horizontal or vertical axis, the symbol // or some similar symbol
  should be used to indicate that fact. (Weiss, 8E, Sec. 2.3)

While this is used throughout on the horizontal axis, what the reader is warned against is modifying the location of the zero on the vertical axis:

Figure 2.12(a) is an example of a truncated graph because the
  vertical axis, which should start at 0%, starts at 4% instead. Thus
  the part of the graph from 0% to 4% has been cut off, or truncated.
  This truncation causes the bars to be out of proportion and hence
  creates a misleading impression... Truncated graphs have long been a
  target of statisticians, and many statistics books warn against their
  use. (Weiss, 8E, Sec. 2.5)

Presumably the issue you point out regarding the vertical axis only applies to bar graphs, though. The proportion of the OP's data points + error bars would not be affected by the origin of the vertical axis.

@ff524: That's debatable. I would plan to put 0 at the bottom of the y-axis by default (as the OP seems to expect) unless some very clear reason presented itself that I shouldn't. Frankly, the only case that comes to mind would be a non-proportional measure like temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Related: How to determine whether or not the y-axis of a graph should start at zero?

@ff524: I like that the top answer in that linked question indeed uses temperature as its example of when to use a nonzero vertical basis, which makes sense because it's (almost uniquely) a non-proportional measure.

Thanks a lot for your answer!  I really liked it, but when I proposed it as an alternative it was rejected by my collaborators as "distracting", "busy", and "unconventional" (which I find a very poor excuse).  Never-the-less, thanks for supporting it so well.  I think this would be a good way to address the issue and keep everyone technically happy.


text:
What are some examples of visually appealing papers?
What are some examples of visually appealing papers, preferably with a two-column layout?
Basically, this is for a publication that is aimed at a more general public and should be appealing and approachable but at the same time, I'd like to maintain academic approach, structure and feel to it.
So I'm looking for examples of papers where the author put some work into polishing the design, perhaps with some conservative use of color and non-standard elements.

Hi, and welcome to Academia.SE!  Can you please give some more information about what you are looking for and why?  Right now this is a "make a big list" question that is ill-suited for the StackExchange format.

Maybe it helps if you tell us why you want to know this. Usually we submit our papers to a journal, and we have no choice about how we should submit the paper and what the paper finaly looks like in printed form.

Yeah, sorry, I added more details.

You may find Showcase of beautiful typography done in TeX & friends helpful. (They've historically been more tolerant of "big list" questions over there, I don't know if they still are.)

The final look of your paper is typically not up to you (the author) but up to the journal (the publisher). I cannot say if this applies to all sciences but in any kind of research I have been a part of, you:

prepare a manuscript, in accordance with the user guidelines that typically make you prepare a word, TeX or pdf file that is plain text with enough space in between the rows, with figures and tables typically in the end,

upon acceptance of the manuscript, a proof is prepared by the editors (typically not the scientific editors but the graphical editors) of the journal which you (as the authors) get to read and comment on. For instance if a figure is badly placed, or the table is wrongly set etc.

Once the proof is reviewed by the authors, and is approved it gets printed like that.

I have never heard of a journal where the users choose how their papers look like in print. Allowing each and every author to choose layout, font, color etc goes against most publishing conventions. That being said, there are certainly things you can do as an author to improve your papers visual appearance:
A) Get your figures right!

If you are going black and white publication then make sure there are no color coded information on your figures. If I had a penny for every time I saw a B&W figure where the blues and blacks are indistinguishable...
Make sure your figures are at least in 200 dpi resolution (preferably 300 dpi or more)
If possible, make sure your figures are vector-based so that they can be scaled up/down without any loss to clarity.
Make your figures in reasonable sizes; too large or too small figures are difficult to place properly when the editor has a strict layout to work with. This issue becomes more prominent for compound figures. Some journals even have limits on how many panels you can have in a figure.

B) Get your text right!
Reading a large body of text is not trivial, especially if the text in question isn't written in the easiest of languages. I have heard the following phrase numerous times over the years: "An academic text isn't written to be read, it's written to say as much as possible with as little space as possible."  In order words it's written to be published.
Since it's difficult to read articles as is, you (as the author) can make the readers' life easier or harder by your choice of words, as well as accuracy in punctuation and grammar. Here are a couple of general tips:

be consistent in your choice of voice; passive voice is supposed to be harder on the reader but it is more common in academic writing. Nevertheless, if you start with "we did XYZ", stick with that. Constant alternation between active and passive voice, raises the question of "who?", every once in a while..

