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Is it ethical to apply different criteria for graduate admissions based on country of undergraduate study?
We have undertaken a small statistical study of M.S. students in our department, including their application information and their eventual performance in our program. The goal is to develop criteria for making admissions decisions for new applicants based on their likelihood of success in our program (as predicted by the performance of recent, similar students). I won't get into the details of the methodology.
One outcome of this study was that different attributes predict success for students with undergrad degrees from different countries. For example, for applicants to the program from schools in country X, but not schools in country Y, undergrad GPA is correlated with the  students' GPA in our program; for schools in country Y, but not X, GRE scores are correlated with the student's GPA in our program. (I'm simplifying a lot here.) A "toy" example I just completely made up to illustrate is shown below:

(of course, for real applicants the criteria and the relationships are more complicated)
There are many possible reasons for this: for example, we could think that the grading system is more consistent in X so undergrad GPA is a better predictor there, and in X students study "for the exam" so the GRE becomes virtually meaningless as a measure of knowledge. I could speculate, but I don't think it would be helpful. The bottom line is, we find that different factors predict student success among different populations.
Therefore, if we wanted to admit students based on their likelihood of achieving a certain GPA in our program, we would apply an undergrad GPA cutoff for students from X, and a GRE threshold for students from Y. (Again, this is vastly simplified from the criteria our study actually suggested.)
Is it fair to apply different criteria to students with undergrad degrees from different countries in admissions decisions?
Does the answer change if this would significantly skew the admissions decisions in favor of a particular country of undergrad study (because statistically, applicants to our program whose undergrad degrees are from X have done much better than those with undergrad degrees from Y).
My concern is that we're effectively saying, "Students with undergrad degrees from Y with a GRE score < T will be rejected, but students with undergrad degrees from X  with GRE < T may still be considered for admission (pending other criteria)."
On the other hand, if we ignore these statistics and reject students with undergrad degrees from X with low GRE scores, we are rejecting applicants even though we have no valid reason to believe that they won't do well in our program.
To those who doubt the results of the study:

When I say the study is "small" I don't mean it isn't statistically significant - just that it was not designed to be generalizable beyond our applicant pool. (This is the same reason why I won't give too many details about the study - I don't want anybody to read it and try to generalize from our results.)
As we know, the sample size is not the only factor that determines whether a given effect is significant. We found that the results are significant, given the sample size.
The results also seem "sane" (which of course is subjective). It's not unexpected that undergraduate grading standards (and the standard-ness of grading standards) differ by country; or that different educational systems and cultures prepare students differently for standardized exams like the GRE and TOEFL; etc. The specifics of the results (i.e., which criteria are good predictors for which undergrad country) are consistent with what students who studied in those countries have told us about grading standards, student culture, and exam prep. So, we really have no reason to doubt them.

You are assuming that different schools in the same country have consistent(or same) grading standards.

@scaaahu We are not - the school is also considered in the analysis, but turns out to be less (statistically) important for our particular applicant pool.

Of course it is. Moreover, it's unfair to apply the same criteria to all students from the aame country, instead of varying the criteria by the undergrad institution.  Alternatively: You aren't using different criteria; the criterion for all applicants is their predicted GPA.

For our applicant pool, the undergrad institution is statistically significant only for a small minority of applicants; for most applicants, the criteria they would be evaluated by depend mostly on the country of undergraduate study.

@JeffE every answer so far disagrees with your comment - care to elaborate in an answer?

Not an education professional here, but I'd like to give my 0.02... If they're already taking a standardised test such as the GRE, then why would you further rank them by country of undergraduate degree? Also aren't graduates interviewed by their respective professors/admissions officers? What you want from them isn't just test scores, but to see their enthusiasm to learn, contribute to the academic world.

@Populus we don't interview M.S. students, we judge them entirely on their applications. Thus, the reason for the study: to find out how to better judge their ability to succeed based on the information in their applications.

Then I'm not sure why you're even teaching them, if you just want to churn out masters degree holders that you already know will succeed. Education institutes should be looking at teaching people how to succeed, people don't just inherently become good at something (except for a handful of exceptional ones). If you think the GRE results can be rigged, that's another matter and you should really be looking at how to change that instead of just generically labeling groups of people due to their geographical location (a.k.a. stereotyping)

@Populus: It's well-known that GRE and other "standardized" tests are not administered in a standardized way worldwide.  And why would it be up to a single department recruiting students to try to fix the irregularities in the GRE?

Not asking 1 department or 1 person to fix anything themselves, but it would help to get the ball rolling instead of just saying it's broken and then step over it. If you think GRE is not good enough, then you can either put some actual work into it: interview your students, or create another test after the GRE to further screen the ones you don't want. Screening people based on skill and knowledge is fine, screening geographically is unfair and plain laziness.

@Populus We're not proposing to use geography as a criteria for admission; we're suggesting that different criteria measure skill and knowledge in different parts of the world, and wondering how we can fairly account for that.

@ff524 I wouldn't use geographical location as a variable for anything relating to admissions. I would either test all candidates individually, or look at their past achievements and qualifications, you can say look at someone's A-Levels or GCSEs or SATs...etc., and rank them according to their performance in those standardised tests, since it's a clearly different standard than the GRE you can then rate your candidates differently according to the different tests that they have done. This doesn't eliminate some edge cases, but nothing in this world is risk-free.

@Populus Not every country has standardized tests, and the tests are different from one country to the next! You're suggesting that we use different exams to evaluate students in different countries?

If you don't have enough information on the applicant, give them another test. And no, not a test for each country, it will be a test that your institute has to maintain for itself, and I hope you're going to confident with your own tests...

I can see why this would raise a lot of red flags. Still, I commend the effort, in that it's trying to accomplish the main goal: to admit the students who have the best chance of succeeding. I don't sniff any malicious intent, but it's still a legal minefield.

I wonder why you would use GPA in the graduate program as a measure of success.  Surely completing a decent thesis is the only really measure of success?  Or going on to a successful career afterwards?  I have not really cared at all about my graduate school GPA, and if a class seems irrelevant, or boring, half way through I just stop going.

@StevenGubkin  In my dept, a thesis is not required for M.S. students. Also, student career outcomes info is not available to me (I believe those outcomes surveys are anonymous, so we can't map them to admissions data.) In any event, the criteria of success is as follows: Successful = GPA >= 3.0, Unsuccessful = "On academic probation" = GPA < 3.0. I agree that finer GPA distinctions would not be particularly useful.

I see.  That does make sense.

You (the OP) are getting very misleading criticisms of a defensible procedure, based on misunderstanding of how the statistics works.  There are many (huge) errors here, such as assuming that people in the "negatively discriminated" country will have lower, or uniformly lower, chances under the nationality-aware statistical model.  The main problem is assuming discrimination if the result of a fictitious procedure "all else equal, change the nation of origin" alters the chances.  That is an incorrect way to interpret the output of the model when variables correlate.  I can add an answer later.

@zyx still planning to add an answer?

I am starting with comments, answer is in progress but will take longer.

For your information, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/11984/546 Please pay attention to the last paragraph of that question.

@scaaahu what's the relevance? I don't understand.

The OP of the other question claims that people from unknown colleges with higher GPAs getting in to places like Stanford and he cannot get to top 20 school because of low GPA. Again, this is his claim. We have no idea if he is good or not. My point is that this is an example a student believes he could not get to a school he wants only because of low GPA.

I'm going to advise against.

You say your sample size is small. And honestly, unless you hired a professional statistician, I have doubt the analysis was carried out properly or shows exactly what you think it shows. Good statistics are hard to do.
Assuming my google results are truthful, National Origin is a Protected Class in the US. You can't discriminate against people because of it. I assume this is an american institution as you talk about GRE, but similar applies in other places. EDIT: OP has since clarified a misunderstanding of mine - the judgement is based not on the student's country of origin, but the country of the school they attended, which makes me less certain this point still applies.
You're department is actually, seriously proposing to say to people "Sorry, while you have the same official qualifications as another candidate we accepted, we're rejecting you because of your country of origin"? I mean, really? Whoa. Just stop and play back how this kind of justification would sound in almost any other circumstance. Think about how the press will make it sound when they (inevitably) get wind of it.

SUBSEQUENT EDIT
So, this question interested me, and I've bounced it off a couple of other people in my lab. Their main concern seemed to be that grouping by country was just to coarse a measurement, as every country has its own mix of good and bad schools. The basic idea, though, didn't seem to elicit the same gut reaction as it did from me.
Moreover, I've googled and found at least two examples of courses that vary their requirements based on country of origin, so there is precedent:
https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/for/international-students/is-entry-requirements/is-minimum-overseas-entry-requirements.html
http://sydney.edu.au/business/futurestudents/postgraduate_study/pg_coursework_studies#app_req
So maybe I've got this wrong, and should just be ignored. At any rate I'm no longer sure it's quite so clear cut.

