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One First author paper, what are my prospects in academia?
I completed my PhD about a year ago and I'm currently one year into my post-doc. I had a first author in a mid-level journal and have only one citation to date. I also published a chapter in a textbook but I don't know how much weight that holds. While there are prospects of getting some data published at the end of my post-doc, it is probable that these would still be in press at the time or may not even get published at all. I'm pretty worried about the low citation index of my paper. I know I'm not ready to apply for a fellowship yet but what are my chances of nailing another post-doc.

What (sub)field?  What country?  The answer to your question isn't the same for all fields everywhere.

A lot will also depend on the letters of recommendation that you can get and the network of contacts that you and your postdoc supervisor have.  It's very hard to say anything general about your situation.

Alexander Woo, I'm a molecular/cell Biologist in the UK.

To be frank, in molecular/cell biology your chances are rather slim. The 'standard' is almost 3-5 papers from your PhD which can be expected to be out by the end of your first postdoc plus some output from your postdoc. Of course, it is stupid to judge people only by their paper metrics, but this is what very many people in academia do. If you are lucky, you find a person who is not that quick with her judgement and searches for the hidden gold, carefully reading your letter and CV and the reference letters or is giving you a chance and invites you for interview. That can happen (happened to me once), but is rather rare.
Chances are even lower if the hiring process involves a committee panel or external reviews (as for grants or scholarships). Competition is often high, so you will usually only have a chance when you get very good/top marks from all reviewers. Because if there are three candidates who get 3 A+'s and then there is you, and even if just one of the three reviewers was only looking at publication output (chances for that will be veery high) and gave you a B or C, then you are already out and the decision will only be between the top-rated candidates.
On the other hand, a combination of a convincing letter AND the luck of being at the right time ready for the right job AND a bit of luck of hitting a person who is not overemphazising your publication output might put you into your 2nd postoc. Your chances are low but not zero.

I hope that the quality of the single paper stands for something in this equation. I don't know this field and its processes, but in some lab sciences it is possible to get a lot of publications based on the work of the entire lab. In others, and in other labs, that may not happen. But, as you say, the candidate has to make his/her own case.

@Buffy In Mol/Cell bio, 1 publication is a quite low output for a phd unless its an incredibly in-depth work published in a top tier journal. Even if there are other papers, only 1 first author paper is a low output. Sure the quality matters, but with just 1 citation after a year it sounds like the work is not particularly groundbreaking. Not saying OP can't get another post doc job but they are going to be competing with much more complete resumes if they want to aim for a permanent academic job.

@BryanKrause, I yield to your better understanding of the field, but hope that more happens than counting. The OP didn't mention the paper's quality.

@Buffy It's not about simply counting, it's just that 1 is very low. If someone had 4 publications and someone else had 8, you would evaluate the quality (and also the level of contribution) of the 4 versus the 8. If there is just 1, you would probably not get to that point, there are going to be too many other people who have 4+.

@PuzzledBiologist said your chances are "rather slim". I think that's a little pessimistic, but I do agree that one publication at this point in your career is a moderate mark against you in that you will almost certainly be competing with candidates who have three or more first-author publications at the same point in their careers. If you're applying for a medium- to high-ranked research institution, those extra publications are considered evidence of research potential, and therefore suggest that the candidate can bring in grant funding. (I'm not saying this is fair or even reasonable, I'm saying this is how search committees tend to work.)
You say the publication is "in a mid-level journal", which is relevant because a single high-profile publication is worth several mid-level ones. "High profile" usually means one of the so-called high-impact journals, but it could also mean a publication in a mid-tier journal that has obvious impact, based on buzz or citations or whatever. It doesn't seem that helps here, though, since the publication has "only one citation to date".
That said, having one publication is a lot better than having none, and you could be a strong candidate in enough other ways to overcome that. Academic careers that emphasize teaching also tend to de-emphasize publication counts, so that also may help focus your search. Your research could be a particularly good fit for a particular department based on their needs or strengths or weaknesses. A strong and personalized recommendation from a mentor, that specifically addresses the lack of publications and explains why it doesn't reflect on research ability, can help enormously.
(For example, I know of a candidate with a relatively modest publication count, whose interests fit departmental needs; a member of the search committee phoned a friend who knew the candidate, who said something like "Oh, they don't have a lot of publications because they're so busy helping everyone else. They're the unofficial troubleshooter of the whole department, they solve everyone else's problems first.")
The strongest candidate for a research university position will have multiple high-profile papers plus strong recommendations, a good departmental match, and a personality that fits with the hiring group. The fewer boxes you can check in the list, the harder the chances become, but there are definitely boxes other than publication count.
Edit to address two other points in the question:

it is probable that these would still be in press at the time or may not even get published at all.