Try to keep your paragraphs to reasonable sizes. Too long paragraphs makes the reader lose attention, single sentence, one/two line paragraphs are distracting. Try to keep your paragraphs away from those extremes as much as you can. Each paragraph should optimally be a single "move", you talk about a single bullet-point.

Break up your text with headings/subtitles into reasonable and meaningful chunks (4-6 paragraphs is pretty good IMHO). Make sure these headings are explanatory for what you will be describing in the coming subsection. These not only serve to separate long bits of texts from each other, but also give the reader a framework to place the newly acquired information and make it easier to see the overall point of the paper. Also it makes relocating a specific bit of information MUCH easier several years down the line.

Hope it helps.

A good place to find examples of highly visually appealing mass-audience articles is in "magazine journals" published by academic/professional societies.  Some examples that I happen to be familiar with are:

IEEE Computer
Communications of the ACM
AI Magazine

These sorts of publications have technical articles, but they are published for a very broad audience and are professionally edited, including by graphical designers, in order to ensure that they are visually appealing as well.


text:
Is there evidence that suggests students should take notes?
I hear a lot about good note-taking strategies vs bad note-taking strategies, and I have seen a lot of research papers on different styles of note-taking. What I haven't seen though is any study that has asked if we should even be taking notes in the first place.
Specifically I would like to know the long-term effects of taking notes vs not taking notes. It is clear to me that if someone has taken notes their entire academic career, then immediately stops, their performance will probably plummet, but how do students who have never taken notes compare to students who have always taken notes?
I would guess certain learning styles would benefit from note-taking while other learning styles are hindered by note-taking, but I would like to see some actual data on this if anyone knows anything about it. A cursory Google search didn't return anything, so I hope there is someone on here that may be able to shed some light on this.
Edit: A lot of people have taken this question to solely be asking for research on this topic. While I would most like to see actual data, I did not intend this to solely be a literature search, and people can post their anecdotal evidence, as long as it is pointed at the long-term difference in note-taking vs not taking notes.

@101010111100 There is an entire [tag:reference-request] tag for questions seeking research-based answers about academia. A good rule of thumb: if a question would be on topic if it didn't specify that answers should be based on research, not only experience, then asking for that higher standard of evidence in answers doesn't suddenly make it off topic.

A Google search for "efficacy of taking notes" returns lots of hits in the literature, including e.g. http://hilt.harvard.edu/files/hilt/files/notetaking_0.pdf . I've run across several such papers myself. (This one, not exactly on-topic, is interesting: https://sites.udel.edu/victorp/files/2010/11/Psychological-Science-2014-Mueller-0956797614524581-1u0h0yu.pdf) Are you sure the answer to your question doesn't come up in the usual literature searches?

@RaghuParthasarathy I did find that paper on Harvard's website before posting this, and it was the closet thing I looked at to what I want to know. While it is close to what I want to see, it only addressed the benefits of note-taking, but didn't address the benefits of not taking notes, and didn't compare the two, at least that I saw.

@emory There's a big difference between 'should you attend lectures?' and 'should you take notes in a lecture?' Either way, I believe there are good arguments for the answer 'yes'.

@emory My question was not at all about students attending lecture. First, the article you cite only talks about a strict lecture-only format, and that isn't the only format where one could effectively take notes. For example, when I teach, I switch between mini-lectures(5-10 minutes to present a concept or get everyone on the same page), discussion and group work. During the mini-lecture many of my students take notes, and during group work I encourage students to write their ideas out as they discuss them. This avoids the problem of the "pure lecture" while still having students take notes.

@emory Also, the study that shows pure-lecture is bad has never(to my knowledge) been performed while controlling for note-taking. What if students who have never taken notes can subsequently pay attention for longer in lecture settings? What is the attention deficit is actually caused by the fact that most students are trying to pay attention and take notes, rather than just pay attention and be fully engaged?

@SeanEnglish I commend you for your active teaching style.  Whether your students take notes or not, they are ahead of their lecture-only peers.  I am not aware of research about note-taking wrt active teaching.  I would guess that note-taking is not useful because it interferes with listening and doing, but maybe that is just me.

@emory I am actually in the same camp as you are, I have a suspicion that for many students(not all, I guess it will depend on the learning style of the student.) note-taking is actually a barrier to their education. I can't find any literature that tackles this issue to my satisfaction, which is why I wanted to know if anyone else knew something.

Why would this question apply only to students, why should anyone take notes?

@user4050 You are right that there is a bigger question that applies outside of the classroom. That just isn't what I am asking about though. I want to know about note-taking specific to students in academia. If you are curious about more general note-taking, you are more than welcome to ask a question about it, but I don't think academia stack exchange would be the right place for a question about non-academic note-taking.