"Students who earned their undergrad degree from a university in X" Okay, that's a better criteria than what I thought you were doing at first (The line "Is it fair to apply different criteria to students from different countries in admissions decisions?" really confused me on the front, as there's no mention of institution there - only the student). However, having a blanket rule on universities based on country they're in still seems to have massive potential to blow up in your face later to me, legally or otherwise.

I agree that it seems wrong to have a double standard - but it also seems wrong to me to reject a student based on a GRE score, when I don't have any reason to think it will predict his performance. I can't seem to find an acceptable approach here.

Yeah, it's not I problem I envy you for having to deal with. What kind of numbers of students are we talking about processing here? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Would it be possible to set a departmental test they all have to carry out and judge them on that? Or run interviews?

I'd rather not be too specific. Enough to have  statistically significant results by country, not enough to be significant by individual institution (which would certainly make things easier). But interviews are not practical at the M.S. level for us.

At this point then, I'm probably all out of suggestions, few as they have been :/. I think the reaction you've received from myself and the other two people who have answered so far is pretty representative of that you'll get from the public in general. This is potentially a huge ethical/legal/PR minefield. If you can, I'd say it may be worth organising a meeting with other concerned parties (admissions, department heads, legal, student representative, whatever is appropriate), putting your findings to them complete with all the details we can't see, and getting input on where you should next.

@shane it's really not that simple. For example, how would we verify that students submit their own work? Who says ability to solve one particular programming problem predicts success in our M.S. program? (I don't think it would).

I think the last point would be more like: "So, you got the same score as this other candidate, but as we think you have had to overcome greater obstacles, and your university has prepared you better for this job than the exam, we are taking you in instead".

Of the three arguments, (1) is irrelevant to the question, which was about a presumed-correct analysis; (2) assumes that foreign nationals on foreign soil are subject to all the protections of US law (e.g., that a university cannot apply quotas or diversity considerations to foreign applicants); and (3) is not how the statistics works.  You can't assert discrimination based on one of the variables (such as nationality) by "controlling for all the other characteristics" when the other characteristics, and the outcomes the study is examining, strongly correlate with that variable.

That is, it is invalid (statistically) to argue about discriminatory impact by pretending to hold everything but the national origin constant, changing the national origin, and observing that this would change the applicant rating computed using the model.  If the variables include GRE Verbal or TOEFL, it is essentially impossible to change an applicant's nation from China to Canada without altering those scores.  The whole point of the statistical model is to account for the difference in the interpretation of such scores as detected by performance measures that are nationality-blind.

(That's in reference to the 3 arguments at the top of the posting, before the edits.)

I was waiting and hoping that @JeffE would expand his comment, since I share the opinion he expressed there, and moreover I think he is far more qualified to give advice on the subject. (Quite possibly, if he decides to expand his comment to an answer that has better facts and arguments than what I am about to offer, I will delete my answer).
DISCLAIMER: I do not know either where you are, what the laws are like there, or if your final decision can have any legal repercussions. I advise seeking legal counsel for any questions of that sort.
I think it if fine to have different criteria for students that obtained their undergrads in different countries (and/or in different institutions), as long as you can ensure the criteria are fair.
Now, how to approach ensuring that the criteria are fair, I have no idea, but I definitely know that if in some countries the GPA is indicative of a person who has potential as a researcher, in some countries it is simply not (I for example did my Masters in Croatia, and I know both people with around 3/5 GPA that made excellent PhD candidates and people with a perfect 5/5 GPA that I do not think would be capable of much independent thinking that were happy to take jobs where they have strictly defined output they have to produce and no research to speak of).
I have two different examples of using "different" criteria in the admission process, but unfortunately both of them are for the wrong level of study:

First one is about undergrad admissions to my former Computer Science Faculty* in Croatia. While the big majority of the candidates take a standardized test and are admitted based on that, a small amount of students (maybe 1%, maybe even much less) are invited.
These invitations work as such: the Faculty regularly does a continuous performance study on the previous invitees according to their High schools, as well as (I assume), overall performance of students from different High schools. Each year, a number of invites is extended to High schools, who can then "award" their students with those invites.
Based on the performance study and possibly High school size, some schools get a larger number of invites (up to 5, I think), while some get only 1 invite or even none.
And, actually, I think it's fair. E.g. the strong mathematical High schools will get the most invites (those are the schools "prepping" their students for technical studies after all), strong general schools would get some, and weak schools would get none. And still everything would be re-evaluated year after year. Also, additionally, nobody still loses their fair chance to enroll: this "invited" students make less than 1% of the enrolled students, while everybody can still take the standardized test.
The second example is about the interview for a PhD position / pre-PhD internship.
Recently, a permanent professor from my lab started looking for a person to hire for an internship with a strong chance of offering them a PhD upon the completion of the internship. I mentioned that my ex supervisor used to supervise people with a similar profile to what was required, and that I could ask him weather he has somebody interested (and good enough) to apply.
When he received the preliminary application documentation, he asked me to comment on the profile because he was not familiar with the Croatian University system at all. I said that good grades were usually indication of a good student, but bad grades do not have to be an indication of a bad student.
There was also some other points in the CV adding value to his application, not directly obvious to somebody non-Croatian. After talking to an ex post-doc of his (who worked a bit with the applicant), the professor decided to interview with the student.
A few days later, he told me that based on the interview, he offered the applicant a position. He also told me that he would most probably not interview a person with that profile, if not for what me and his Croatian ex-post doc said about the "interpretation" of the profile.

I agree with both these cases. The ("absolute") criteria is indeed not the same for everybody. But still, in both these cases, the goal was to be fair, to base the decision on the applicants abilities, and finally to judge the applicants abilities and potential "on the same scale" for all applicants, just based on different information that was available, finally causing different "absolute" criteria.
*In Croatia, the Universities are not wholesome entities, and all the administrative decisions are made on the level of the Faculty. There is no identification of students with the Uni in Croatia; if you ask a Croatian studying "at home" where he is studying, he is going to provide the information about his Faculty.

ADDITION. I wanted to add that, despite what any statistical research might show, if students from different countries have the same, internationally standardized tests, then I think making a different criterion would be wrong.
Maybe, for the country X, those tests are not good indicator because students get prepped exactly for those types of exams, but there just might be a few students who learned the material in the "proper way" (as do the majority of students from the country Y), who might get rejected for no real reason.
So, bottom line, I think

studying, and then declaring your own criteria to interpret different (non-standardized) national grading schemes is fine (even if they use the same scale "on the outside" -- e.g. two countries which both have a national standard grading schemes on a scale 1 to 5)
but, if a criterion is based on an internationally standardized exam, that same criterion should be used with everybody where applicable (e.g. everybody who took that standardized exam).
As a compromise-suggestion, I think it would be fine to say that you accept all students from everywhere if their score is extremely high (e.g. >95%), and all the students with medium-to-high scores (e.g. between 75% and 95%) will be considered based on additional criteria (where you can introduce personal interviews, standardized test from your institution, personal research statement + recommendation letters)...

Edit2: This opinion was supported when I talked to a person with a background in law (not in academia thou).:
 The final verdict was: interpreting criteria that are initially different (e.g. GPA) differently is OK, but if something is standardized on an international level, it would only be OK to either take it in to account equally for everybody, or not at all. (purposefully using OK instead of "allowed" or "lawful" since I don't know the laws at your place). With a note that, unfortunately, What is lawful and what is just and fair is sadly not always the same.

The specific example you mention, of asking a trusted individual from country X for advice in evaluating students from X, is I believe very common. I think what we're trying to do is essentially the same thing, though less subjective.

Exactly. The point was finding the "context" in which to evaluate the student. The same way the first (undergrad) study is trying to put the schools in context (i.e. you might get an invited admission if you're an excellent student from an excellent school, but not from an average school), the second one is trying to put the transcript in context (i.e. does the mediocre transcript by absolute value really mean a mediocre student or not). And of course, in your case of a large student pool, such a context has to be based on a large pool of "opinions" - evidence, and not on one individual.

Neither of the examples actually answer the question on whether or not you can officially demand applicants to meet different criteria based on where they come from. More specifically, #1 would be considered unacceptable and immoral in Scandinavia, it would be some serious sh*tstorm if something like that were to come up on the news. #2 happens on a regular basis pretty much lab I know of. It does not mean that the professor in question can go out and write it out in plain text that if the applicant is, from China/India/Croatia/Madagascar/... they don't need to meet the same criteria.

Consider asking the professor in question whether or not he would or could write the job advert in the following way: "The applicant should have a GPA of 3.5/4 (~87.5%), unless they are from Croatia, in which case 3/5 (60%) is good enough."

Well, actually, the 3/5 GPA in Croatia is more like 75% since the grade 1 is a failing grade... But again, not really, since all the passing grades are distributed as in lowest 15% of the students gets a 2, next 35% gets a 3, next 35% gets a 4, and the best 15% a 5. So, "yearly score" of 3/5 actually means that the student is "somewhere between the the best 75% and 50% of best students who got all passing grades"...or something similar like that. I'm just trying to demonstrate that to recalculate the GPA of ~87.5% to Croatian system is really not so trivial and obvious.