"In press" is perfectly fine. In-press manuscripts count exactly as much as published manuscripts do as far as search committees are concerned -- if not more, since they are evidence of active, ongoing work.
"In preparation" is better than nothing, since it suggests that you consider your work complete and that it has a chance of being published and impressing granting committees, but it's not great.

what are my chances of nailing another post-doc.

I think odds of getting a second post-doc are pretty high, just based on the little we know here. You'd need a decent reference, but you'd be primarily competing against new PhDs and the expectations for publications are much lower (since post-docs don't have as much need to get their own grants, their portfolios don't need to be as strong coming in).

Thank you all for your comments. There are some missing points, however. I'm 10 months into a 2.5 year post-doc. I got three post-doc offers and eventually settled for my current one. I am only worried about not publishing the data I generate from my current position due to time constrains. Meanwhile, I have some unpublished data from my thesis but these don't seem to have major conclusions.


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How to benefit from unsubmitted thesis?
I have completed a MSc thesis in image processing. But, I can't submit it yet as I don't have the money needed to finish my study. I still have 2 semesters left before graduation.
I implemented a research article so that I can verify its proposed theory and previously found result.
What can I do to make the best use of my thesis?

You could publish the current state of the work on arXiv, a repository where people normally publish work in progress for related subjects. It would count as a "working paper", which is not a peer-reviewed article, but since it is highly visible and well-indexed by Google Scholar, interested researchers might easily find it and even cite it if they consider it valuable to their own work.

If the research is of sufficient quality, you can write papers and submit them for publication in peer-reviewed journals / conferences.
Check to see if your institution has specific rules about publishing material from a thesis.  Also, if your advisor or any other person made significant intellectual contributions to the work in the thesis, they may be entitled to co-authorship and you'll need their approval before submitting any papers.  (It is probably a good idea to consult with them anyway about whether the work is of appropriate quality, and what revisions should be made before publishing.)

Try to summarize your thesis into a poster. Then use the poster in communication with a professor in the same field. This could turn into an invitation to work on their research projects or a presentation of your poster in a conference.

If your thesis did what I think it did, then you haven't actually broken new ground. You've only implemented what someone else did and verified that you got the previously found result. Since you didn't break new ground, I don't think it's publishable.
Accordingly, I think the best thing to do with your thesis is "nothing".

If your thesis did what I think it did --- what you think?

@yahoo.com As I wrote in the rest of the answer, I think your thesis didn't do anything new, you only implemented what someone else did and verified that you got the previous result. If this is not what your thesis did, then please point it out.

As others stated, since you only implemented an existing result, it doesn't really warrant publication. However, if the original paper didn't provide detailed documentation, or if you implemented their idea in a language other than the one they used, you can definitely publish your code on GitHub. Or, if the original authors already have a GitHub repository, you can contribute documentation or examples. That way, someone else interested in implementing the original result can benefit (and cite) your work.
You can even use Zenodo to make a DOI of your repository, so that it is easier to cite.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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Do people feel free to review a Festschrift as any other book?
In different fields, renowned academics are sometimes honoured with a Festschrift on the occasion of their birthday or in memory of their life. (The Festschrift contains articles by scholars close to them who typically engage with a topic the honoured academic is interested in.)
I could imagine that if someone were to write a review of such a book as a whole, she wouldn't want to be overly critical because it's not nice for the editors and the honoured academic (if still alive). Of course a bad review is never "nice", but since a Festschrift is a present one may want to be more careful.
Then, can we trust book reviews of Festschriften? Is the difference with a normal book review negligible?

Do you have some examples of book reviews of Festschriften? It might be easier to answer if you would link some examples of what you are asking about.

@Tripartio for instance, this 2003 review of Fact and Value: Essays on Ethics and Metaphysics for Judith Jarvis Thomson by Alan Soble is rather critical with regards to the appropriateness as a Festschrift of content and style, although positive about the quality of the articles an sich. I have never written a book review but can imagine that I would be hesitant to write a list of essentials some of which the Festschrift does not satisfy.

The answer would depend a lot on the subject area. In mathematics, collections are hardly reviewed as a whole, but each contribution is read and reviewed separately by different people. Of course, a Festschrift usually contains some very weak articles, which were written by colleagues who more or less stopped doing serious research. When writing a review on whether an article should be accepted, the relation of the author to the honoured person is taken into account, while when writing a review for the article after appearance, this connection does not count anymore.

@Jan-ChristophSchlage-Puchta thanks, that gives some valuable insights. Could you add that as an answer?

A festschrift is there to celebrate the person in an academic way, so they are typically treated as such.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the UK, particularly for weak or borderline students?

Related: How does the admissions process work for PhD. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?

When applying to a PhD program in UK (where GRE is not accepted), how does the admissions process work? If an applicant is weak in a particular area, is it possible to offset that by being strong in a different area?
Note that this question originated from this meta answer. Please feel free to edit the question to improve it.
Note. I am interested in engineering desciplines.