You said you're not looking for research on note-taking, so consider this a freebie.
That said, I'm not entirely sure what you are looking for here. There's a preponderance of research showing that (1) putting things in your own words and (2) recall exercises over time significantly improve memory. This pdf has some good overviews, and points to this academic publication (note: paywall) which contains a bunch of actual references.
Actually, the more I'm researching here, there does seem to be significant evidence that the act of note-taking itself is beneficial to recall and understanding. Two more recent examples relate to mock jurors watching a mock trial while either taking notes or not [1][2]. There's a paper which I can't seem to download but I've seen cited a few times that discusses the positive effect of note taking on student performance [3].
All this said, there's more to it than this. There are numerous note-taking methods, and they have a literature all of their own (e.g., [4]). The way you take notes definitely affects how effective the note-taking will be.
So yeah, it helps.

Edit based on comments: There is substantial evidence that note-taking, by itself, improves retention. That said, the OP seems to be curious whether the fact that we take notes at all is biasing our results; perhaps we should be focusing on comparing pure memory recall techniques to note-taking. Said differently, will someone with memory training outperform someone proficient at note-taking?
I still think that this question itself has issues. Specifically:

There is a significant difference between someone who simply doesn't take notes and someone who has trained themselves to not need written notes. I know people who avoid writing anything (mostly psychiatrists who don't want everything written down and subpoena-able), and it took years of mental training to get there. That is different from the lazy kid who just says "I can remember everything."
As with note-taking, there are many different techniques for remembering without notes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that ignoring the techniques ignores an important part of the question.
I don't think this question is even answerable anymore. Most of the modern world takes notes in some form (source: I made this up), whereas a very minor percentage of people nowadays use purely memory-based techniques (source: I made this up too). As such, finding a representative sample from the second group for our comparison would be pretty doggone difficult.

I actually said the opposite, and would like to see research on note-taking... I looked through the things you cited((that weren't behind paywalls) and couldn't find anything pertaining to my question. Specifically the long-term effects of note-taking vs not taking notes. if a study takes students that have been taking notes their entire academic career, then tests their ability to not take notes, they are surely going to do poorly. As far as I have been able to find, it is unclear how a student who has gone their academic career without taking notes would fair against a note-taking student.

@SeanEnglish - Thanks for clarifying. That's a very specific question, and I'm not entirely sure what the grounds for it are. The above links strongly suggest that note-taking improves performance relative to not doing so. As such, asking how well a life-long non-note-taker would perform against a note-taker would require some statistical consideration that the note-taker would do better regardless. Even so, I'm not sure what's being learned there... that's a VERY specific question.

What would be learned is if we should actually be taking notes or not. Just as people need to develop good note-taking strategies over time(your average college student has practiced for a decade.), people need time to develop strategies for studying without notes. When taking notes, people store information in their brain by linking it to the notes. Each time they want to use that information, their thought process passes through the notes, rather than directly connecting related concepts. Could these indirect routes actually hinder long-term conceptual understanding?

Maybe an example will help to illustrate my point. Look at calculator use for students studying math. If those students have been using a calculator for the past decade in their math classes, and you test them with and without a calculator, they will probably perform better with one(as long as the test requires some computation.), but someone who studied without ever using a calculator would probably have much better number sense than the calculator users, and thus may outperform the calculator users. Could a similar thing happen with note-taking? I don't know, and I am curious to see.

@SeanEnglish - Thanks for explaining; I've amended my answer.

Thanks for the edits. I think your answer really does address my question now. I can understand your worry about not finding a sample large enough, but I think maybe you will be surprised. There at at least three people in my department that I have spoken to and they have said that they never take notes(or if they have, it was very minimal, because of a requirement from a teacher.) While this is purely anecdotal, and may depend on the department, it suggests that maybe if you look across campuses, you could possibly gather a sample of non-note-takers or minimal note-takers.

Anecdotally, not taking notes worked well for me in CS, but the optimal strategy depends on the particular style of instructor delivery.
If tests covers content directly from the texts, it's often beneficial to not to take notes, and give 100% focus to the lectures and engaging in discussion.  This approach maximizes real time absorption, giving your brain precious extra seconds to consider the implications of each concept you hear, and to ask clarifying questions.  Notes are replaced with the text or course materials for later review.
Alternatively, some instructors will test on concepts from lectures that are not part of course text or materials.  In these cases, there is not really much choice other than to take notes (or use recordings) to make sure you have what's needed for exam review.