@posdef Ups, sorry, meant to @-reply with my last comment. But, also, I wanted to add what I edited in the question: I think interpreting the results from an internationally standard measure different across countries is not okay. But if a country has it's own country-specific grading system, studying and making criteria based on their grading scheme is better than just "wigging it" and hoping you interpreted it correctly.  Also, I don't think the "job add" sounds very unfair -- I actually kept my GPA unnecessarily high during Uni, because I didn't think non-Croatians could interpret it well.

@penelope I can sympathise with your example, especially after having seen the german and danish (by far the least intuitive I have seen so far) grading systems. I definitely agree that any local grading system should be rated individually instead of a direct conversion. I just didn't interpret the OP that way; but rather as feasibility of having different GRE score thresholds for different countries (GPA is a crap method of evaluating the student anyways, especially when multiple different grading schemes are involved).

@ff524 I am quite familiar with that question :) Anyways, I hope I managed to provide a valid, albeit negative, opinion to your question. I intend to retire from the discussion otherwise :)

let us continue this discussion in chat

I don't think it has to be bad. GRE is a measurement of how good you are at doing exams, and not necessarily the most relevant kind to your graduate work. Some universities and education systems are very good at making people excel at set fixed format exams; but they don't teach them how to think by themselves and be creative.
In my opinion, GRE is a very biased measurement in itself, and it is not very well designed (just look at the ridiculous maths part). Also, it is based on a lot of fairly simple exercises, whereas in some universities, we are used to completely different kind of exam: a few long and complicated exercises, and perhaps don't have the ability to work fast enough in simple and repetitive tasks.

I hope by "Ridiculous maths" you meant "ridiculously easy, to the point where it fails to differentiate great applicants to technical programs from mediocre ones."  Non-technical programs oughtn't to be using the math score for much of anything.

Yes, that is what I meant. I haven't look much at GREs, but judging from the maths one, I fear many parts will likely be useless measurements: or too easy, or too specific for a certain background.

If the GRE is too easy you need to find another test. This is not an argument for biasing it against people from certain countries

It is not only how difficult it is, it is also what it measures. Changing GRE for something more sensible would be the ideal option, but it is way outside the scope of a department. The question here is if they could, with what is available, make a better choice.

@PhilipGibbs, the purpose and quite possibly the result of the statistical analysis is to un-bias the GRE (which favors or disfavors various nationalities, languages, types of education system, etc) by validating it against real outcomes that are defined uniformly with respect to nationality, such as performance in the program.  It is absurd to imagine that national origin, either per se or using undergraduate institution as (in effect) a proxy, does not play a huge role in the way that, among many other things, GRE verbal scores should be weighed.

I think the underlying questions are (ought to be) first, whether it is fair to reject a student because you cannot accurately measure their potential to do well in the program; and second, if you can perform equally accurate measurements on two groups as long as you use different criteria, is it okay to do so?
Answering the second question first: I think the answer is "yes".  The reason is made apparent by advocating the alternate view: should you take students who are likely to do poorly simply because you fail to apply a more sophisticated measurement?  That seems pretty boneheaded, and not very fair to the best students.  You should leave the analysis up to computers, as they are good at this sort of thing and impartial, but it's a good idea if you can implement it.  Don't forget, though, that data on whether a score distinguishes students within your program does not tell you about whether it helped you reject students that didn't make it in!  So you should be skeptical but open to the idea if that's where the data leads.
The first question could be rephrased as: "if I know I'm not getting a good sense of some students, can I just ignore them all?".  And that guides my advice there: no, that is not fair.  Find a way to do your job better--to get more information so that you can get a good sense of these students, or just accept that you would rather make mistakes in acceptance than find a way to do better on your predictions.
Putting these two together: if you have equal statistical power across groups when subdividing one population, then great!  Use the information.  But if you end up with one group better-measured than the other, you should only apply different criteria if you can show that students who are great and do all the right things in their less-measured context still have a shot at being admitted.
(Also, simple thresholds for individual scores, e.g. "We only take people with GREs above X" are rarely a smart way to run admissions unless those thresholds are set amazingly low.  You should be thresholding an overall score to get the top N students, so you'd be applying different weights for GRE in one context vs. another.)

simple thresholds for individual scores - yes, I simplified for purposes of the question - the classifier is more sophisticated than that.

I would argue that you are interpreting your data incorrectly and using the results in an unethical and discriminatory way. Your model is not identifying groups of individuals who should not be accepted, but rather groups of individuals that require additional support so that they can reach the full potential predicted by their past performance.
Consider the following example: For a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with ability or commitment, women have historically been less likely to become full professors in STEM fields than men. To reject female applicants base on a model that captures this historical effect is completely unethical. What the model would show is that female applicants need additional support to maximize their potential (e.g., flexible working hours and mentoring).

I don't think it shows that at all - it's more like saying, "GPA doesn't historically capture the ability of female applicants to succeed, so we should consider another criteria, like work experience, in evaluating them."

I would argue that you do not know which data the OP has, how he has done the analysis and on what exactly is his interpretation based. Try to, just for a second, imagine that his interpretation is correct. If you apply your reasoning to e.g. sports, would you rather compose an Olympic team from 5 best sportsman in the country that accidentally all practice in the capital, or would you say that this results are skewed and entice favoritism towards capital-dwellers, and instead rather train 5 sportsman who were only good in their local city/county, in order to "reach their full potential"?

@penelope I would want to train the 5 best sportsman independently from where they were from. I would not care that historically the only people who win Olympic medals are capital dwellers. If the 5 fastest and strongest (or highest GPA and GRE) happen to live in the capital so be it.

@ff524 the point is that the best predictor (e.g., GPA) may be the same for both groups (e.g., male and female), but that predictions of future success are going to be skewed by historical discrimination.

That's not what the data shows - the data shows that the value of every predictor we have available varies (statistically significantly) according to the country a student previously studied in (at least, for our applicant pool). Answers that assume this isn't possible aren't really helpful to me, they don't address the question.

@StrongBad As far as I can see, the OP made a study of predictors. And he is saying that the best predictor is not GPA, but something far more complex, and the country of undergrad study plays a significant part in that predictor. As far as I understand, we are not here to try and tell him that he did a wrong study (because some of us might not like the results), but rather to tell him what to do with the study results assuming they are correct. If he wanted to asses the validity of his study, I'm hoping he would have gone to a different SE site.

@penelope the OP asked if it is ethical to base admissions decisions on the results. My answer is that it is unethical since the design of the study would potentially reinforce existing discriminatory practices.

Given that you don't know the details of the study, I'm not sure why you assume that it reinforces existing discriminatory practices. We haven't found that, e.g., because we have historically had fewer successful students from Y we should reject all students from Y. We've found instead that the criteria that distinguish between a successful and unsuccessful student from Y are different from the criteria that distinguish between a successful and unsuccessful student from X.

Your answer, as it reads to me, is based on the assumption that the OP is interpreting his data incorrectly. Thus, I do not think it is actually the answer to the question. But, it is your answer and I have no right to try and change your opinion expressed in this answer.

@ff524 can we move this to chat? http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/14083802#14083802

The example with women is fallacious. The point is to get the best results in a, I assume, enviroment that provides the same opportunities for all. Academia in the mid XX century was not offering equal oportunities for women.

I completely agree with this answer. The comparison with gender bias is perfectly correct.

What if it went the other way around? This answer seems to assume that the fluid rules would always result in barring people who would be otherwise qualified. But what if an admissions office used this data to relax admissions criteria for some, rather than make them more stringent?

"Model is identifying ... groups of individuals that require additional support." -- This has nothing to do with the OP's question.  In situations where some group tends to do less well, most or all of that tends to be predicted correctly by the distributions of credentials in different groups. If group X has a worse distribution of credentials than other groups, that would lead to the prediction and observation of lower overall performance for group X.  The OP's question is about additional (statistical) effects of group beyond what credentials alone predict.

For example, you used women as a comparison, and women do have a lower distribution of things like GRE math scores. But studies that use the OP's type of analysis quite often find women performing better than credentials alone predict.  This is the opposite of the historical pattern or relative group standings assumed in the answer.  And the admissions argument that it would make is, as a matter of "merit" or performance prediction, to admit more women than credentials alone would suggest.

Does the answer change if this would significantly skew the admissions decisions in favor of a particular country of undergrad study (because statistically, applicants to our program whose undergrad degrees are from X have done much better than those with undergrad degrees from Y).
My concern is that we're effectively saying, "Students with undergrad degrees from Y with a GRE score < T will be rejected, but students with undergrad degrees from X with GRE < T may still be considered for admission (pending other criteria)."

To my ears this sounds analogous (with certain exaggeration) to: "we only want rich, white men from successful parents that could afford to send them to good schools through out their childhoods."
I realise that this is not what you intend but you got to realise that having different criteria based on the country of undergrad studies is unethical, biased and I can't see how you could implement something like that without having major headaches. You can, by all means, have different criteria for an individual (for instance by having an interview) but if you clump up an entire population based on some statistics, which you can't elaborate on for some reason, I call that discrimination.
Bottom line is, you cannot evaluate the chances of an individual being successful or not, without giving that person a fair chance. If you deem a particular GPA/GRE score to be "good enough" for your graduate program, all applicants that satisfy that criteria should be considered good enough, regardless where they come from. Any additional selection criteria could be justified only if it warrants additional information, such as TOEFL score for those who don't have English as a mother tongue.
One other option would be to calculate "success rate coefficients", something like a multiplicative factor for the GPA/GRE score for applicants from different undergrad institutions, which could in theory be a fair assessment, but practically unfeasible considering the number of possible institutions involved.
Another alternative would be to devise a test for your institution, that you consider to be more fair than using GPA or GRE score. But even that, judging by your comments, is not an acceptable solution. Honestly it sounds a bit like you just want confirmation of some sort.

It's "Country of undergraduate study," not the applicant's nationality. How do you propose we adjust undergrad GPA for different grading standards between universities if we apply a single numerical criteria to all?

Dont use GPA as a proxy for student's potential for success, if you cannot rely on it.

The point is we don't have any single factor we can rely on for everyone - we've found that the indicators of student success are different for different populations. Hence, the question.

I understand the essence of the question, and the need to ask it, I do... and my answer is that if you are operating within the boundaries of fair treatment and equal chances (which you should) then it's not as simple to change the thresholds and change the criteria depending on the candidate, because it is not fair to the person in question. If it is about evaluation of significance of the GPAs, you can do an assessment of several hundred universities from which most of your applicants come from. But it is a daunting task

@Downvoter: care to explain?

@penelope I did in fact edit the question to clarify that point

I dont think this answer needs any edits in light of the changes to the question. It is a good answer +1

@ChrisWhite you may weigh in different components to varying degrees in evaluation but if you formulate your criteria like: "GRE score > X" for some applicants and "GRE score > X + 100" for some others (I have no idea about the actual scoring system for GRE), based on country the applicant has graduated from, that's called discrimination.

@penelope no rage, just frustration. the question was edited as the OP was kind enough to point out, so my first response was associated with what I read at first. I don't have any expectations regarding your vote, but hopefully this version of the answer depicts my ideological standpoint better

@posdef I added an image to the question, which I think illustrates that it is not a case of "GRE score > X" for some applicants and "GRE score > X + 100" for others. I'm not looking for confirmation of anything, just genuinely asking what the best way to evaluate students is given different predictors of success in different populations.

@posdef I appreciate the "negative" answers too, but they don't seem to acknowledge that if we follow the advice and apply the same rules for everyone, we reject many candidates who we really think would do well (e.g. low GRE candidates from X, low GPA candidates from Y in my toy example). I wish some answers would address that issue.

@BenCrowell you should read the whole remark and properly so; I said "to my ears", "analogous to" and "... with certain exaggeration". I am not imputing anything, and I did not accuse the OP with being a racist, or sexist or anything really. All I am saying is that the original formulation of the OP could be seen discriminative, and the global stereotype of positive discrimination is "rich, white men". If you dispute that, I have no further remarks for you, but don't reframe my words.

I would "massage" this problem by including a dummy statistical variable for the country. E.g. 0 for the country where grades are more important, and 1 for the country where GREs are more important. You could almost separate the applications into two piles this way, and tackle one pile at a time.
If asked about it, I would answer that neither grades nor GREs alone are dispositive, and they both have have greater explanatory power when you introduce the third (country) variable into the equation.
As far as I'm concerned, it is ethical to use any combination of statistical variables that satisfactorily explain performance, and to strive for "best fit" (statistically).


text:
Someone cited citations I used without citing my work and effort in finding the references
Recently I came across a conference paper that tried to solve the same problem I solved couple of years ago and published a workshop publication about, but using a different algorithm. In their introduction they mention and cite 6 applications that can benefit from the solution to this specific problem. Out of the 6 examples 4 are exactly the same in my publication word for word with 3 of them using the same exact citations I used. Which made me believe with zero doubt that the one of the conference paper authors read my workshop paper and found those applications and citations useful and decided to reuse them in their publication without giving my work proper citation for finding those references.
I have read through academia stack previous questions and all questions I found were researchers trying to figure out if citing the source without citing the middle resource was okay:

Attributing Second-order Citations
I have found theses on a similar subject to my own, and want to use
their references with my own text and a similar flow. Is this
plagiarism?
Citing a citation from a paper?
Is it okay to incorporate a block of citations from a review paper
into my own paper?
Is there a problem with citing the original source instead of the
source where the information was first found?
If I use most of the references from a thesis but not the exact
same sentences, is it plagiarism?

The consensus form the answers of these questions is that the middle resource should be also cited.
Since in my case my work was not cited at all, I contacted the conference committee chair about this issue and showed that the citations I have used have been reused in the paper that was accept in his conference without citing my work. His response was "this related work discussion does not amount to plagiarism." and continued to say that if I am not satisfied with his conclusion that I can contact the journal and ask them for a full investigation of this issue.
So currently I am a little bit conflicted, is this a case of plagiarism? If so how can I proof that it is a clear case plagiarism to avoid a similar response from the journal editors.

The consensus I get from the linked answers is not the same as the one you describe. A quote from the (by far) most upvoted answer among the ones you linked: "You don't (usually) have to cite the paper that exposed you to that original source. The purpose of a citation is to give credit to the originator of an idea/quote [and] tell readers where to look to verify your claims about that idea/quote. In this case, citing the original source satisfies both purposes and is sufficient."

@mrp the user whose answer you are referencing from the questions list that I have compiled has an equally (by far) most voted answer (https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/42442/9488) where the users says: "Otherwise you are misleading the reader into believing that you've done all that work (reading very broadly in the literature, identifying the most relevant and useful sources) yourself."

But that answer pertains specifically to survey or review papers, and nowhere do you indicate that your paper is one such.

Addressing the focal point first:
(1) The editor doesn't believe this is a case of plagiarism. If you want to establish it as one, you will need very strong evidence. Based on the question, I don't think you have that. What you do have is a strong indication that someone has read your paper (this comes from the 4/6 applications bit). There is a weaker indication that your paper has directed the author to further work in the field. But your paper is not the only source for this direction, so this remains a weak and unsubstantial argument.
(2) A researcher may read many publications, and may benefit from them directly or indirectly; but not every one of these will be cited. Citations are for when you use someone's work (results, conclusions, methodology, figures, entire sentences), or when you compare your results to someone, and so on. It is certainly good practice to cite papers which direct you to seminal work, since they saved you effort. But this decision is still up to the author. You may disagree with the decision, but you can't enforce anything.

Who cares whether this is technically plagiarism or not? This is obviously a trivial matter and you should not waste your time on it. Do not be overly sensitive on receiving credit for every bit of work you ever did.

The issue is really if an extended piece of text has been plagiarized or not. If not, then this advice holds. If an extended quote has been plagiarized, it’s actually worth pursuing.

I am probably sensitive to this incident because its my first encounter, and honestly I couldn't find any logical explanation for not crediting my work. But yeah I guess I will face more of this in the future if I stayed in academia.

Take this as affirmative evidence that your work is being read and is having impact. You’re doing something right! Then move on.

No, this is not plagiarism, unless the authors specifically used the same wording as you. Citing the same sources as another paper is not plagiarism, otherwise anyone who cites an influential paper would be guilty of plagiarism unless they also cited the hundreds of other papers who also cited that influential paper.
In your specific case, you say

Out of the 6 examples 4 are exactly the same in my publication with 3
  of them using the same exact citations I used. Which made me believe
  with zero doubt that the one of the conference paper authors read my
  workshop paper and found those applications and citations useful and
  decided to reuse them in their publication without giving my work
  proper citation for finding those references.

This is speculation, and you can not know that this is indeed what happened. It is also quite likely that the authors did a literature review or simply knew parts of the literature, and found examples of applications that were relevant for their paper. Using the "exact same citations" is what is supposed to happen when you cite the same work.
Unless your paper is relevant and related to the work done in their paper, there is no reason for them to cite your paper, and citing work that is related to both your papers can not be considered plagiarism. At worst, you could argue that the authors should have included your paper in their related work.
Remember, people cite your papers for the work that you describe in that paper, not for the citations you give.

If indeed the authors read your paper and reused your citations, I would consider that very bad manners and not OK, but not necessarily plagiarism.

Consider that the authors may have read your paper, looked up your references, read those papers, and then much later when they wrote a paper, they cited the most relevant papers they had read. At that point they may not have remembered that they were led to this batch of papers by your paper.

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text:
Is it conventional to acknowledge someone who read a draft of paper but didn't suggest any improvements?
Let us say you have a paper drafted up and asked someone to comment on it. If this someone replied to you with compliments but with no suggestions on possible improvements, is it academically conventional to mention this someone's name in the acknowledgement of the paper?
I intend to do that, verily. However, my concern is that I am not sure if doing this is appropriate, for doing this may be not fair to other people who made substantial suggestions and whose names are also listed in the acknowledgement.