I'm addressing different points in my response.
Should you take notes? (Short answer is yes for most subjects especially if you're new to the material and/or have terrible memory)
The long answer is it depends on the subject, individual, and level of expertise in the subject. As an example of the first, it's not uncommon in music to learn by listening so note-taking benefits are limited.  For the second, some people can capture information without the need for notes but there is plenty of literature (and this has also been joked as the "Lake Wobegon" effect) that most people feel they can capture information without note-taking but when actually tested their performance was weaker. But recognize most of these studies were for people studying new subjects, which brings me to the final point.  If you've been practicing the field for awhile, then the knowledge is embedded in your head so your need for note-taking is less.  From experience, you know what you need to pay attention to so you may not write it down.  As an example, I've worked with two world leaders in their respective domains. I rarely saw them taking notes when it came down to their own fields but for new materials they did: one was biochemical engineering (expertise thermodynamics) and the other was statistics (expertise biochemical engineering).
What does the science say about note-taking?
It's actually quite complicated for a variety of reasons but here's a short synopsis. First, most people don't know how to take notes and there have been studies on people learning from their own notes vs. those provided by the professors.  People did better with the latter but considering that doesn't
happen most of the time I consider it a moot point. But if you can get lecture notes from the source use them.
Second, science has actually looked at listening vs. taking notes (and not reviewing- called encoding) vs. storage (which is reviewing notes either you've taken or provided by the expert) and there are many papers that
talk about it but one pretty good review paper is by Kenneth Kiewra (1989) Review of Note-Taking: The Encoding-Storage Paradigm and Beyond).  Below is a relevant excerpt
From Kiewra's paper:
"In 61 studies reviewed by Hartley (1983) and/or Kiewra (1985a), 35 found facilitative encoding effects, 23 indicated that note-takers and listeners did not differ significantly on performance tests, and three studies reported that listening without note-taking led to better performance than note-taking. Among studies comparing the storage and encoding functions, the storage function has proven more beneficial (e.g., Carter and Van Matre, 1975; Fisher and Harris, 1973; Kiewra, 1985b; Rickards and Friedman, 1978)." [Complication was that testing immediately after lecture revealed in many cases no difference but after waiting a week or longer after the lecture the note-takers/reviewers often did better. So, for most realistic settings either take or review your notes.  Cramming is not recommended]
What's the best note-taking technique?
People state Cornell but the reality is unless you review, reflect, and synthesize your notes it doesn't matter which approach you take. Cornell just makes it easier to do those steps but the others can be modified to do the same.
Now in the words of one of my professors, "You are not asking the right question."
If the objective is to learn, then note-taking is one way to do that and is the preferred route for most topics and beginners (aka students).  But it is not the only way, deliberate practice which may or may not include note-taking is a more general strategy for acquiring expertise. K. Anders Ericsson published a layman's book on it called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise if you want to learn more.  (But even his research has its critics)

I understand it's very easy to overestimate abilities, but individual differences are real and can be quite significant in finding your best style.  It's not even that some people have "better" memories than others.  I didn't realize until later in life that I seem to recall academic lectures better than others, but at the same time seem to be at best average in other situations.
Not sure if this is purely due to interest because it happens across subjects. The net of it is, it doesn't cost much to try multiple styles and see what works best.

I think it is important to distinguish two kinds of note-takers.
The first kind of note taker takes notes because they can't understand the material in real-time. This group of note-takers plan to learn by poring over the notes later, perhaps in several iterations. Such note-takers are, of course, not the creme of the crop academically.
The second kind of note taker takes notes because writing things down is their way of memorizing things. Members of this group of note-takers rarely, if ever, refer back to their notes. Their notes may be distinctly less organized than those of the first group of note-takers. They may also have poor memory when it comes to anything non-academic that they wouldn't necessarily think of writing down.
It's also important to distinguish two kinds of non-note-takers: Students who don't take notes because they plan to barely pass the course versus students why are exceptionally capable of memorizing things without aids.
As you can see, overall, both "good" and "bad" students span the entire spectrum of note-taking, making it difficult to make accurate judgements based on observing note-taking behavior alone.

"Such note-takers are, of course, not the creme of the crop academically." Er, how do you make this leap, except by redefining your mixed metaphor to mean "the best people are those who (think they can) digest everything in real time"?

Moreover: on what basis are you making these analyses/judgments/taxonomies of note-takers? Observation of peers? Observation as a teacher or lecturer?

I personally alternate between these two supposed types of note-takers - sometimes in the same class, sometimes in the same lecture.

(The question asks for judgments based on research, not "judgments based on observing note-taking behavior alone".)