Acknowledgements are mostly yours to do with as you please---in my experience in computer science, at least, there are few hard and fast rules.
For my own part, I typically keep my acknowledgements relatively spare, reserving them for people who made significant and meaningful contributions, but who did not rise to the level of authorship.  As such, I tend to not acknowledge anonymous reviewers, people who gave feedback that didn't result in large changes in the manuscript, etc.  You should feel free to be more liberal in your acknowledgements if you choose, however---the only real limitation is if either a) your manuscript may have length limitations or b) you do something that can be taken as silly (which can be OK for a thesis but generally not so much in a peer-reviewed manuscript).
It is pretty much always the case, however, that acknowledgements say what a person is being acknowledged for.  If you say that, then people will know how to calibrate the contribution.  If you have a hard time figuring out what to write, that may be a sign that the person didn't do enough to be acknowledged.

As long as you decide (or are obliged for different reasons) to include one person, you can grade the acknowledgement.
"I would like to thank A for providing substantial improvements to the paper, B for her caeful proof-reading (I thank her for the missing "r", as well as @DavidRicherby). We are grateful to C for his thoughtful comments, to D who provided insight and expertise, to E for assistance in the shaping of the paper, to F for voting the answer up. Last but not least, we are indebted to the reviewers for their insightful remarks.

Was "caeful proofreading" deliberate?

Indeed, I made this mistake once in actual acknowledgements. I hope this is the only one on the post

In general I would not acknowledge someone who read the paper but did not contribute suggestions or changes. After all, I often post to the arXiv and so I've had hundreds of readers by the time the final version goes to press.
That said, if you do want to acknowledge this person C who provided compliments, perhaps consider something like "We thank A for valuable discussions, B for suggesting an improved proof of proposition 2, and C for her encouragement".

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text:
Is regional accreditation important for a masters degree?
My understanding is that a regionally accredited school is important for getting into other schools, such as when applying for a masters program. But considering a masters program is typically the end of the road, is the type of accreditation important when looking at schools for a masters degree?
If choosing between two schools:

A. Regionally accredited, but less desired degree
B. Nationally
accredited, but more desired degree

(desired = more desired degree type by the industry)
For example:

A. Regionally accredited; MS in Game Design and Development
B. Nationally accredited; MS in Computer Science with heavy emphasis on Game design and development

To gain entry into the game industry as a programmer, a computer science degree probably goes further than a game design and development degree. Both schools would provide the networking.
Do employers care about accreditation type?

Are you referring to programs in the US?

@ff524 yes. updated question

I'm not sure this question can be answered here, since it asks about what employers in industry think (not employers in Academia). This site has experts with knowledge of Academia, not necessarily industry employers. ([workplace.se] is the place to ask about expectations of employers in industry, but similar questions have been closed as opinion based there, so I'm not sure how this would be received.)

@ff524 i tried to make this as unopinionated as possible while still providing all potentially relevant information.  Maybe I should remove the request of what would employers think.  I am just trying to find out if accreditation type matters in graduate school, or if it just matters in undergraduate school.  I don't know who else to ask.  Should I remove/rephrase the last line in my question?

"Do employers care about accreditation type?" - Does something give you the impression that they would? I would be surprised if they knew this difference even exists in the first place.

For those who didn't know the difference (such as yours truly) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation

The field of game design and development is relatively new and specialized.  The best potential employers are quite likely to know the reputations of institutions that offer suitable degrees.  Therefore, I would say that the reputation of the institution is probably more important than either the exact degree title or the accrediting agency.
You probably have a small number of target employers in mind.  Try to find out where their employees went to school.

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text:
When to apply for NSF funding?
At what stage of the project should you apply for NSF funding? Before working on it at all? Once you have a working paper? I'm mostly thinking in terms of economics or similar social sciences without large lab costs.

Some suggest you should propose work you already finished, because you will know a lot about it.

Relevant PhD comic

You should apply for grants at the beginning of the funding cycle. Most funding agencies provide specific dates during which they accept grant applications. Depending on the subject, there can be a funding cycle every 6 months, 8 months, or a year. For the NSF, as far as I know, the funding cycle for the Social Sciences and Economics is an annual cycle, with the deadline in August.
If your research is around halfway through by that time, I think it would be best to apply, because if you choose to wait for the completion of the work, you might have to wait for a long time. However, if you have just started your research, maybe it would be a good idea to wait and apply for funding in the next cycle. So basically, I would recommend preparing for grants application once you have enough clarity about the direction in which your study is heading.


text:
Any book or tutorial about good practices or typical mistakes when conducting scientific research?
Some days ago I read this question:
Feynman describing a scientific error
and I found it quite interesting. Although it seems naïve it could be a typical mistake made by a beginner researcher as me.
My question is that if anyone knows a book or tutorial that explains the typical mistakes or some advices when conducting research (theoretical or experimental). By the way, I am not asking for advices such as the ones described in
Good research practices
even though they are also useful they are generic tips and do not describe the common errors done when doing research.
Thanks!

Such a thick book, that would be!

Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scientific revolutions." A fantastic introduction about how advances in science are usually made.

I think that a good place to start would be What Is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers.
This will give you an overview of the disputed concept of the scientific process. It will explain how researchers have continually evolved their views as to what is acceptable scientific practice, and as part of this, what general scientific practices seem most reasonable to adopt in different circumstances. It will also make you wary of assuming that there are always universally accepted, or applicable, rules for good science.


text:
Citing a paper with multiple versions
In my area (computer science) it's common for a paper to be posted on arxiv, then appear in a conference a few months later, and finally appear in a journal several years later. This raises the question: which version should I cite?
The general practice I've seen is to cite the latest version. However, I do not agree with this general practice for several reasons:

The chronology becomes unclear. e.g. I might say "Bobson [Bob14] builds on the seminal work of Adamson [Ada15]" It looks like the chronology is backwards, but the correct chronology is that [Ada15] appeared on arxiv in 2013 and then appeared in a journal in 2015.
The most recent version is often not the best version to read. For example, the conference version of a paper is usually heavily abridged (due to a page limit) and the journal version is hidden behind a paywall and strangely formatted. Thus the arxiv version is usually the best version to read.
If I am citing a specific part of the article (e.g. "Theorem 4.2 on page 23") that only appears in the arxiv version or has a different number in the journal version, then it doesn't make sense to cite the "wrong" version.
It means I have to keep updating my citations as the paper moves through different versions. And this leads to inconsistent citations.

The only advantage I see to citing the most recent version is that it  indicates how "good" the paper is, as indicated by the prestige of the conference or journal.
I am often tempted to cite the arxiv version in these cases, as it is gives the best chronology and is usually the most readable version. (I can justify it by saying that this is the version I actually read.)
Is going against this general practice acceptable? Might I annoy someone by not acknowledging that their paper appeared in a very prestigious venue? Or would someone be unhappy that I don't have the venue information in my references?
How should I cite articles that have multiple versions? In particular, how do I communicate (i) the correct chronology, (ii) the version with the right information, and (iii) the conference/journal that accepted it?
One solution is to cite all the versions, but I think that is impractical and confusing - and I have never seen it done.

In math we have the same issues.  Here is what I do, most of which is standard:

If a paper has been published, always cite the published version.
If you want to point out the chronology, in particular because it is not clear from publication dates, do it in the text.  People understand that publication dates do not align perfectly with when the papers were originally written.  (My papers don't appear in the order I wrote them.)  If you refer to arXiv versions, it is easy to see the chronology, at least up to the level of month/year, from arXiv ids.
If something is accepted to a certain journal/conference proceedings, you can say "Journal XXX, to appear" in the references.  If you want to say something was announced at a certain conference, you can say so in the text.
Make references (e.g., theorem numbers) to the version you cite.  I personally like to include version numbers in arXiv citations for this reason (e.g., arXiv:1601.0000v37).  If you want to refer to something that appeared only in a previous version, I would cite the published paper if published and say in the text something like: This result appeared as Thm A.B.C of an earlier version (arXiv:1601.0000v36) of [citation]" possibly with some remark about why it's not in the current version.  (Hopefully, if you're using it, it hasn't been removed because there was an error in the proof.)  But if the paper has not been published, you can either do a similar thing or just put a citation to the version you want to refer to.  However, it's probably best to point out in such situations that the result doesn't appear in later versions so the reader doesn't accidentally check the wrong version.

I have seen some math papers cite the published version of a paper, but include the arXiv id for the preprint in the bibliography entry.  Of course, this has the potential to create confusion if the arXiv and published versions differ significantly.

Likewise for conference publications, you can list all the versions as a single bibliography item.  For example: [72] Jake T. Dog and Finn D. Human. Orbital mechanics of catalyst comets.  Candy Kingdom J. Comp. Astronomy 15:1--16, 2117. Extended abstract in Proc. 7254th Ann. Meeting of the Magical Society of Wizards Only, Fools, 2115.  arXiv:2114.12037. Reprinted in The Enchiridion, 17th edition, Marceline Abadeer, editor, Ooo Press, 2702.

I would cite only one, and that would be the
(a)latest (b) peer reviewed item (c) from its first place of publication.

The hierarchy is usually 1) the journal paper (if exists, usually the most recent), 2) the conference paper (if exists), 3) non-peer-reviewed sources, including arXiv.
Never cite arXiv if there is journal version out there, since in many fields citations are valued, and citations are formally collected only for "reputable" sources. SCI index for example, counts only journal citations of journal publications. So, citing arXiv instead of journal is really bad.
Another, equally important reason is, that arXiv papers are not subject to peer review and basically anyone can "publish" anything. Consider this: in arXiv paper you find some interested claim you plan to rely on. You don't find this claim in the journal paper. Perhaps you don't find it, because reviewers made the authors remove it, since it was not substantiated by results, and citing the arXiv paper because it says something that the journal paper does not, would be extremely foolish. Conference papers from reputable conferences are usually peer reviewed too, but authors cannot fix as many things as in journal paper, so they come as the second choice.
So, there is reason that peer review exists, and you really should rely on reviewed versions of the paper.

I have the same problem and cannot offer you a solution for which I claim it to be the correct one. However here are some thoughts:

For work citing other work like in your example "Bobson [Bob14] builds on the seminal work of Adamson [Ada15]" I would use the version [Bob14] references since this is the one [Bob14] builds on.
I usually prefer a peer-reviewed publication to arXiv.
Typically I stick to the first peer-reviewed publication I used and only "update" if a later version contains a result that I need.


text:
When someone cites one of your papers, is it a good idea to send an email to the authors to show appreciation?
For an early career researcher in physics or science in general, is it a good idea to send a "thank you" email to other authors who cited one of the researcher's papers? Will this be perceived in a positive way and even start a possible collaboration, or it will be cheesy?
Notice that in physics, where people post online versions of papers before publications (on the arXiv), it is very common (sometimes annoying) to receive or send letter to request citations to your own paper when one finds a similar/related but yet unpublished work.
This question obviously applies only to early career researchers who receive few citations per week.

what are you trying to achieve by that email?

@aaaaasaysreinstateMonica Maybe to establish a collaboration or just a scientific exchange of ideas.

these are great goals! i would just write that in the email. Maybe just "i've noticed you cited our work, we have potential collab project / i wanna know what you think about X"

It's always fine to write an email about their work, even if just to congratulate them on an interesting result. It's even better if you have an insightful comment or a question or a correction, but I don't think it's wrong to write a short note that just says "Hey! I saw your paper and it looks very interesting, well done!". Then you can close by remarking that you're happy your paper contributed to the new development that they achieved (which is presumably the case, since they cited you).

No, because citation is a matter of transparency to scholarship generally...
No, one does not "thank" someone for citing one's paper. An academic author is obliged to cite a paper when he/she is either placing reliance on or referring to its ideas, content, or argument. An academic author does not cite a paper simply because he/she wants to promote its author. To "thank" such an author would be an insult, in that it undermines the principle of separating the work from the person.
Decisions on whether to cite something should be independent of personal sentiment. Authors often cite work with which they disagree, sometimes profoundly. Sometimes, an author will find himself/herself having to cite material with he/she finds repulsive, especially in disciplines such as history or sociology (e.g.: a scholar writing about Nazi Germany and/or the history of racism may have to cite Mein Kampf -- do you think this scholar would want to be "thanked" by neo-Nazis or eugenicists? On the contrary, if such a scholar were "thanked" by such groups, he/she would probably be worried that he/she had somehow endorsed racist ideology).
...but you can still contact the author if you have something to say
One can, nonetheless, still make contact with authors who cite one's work. The purpose of such contact, however, should be to discuss the ideas, and not to imply any sense of personal debt/obligation (citations are an obligation to the academic community at large, not to the individual being cited). Appropriate examples include (but are not limited to):

clarifying any misunderstandings;
responding to criticism or counterarguments;
asking for further details of each other's methodology/research/data;
expressing an interest in or willingness to collaborate; and
any other reasonable request/proposal that furthers scholarship.

"To "thank" such an author would be an insult"  Not true.

"principle of separating the work from the person."  This "principle" doesn't make sense.

"Decisions on whether to cite something should be independent of personal sentiment."  True, but irrelevant to the question.

I believe that separating the person from the work is a principle and it makes a lot of sense @AnonymousPhysicist. Anyway +1 for expressing an interest in or willingness to collaborate

Straight answer: NO it's not a good idea
Citing someone is (and should) be neither a favor nor a gesture of politeness. So there's no point to send a thank you email. Thanking someone for a citation seems a way to beg for something. If you want to collaborate send an email explaining why you want to collaborate, or mention that you have read their paper when you meet the author/s. Take pride that someone more senior or expert has cited your work and move on.

"neither a favor nor a gesture of politeness" This is not generally true.

@AnonymousPhysicist, it may not be 100% true, but it is certainly generally true. I have never seen any citation that seem to me like politeness or a gesture of any sort.

@Anonymous Physicist it should be true, though.

I would think it was really weird if somebody sent me a thank you for citing their paper. Really weird.

I've received such an email. My first reaction was to wonder why this person was thanking me; if I build on your research, then I have to cite it. My second reaction was to wonder whether perhaps other people had used but not cited this person's research. In that situation, my citing it would not have seemed so automatic and could have seemed worth a thank-you email.

I think it might be helpful to elaborate on what sort of communication would be more appropriate. I assume the original asker is not so much trying to express thanks, exactly, as to network a bit. Surely there's a less weird way to do that.

@GlennWillen That'd be useful information for sure, although I also think the directness of this answer (and the lack of other information that might distract from the main message) is a strong benefit.

@GlennWillen the question is very specific, if the OP has other purposes he/she would need to ask a different question, that's why I didn't want to mention other communication techniques.

No, it's probably not a good idea because they used your paper cited it like they should, so just leave it at that. If you want to do a partnership, then do contact them, but just not for a thank you note.

I wouldn't do it if the citation is incidental to the main results of the paper. It's not a bad idea to send them an email if you notice that your work played a key role in their study. In that case you wouldn't be thanking them for a citation per se but rather you would be establishing a relationship with someone who has benefited from your ideas and perhaps extended them further in a direction that will be useful to you as well.

If you want to thank the author(s) who cited you i can see one appropriate circumstance to do so.
You can thank them for pushing your contribution to the topic further or addressing new points of view you were not thinking of. But even this would be somewhat weird for the recipient.
If you want to "just estabilish a collaboration or exchange of ideas" simply ask for that. Directly. No babble around with sweet words. There is also a chance you can meet them at conference, you can approach them there.

Such a message would have no effect.  Sending one would be a neutral act.

I generally consider receiving an email to be a negative thing. Unless the contents of the email is fairly valuable to me, I continue to consider it as a negative - I don’t think email is neutral by default.

I would interpret such an email as odd, which is on the wrong side of neutral.

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text:
Advantages or disadvantages of submitting to the new APS open access PRResearch journal?
In the decision about where to submit a physics manuscript, which are the advantages or disadvantages of the new open access PRResearch as a better choice over PRA/B/C/D/E?
PRResearch is rather new and does not have an impact factor yet. Do you expect the impact factor would be comparable to the other PRA/B/C/D/E journals, or slightly higher/lower?
Apart from the impact factor, do you see any inherent advantage to publish in a full open access journal? Notice that also the other PR* journals have open access options.
Also, the fact that the journal is multidisciplinary (as PRL and PRX) can be an advantage or disadvantage?
Are there any other aspects to consider?
From the APS website https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/welcome:

The acceptance criteria for PRResearch are aligned with those of other long-established journals in the family, such as Physical Review A, B, C, D, and E.

I really do not understand why the question was closed. I am not asking for a  personal advice, but about advantages/disadvantages of submitting to a specific journal. There are also similar questions about other journals.

Certainly, it does not seem too different from e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/76420/is-the-nature-publishing-groups-scientific-reports-journal-well-regarded

@user151413 Yes, exactly!

I suppose one question to ask yourself is whether your paper fits well within one of the subcategories delineated by the A-E journals. If it does, that might be the best way to reach your audience. But if it is interdisciplinary or doesn't have an obvious home in one of them, PRR might get you seen by more relevant people.

Prior to the journal opened up for submissions, I asked a few editors of other APS journals about the need for full access when e.g. PRA/PRB have open access options. Apparently there are some funding options (e.g. institutional funding for publication charges) that apply only to full open access journals, not hybrid options. So part of APS' goals with PRResearch was to provide an option for authors under such restrictions.

@Anyon Good point, proabably some funding bodies only pay for open access fees when they are mandatory.

@sintetico: I am […] asking for […] advantages/disadvantages of submitting to a specific journal. – which is pretty much the definition of a shopping question. (If this was not among the guidance you were shown, please tell me as this sounds like a bug that should be fixed.) A question that you can ask here is what the potential motivations for this new journal could be (in particular since PRA–PRE already have open-access options). If you wish to do so, please ask it as a fresh question (since the current answer doesn’t match it).

@Wrzlprmft That would indeed be a good question!  (And there already some good comments in that regard.)

You might also ask very general questions about publishing in a pay-to-publish journal vs. a pay-to-view one or one with a broad vs. a narrow scope (in each cases assuming all other things being equal and not naming any particular journals).

@Wrzlprmft This is really a splitting hair argument, "advantages/disadvantages" vs "potential motivations", is it really a matter of rephrasing the question, nothing more, do you agree with this? Also, as I and other members mentions, there are already questions which are very similar to my question and which are not closed...

@sintetico: is it really a matter of rephrasing the question, nothing more, do you agree with this? No, but I see that my phrasing was not particularly clear. To clarify, I am talking about motivations for the APS to issue the journal, not for motivations for authors to choose it. — there are already questions which are very similar to my question – when in doubt, please always consider the current guidelines, not precedents. There are some old questions which should have been closed but weren’t. (I now closed the question in question.)

@Wrzlprmft Perhaps your rephrasing is still not clear...Why anyone on this website or in academia in general would care about the motivations for APS to issue the journal? Instead academics are concerned about the publishing process. In other words, the point of view of academia is to publish in a journal, not to issue a journal.

@Wrzlprmft I will be glad to rephrase this question, if I have a clear guidance. But I haven't got any meaningful guidance yet.

@Wrzlprmft Also, the question is closed because "off-topic", not because it is a shopping question. Clearly, it is not off-topic, nor a "shopping question".

@sintetico: I indeed suggested that you ask about the (potential) motivations of the APS, for example: “What motivations could the APS have to issue the journal PRResearch in light of its current portfolio?” Understanding the motivations is interesting to understand journal politics and can help to understand what the point of the new journal is and in particular why they expect people to choose the journal.

the question is closed because "off-topic", not because it is a shopping question. – Can you please show me a screenshot of what exactly you are seeing (it’s different for you than for me), so we might improve this?

This is impossible to say: As you note yourself, it is a new journal, and no-one knows where it will end up ranking.
On the other hand, my sentiment would be that it goes in the PR[A-E] bin, rather the PRL/X one (in line with the quote you give).  Now since there are five PR[A-E] jounrals, and only one PRR, I would assume that it has good chances to rank higher than PR[A-E]. However, it could also go the other way: Given that you can publish for free in PR[A-E], while PRR is rather expensive, it could be that they only get a very limited number of submissions and cannot reach such a level.  (The initial waiver for publication fees certainly suggests that they want to avoid such an effect until the journal has established itself at a corresponding level.)

@Anyon My point is rather that people w/out open access funding will not be able to submit to PRR, which will have some effect on the quality (or, at least, it will form a filter layer).

If they get a very limited number of submissions, would this automatically boost the impact factor? One can argue that researchers with more funding are also producing better papers in average, thus the expensive fee will act as a filter, by allowing few publications, with an average better impact/citations?

@sintetico You can apply different types of logic here.  Either less submissions -> less good submissions -> less good publications, but there are probably also some arguments supporting your reasoning.  (Though, well, again: What matters is the best papers submitted there, until the cutoff where they accept it, not the average quality.)


text:
Should I ask the Editor for a third Referee when the answer of first two Referees do not agree?
I submitted a theoretical paper to Physical Review Letters, and the editor answered that it can be published in Physical Review but it seems not suitable for a Letter given the Referee responses.
Basically, one of the Referee recommends a Letter, while the other recommends a normal Physical Review.
I would like to answer the editor/referee, in order to try to get published as a Letter. What is the best things to do in this situation? Of course, in any case, we should answer all the comments and try to convince the Referee. But is it useful to ask the editor for a third Referee in this case? Is it really hopeless to try to convince the Referee? Will be the third Referee a kind of a lottery?
More details about the specific situation:
One of the Referee praises our work for the interesting results, and for the clarity and readability of the manuscript. Also they say that it would stimulate new experiments, and recommend the publication as a Letter, after some minor points are addressed.
The other Referee however has a different opinion. They say that it is difficult to understand, cumbersome, and even raises a fundamental problem about our main result, which in their opinion is in contrast with the existing literature. Also, they say that the measure proposed will not stimulate the experimental community, since that, in their opinion, the measure seems not easy and there is no qualitative advantage in this proposal, compared with other methods.
Now, I and the other coauthors have fixed the manuscript, and we are able to show that our results do not contradict existing literature, and that the measure is possible (a very similar measure has been already done). I should remark that the topic of our manuscript is a phenomenon which has been confirmed very recently in 2 papers using the same experimental technique. Our proposal refers to a different signature of the same phenomenon.
EDIT: I don't want to appeal, since I think that the Refereeing process has been fair, at least so far. Appealing should be reserved only in the case that one has the impression that the Refereeing was kind of unfair, biased, or fundamentally wrong.

May advice.  If the paper was rejected, go to another journal.  Do not make further attempts at that journal.

I'm facing a similar situation and would really love to find out what happened in your case!

The situation you are describing is not uncommon at all. Acceptance of an article in the prestigious Physical Review Letters is a big deal, and that is also the popular perception regarding it, primarily because of the high reviewing standards. Having personally attended a talk about this issue from one of the journal editors, I point out the technical correctness of work is not sufficient to guarantee publication in PRL - how much captivating is it for the Physics community is also a big factor. (Some part of this is hinted at, in the Acceptance Criteria of the journal.) Unless both the referees strongly recommend that the article qualifies to be a PRL on all eligibility counts, the decision is generally unfavorable. It is important to note that not all articles rejected by the journal are necessarily incorrect - some can rejected only because they were not deemed to be interesting enough!
In your situation, you can definitely appeal. This has been treated in the journal's Editorial Policies and Practices, under a separate tab of Appeals, from where I quote:

Authors may appeal a rejection of their paper by the editors. In the case of a formal appeal, the paper and all relevant information, including the identities of the referees, will be sent to a Divisional Associate Editor (DAE). The DAE may review the case on the existing record or may seek additional expert opinion. The DAE will present an advisory opinion to the editors, which will be sent to authors and/or referees with the DAE's name.
Authors may suggest those DAEs they feel are appropriate (or not appropriate) to conduct the review, but the editors are not bound by such suggestions. If there is no suitable DAE available, the editors may appoint an appropriate scientist to consider a paper under appeal as an ad hoc DAE.
The author of a paper that has been rejected subsequent to a DAE review may request that the case be reviewed by the Editor in Chief of the American Physical Society. This request should be addressed to the Editors, who will review the file and, if appropriate, forward the entire file to the Editor in Chief. Such appeals must be based on the fairness of the procedures followed, and must not be a request for another scientific review. The questions to be answered in this review are: Were our procedures followed appropriately and did the paper receive a fair hearing? A decision by the Editor in Chief is the final level of review.

Please note that the above form of appeal is more of a fairness measure from the point of view of the journal - just in case the authors feel they haven't got a fair review. You must note that the official statement here is "In the case of a formal appeal, the paper and all relevant information, including the identities of the referees, will be sent to a DAE". So, the report by the second referee (as well as info as to who this guy is) shall also be sent to the DAE. Thus, he can also uphold the second referee's verdict if he considers it appropriate, i.e. if the reasons appear genuine. But, of course, he may also rule otherwise.
Quite obviously, this appealing does not guarantee that the paper makes the cut in the journal, it is only like a half shot more at it. It may also happen that the DAE may not feel that it makes a very strong case for a letter, even though there may not be any fundamental flaw with the results. If that happens, and even otherwise, don't feel very bad about missing out on a PRL. It is much more important that the contents of the article are correct, and the Rapid Communications section of Physical Review A/B/C/D/E might be a safe bet too. And of course, you can always opt for other letter journals. But if you think it makes a strong case, PRL does offer you a procedure for appealing too. Avail it if you wish.

I was thinking to just resubmit the paper. What is the advantage to appeal instead of simply resubmit? (I don't even know if it is possible at this stage to appeal)

Also, I don't think that the Review process was not fair or fundamentally flawed, in order to justify an appeal. I think that some of the Referee criticism was justified, and surely useful to improve the paper. I think that they were not able to see the potentiality of the paper beyond that criticism.

@sintetico - 1. I'm not sure about the simply resubmit option. I have no experience in that territory, but when I submit an article to a journal, I'm asked to certify that the manuscript is not in consideration anywhere else. Now, of course, a manuscript that they turned down is also not in consideration, but I'm not sure if it is not problematic to submit what is essentially only the turned down manuscript once again, and hope that you get a different set of referees this time around. The journal people will most probably get this information out from their records. So, I'm not sure.

@sintetico - 2. Since you agree that the referee response was beneficial, one option can be to revise your manuscript after adapting it in accordance with the referee's criticisms, and including how "(y)our results do not contradict existing literature" etc. But if the referee wanted this route to be taken, he could've put that part in his report. One ref (not of PRL though) once did that to an article of mine - "I have these concerns ... if you resubmit, address these explicitly ...not possible in the present form". But in your case, if ref didn't say that, possibly your (contd.)

(contd.) diagnosis of the referee not being "able to see the potentiality of the paper beyond that criticism" is true. In that case, this revise and resubmit option may not even exist. To be sure, you can ask the editor of the journal. :)

Ok maybe there is a misunderstanding here. I do not want to submit the paper to another journal. Also, the state of the paper is "with author" (so it is under consideration) and the possible options are "respond to editor/referees" and "transfer to another APS journal". Sorry, when I used the word "resubmit" I really mean "respond to editor/referee".

@sintetico - Oh, in that case, it is best to take the route of "respond to editor/referees". In that case, you can explicitly ask them whether you should revise and resubmit !

Yes ok, but then you still have to answer my question....should I ask the Referee for a third Referee or just address the issues of the bad review and try to convince the reviewer? Your answer at the present stage does not answer my question, but another.

@sintetico - IMO, routemap: 1. Address the issues and try to convince, 2. (if 1. doesn't work) Appeal and seek DAE intervention, which is perhaps the PRL equivalent of third referee, 3. (if both don't work) take the option of switching from PRL to something else. But (1) should be the only option at this stage. That's in my opinion. :)

Ok, let us focus on the first step of your routemap. The question is about which one of these 2 options is better:
1 - Answer to referee/editor addressing the issues and trying to convince
OR
2 - the same, but suggesting to the editor to contact a 3rd referee. This is of course possible in PRL.

Space is so competitive in top journals that they often take any bad review as sufficient cause to filter out one of their many submissions.  You are unlikely to persuade the editor unless you can show a real problem with the bad review.  I recently convinced an editor to look again at a rejected paper by revising it along the lines of the positive review and then resubmitting it.  The paper got rejected again, but we needed to do the revision before submitting to another journal anyway, and I was impressed the editor at least reconsidered their decision.


text:
Is it possible for me to seek a Ph.D. position in the future?
Currently, I am a M.S. student in Applied Mathematics division, and I will graduate in the coming Dec, 2014.
But I want to apply to a PhD. program to continue my study. But I have a complicated situation:

I had a bachelor's degree in software engineering outside US with GPA 3.7. But I'm pursing a M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics in a US college with GPA 3.6, the reason I am doing this is because I want to improve my mathematical background, and prepare for research oriented program in the future.
My native language is non-English, and my English skills are not that strong. I didn't have a competitive GRE test.
But I had some research experiences, both in and outside US. And almost all the research is either direct with national research labs or collaborate with them. However, I have no academic publications yet.

Is it possible for me to seek PhD in the future? I would like to go for it, but it seems more and more professors and universities focus on someone with higher scores and better publication record.

Is the MS degree you're pursueinga research oriented or a terminal masters? Also, why you don't have publication record while you had research experience?

Is it possible for me to seek PhD in the future?

Yes. It is possible to seek a PhD at any point in one's life, although at some point you will shift over into the "unconventional student" category.
Some universities/faculty do tend to overlook unconventional students. However, if you keep publishing articles, learning new skills (and demonstrating them), and staying up to date on the research in your field (and demonstrating that you have), then you'll be in a good position to get accepted by the more open-minded universities whenever you decide to apply.

I want to apply a PhD. degree to continue my study.

I am going to assume that you are seeking a PhD in applied mathematics.
In regards to your first point, seeking a masters prior to a PhD is a good way to improve your skill set. Does the program you are currently enrolled in offer research opportunities as a graduate assistant?

My native language is non-English, and my English skill is not that strong. I didn't have a competitive GRE test.

Each school treats the GRE differently. Some schools will use low GRE scores and  low grades as a filtering mechanism to weed out unqualified individuals. So, a low score on one part part of the GRE is not necessarily going to prevent you from being accepted.
If you know that writing is the weakest point of your application, there are a few steps you can take. Have friends/classmates/professors review your personal statement. Alternatively, you can acknowledge that your English skills are low but you are taking steps to remedy this.
As for publishing, I have heard differing opinions on this issue. Some people will have published when they applied and others will not. Personally, I will be trying to have at least two papers in progress when I apply for my PhD.

Is that possible for me to seek PhD degree in the future?

The short answer is yes. Based on your research experience and academic background, I can see no reason (at least at the present) why you wouldn't be admitted.

One typical reason I try to seek a CS PhD degree, because I know much CS than AM. And one big reason I am seeking CS because it has more funding opportunities.


text:
How do I find the standing of a journal or conference for an academic CV?
I'm writing an academic CV for a PhD application and they have asked for the standing of journals or conferences of published articles.

Research publications
Include articles published or accepted for publication (with the three most significant marked with an asterisk).  Please specify the publication details, your contribution as an author to multi-authored publications, plus the standing of the journal or conference.

I'm really not sure what they are looking for or how to express this. Is it the impact factor of the journal? And what about conference proceedings which don't have impact factors?

What country and field is this in? The Australian Research Council puts out a list of journal and conference rankings, but I'm not sure any other institutions outside of that country care.

@BillBarth It is indeed for an Australian university but it is not for any specific field as it is listed on the Graduate School's website.

For conferences you could give the number of accepted and rejected papers. Though I am not sure if all conferences distribute that data. This also assumes that conference papers are peer reviewed in your field.

I sent an email to the university to try and get some clarification. No reply yet. I'll update once they get back to me.

Seems it isn't actually that important. I sent them an email to clarify and they replied:

Don’t worry too much about the standing of the journal or conference, as long as you list any publications and conferences that you have.

For applications to Australian universities, I suspect they want the ranking from the Ranked Outlets list produced by the Australian Research Council.

Thanks for the info though the lists aren't available for download anymore. At least they aren't available without using the wayback machine. Unfortunately they don't list the particular conferences I'm looking for, or any conferences in the particular field (life cycle assessment).

Use something that the selection committee can easily verify. I would use Google Scholar Metrics and provide the h5-index and h5-median values. The good thing about Google Scholar is that it also automatically generates these numbers for most major conferences. Be sure to mention the following Google disclaimer in the footnote:
"Dates and citation counts are estimated and are determined automatically by a computer program."

Thanks for the info I didn't realise that existed.　But I guess it's actually not that different to journal impact factors which cannot really be compared between fields and is almost useless in multi-disciplinary fields such as for myself. I quite agree with this answer regarding including impact factors on you CV.


text:
How good are journal papers which ask you to pay x00$ to get published
I am looking to this journal -International Journal of Information and Education Technology and it seems they need 700$ to get my work included ,once it is approved.But is it a scammy journal .Has anybody heard of this practice before FYI ,here is the link http://www.ijiet.org/

Asking for publishing charges per se is not necessarily a bad sign. It is almost unheard of in some fields, but perfectly normal in others.
A good indicator of bad quality and scammy journals is being on Beall's list of predatory journals. I'd suggest you to try and stay away from any publisher on that list, on general principle.
Apart from that, the usual criteria for judging a journal apply: do the other people in your field publish there, or cite their articles? Do you find good papers or reputable authors in the previous issues? Is anyone in the editorial board known to you? Is it indexed in databases and/or has a decent impact factor (with the possible caveat that databases and impact factor can be gamed, and have been in the past).
This question has been marked a duplicate of this one, so I suggest you check out the criteria there as well.
EDIT: fixed the part in which I thought this was on Beall's list, and turned this into a "general advice" answer.

,its not on list.I cannot find it there.

Oops you're right, I misread the title for #64 in the journal list. My bad. I withdraw everything then (and I will probably delete this answer soon).

Didn't delete, but edited the answer instead.

Beal's list is not complete, AFAIK. There seem to be a lot of these kinds of journals around. I doubt anyone could keep up.


text:
Malfunctioning social media buttons on a conference website
The website of a conference that will take place soon (next month), offers social media buttons that should redirect the website visitor to the corresponding social media page or account, but when I click the Facebook button I get redirected to "Sorry, this page isn't available" and when I click the twitter button I get redirected to "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" messages.
Is this normal?

I would say this is a minor glitch in the web, probably the webmaster was not too careful when adding this plugin. That says nothing about the rest of the conference organisation.

Mountain out of a molehill, much?  P.S. If you get to the conference and find the coffee tastes bad, it's probably just bad coffee and not the organizers trying to drug you and steal your research ideas.

@DavidRicherby Bad coffee would be a valid reason for upset, though! (I don't think I attend conferences that employ social media for their business.)

@DavidRicherby Worse than bad coffee? Not enough of it. Actually, working 'social media' links would make the conference suspicious to me.

I wouldn't say this is normal. That said, it need not raise a red flag or suggest that this would be a predatory conference or something you must stay away from. It doesn't inspire confidence, but it doesn't need to hurt confidence much either.
This sounds like a relatively minor issue and the kind of thing that is easy for the person setting up the conference website to miss in testing. Keep in mind that many prestigious conference have websites set up by academics volunteering to do so as part of service to their academic community, who are very busy, and for whom building robust websites is not their full time job.
There are predatory and sham conferences. If the conference is archival, check out Beall's List of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers and search around the web for information on the conference.
Email the organizers to tell them about the issue. You might even learn something about the credibility of the conference by who responds, and how.