I would VTC, but do not want to mod hammer the question. The US one is not a good question for the SE system, but we got so many questions that we decided to make an exception. I don't see the need for any other country, but when/if it becomes an issue, we can address it then.

It varies. Some have strict admission procedures, some are interview-based.

Even the concept of a PhD "program" is pretty unknown in the UK. You get accepted, given a studentship and start research on day 1 (no coursework whatsoever). It's far less structured than the USA. Your question might be better phrased as "how do PhD admissions differ between the UK and the USA?" but maybe even that is too broad.

It has been two years, we have no answers and considerable controversy about whether this should exist. So, I am going to mod-hammer it closed...if others reconsider and want to answer, you can either vote-to-reopen or open a post on meta.


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What is the maximum age to get into academia, as a recent PhD / recent post-doc, in the US?
At what age does breaking into academia as a professor, e.g. recent PhD / recent post-doc, in the United States become effectively impossible?
Is it at the age of 30 or 40?
I keep hearing about this from people who are at the very elite institutions, e.g. Harvard and Princeton.
I'm asking the question specifically for STEM subfields and for universities in the United States.
I am not only interested in what typically happens at the very top schools - I'm also interested in hiring at the less prestigious schools.

What do you mean by breaking into academia as a professor in the US? It depends where you are coming from. An established professor in, say, Canada could move to the US at essentially any age.

When you say breaking into academia as a professor, what qualifications do you already have? PhD (recent or otherwise)? Post doc? Publications? Teaching experience?

@Thomas good point - please see my edit.

@astronat good point - I've updated to specify recent PhD / recent post-doc.

As I’ve heard it, the clock starts once you get your PhD. The numbers you’re hearing assume a PhD completed at the usual time.

@knzhou that's interesting

I know one professor who put in 20 years in industry as an engineer before getting a PhD and moving to academia as a professor. They were highly valued for their industry experience. Your mileage may vary.

This is strictly speaking not an answer, since OP was asking about the US, but I felt sharing a European perspective may be of interest here as well. Flag if you feel I am straying off topic too much, and I will happily delete the answer.
ETH Zurich, presumably the premiere technical university in Europe (and one that often follows US procedure pretty closely), actually has an official policy on this.

The academic age of assistant professors (e.g. without the time period of maternity leave, industry experience, military service, etc.) should be 35 years or under at the time of appointment.

Source
Note that they explicitly speak about "academic age", not biological age. Time spent as a postdoc counts against you, but time in industry or in maternity leave does not. Given that, there is (in theory) no biological limit to become assistant professsor if you have been doing "something else" before in your life, but I suspect in practice there is: at Swiss universities, there is mandatory retirement at age 65, and ETH presumably is not overly interested in investing into young professors that don't have too long until retirement anymore.
In Germany, a rule that I sometimes hear is that you need to become professor before the age of 40 or get out (where "professor" usually means W2 or W3 professor according to the German system). However, this is more of a guideline than a formal rule - I have certainly seen cases of people who got appointed with their first professorship after 40.

Maybe I (or someone) could ask a new question for Europe?

Yes and no. It sure helps that they largely follow organisational standards that rankings expect, but as somebody who has worked in Zurich and interacted with ETHZ on many occasions, I can assure you that it is in fact an elite place to do research. I would be hard-pressed to find a comparable institution in Europe.

I don’t understand. If "academic age" excludes any time not spent in academia after the PhD, why not specify at most five years of postdoc appointments (or whatever) instead of an "academic age" of 35?

This question is a bit unclear, but I'll try to answer as best I can. The question seems to ask about how age affects your ability to be hired as a professor.
TL;DR: While biological age is strongly correlated with factors that determine hireability as a professor, it is not itself a major factor.
For hiring faculty, the key question being asked is "what is this candidate's career trajectory?" and part of that is whether the achievements match up with the candidate's academic age. I believe it is illegal to consider the candidate's biological age in the US.
The key determinant of academic age is the PhD graduation date. A 25-year-old fresh PhD graduate has the same academic age as a 35-year-old fresh PhD graduate and both would be evaluated with more or less the same criteria. Obviously there will be some limit -- if your CV shows a 25-year gap between bachelors and PhD or that it took twice as long as usual to finish your PhD, people will wonder why.
The "red flags" will be things  that have happened between the present and when you graduated. If there is a gap, that looks bad -- but could be explained, e.g., medical or parental leave. If you've spent more than 4 years as a postdoc, that looks bad (for computer science, in other fields long postdocs are normal).
Now if you already have a faculty or faculty-equivalent position, then things look different. You can be competitive for positions even 40 years after your PhD. However, after more than about 10 years from your PhD, you will need to apply for positions at the tenured level, rather than the assistant professor level. This means there is a higher bar in terms of a consistent research record and you will also be judged based on your record of teaching, advising, and funding.


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Topology vs. Complex Analysis for Math Grad School
I'm majoring in math and am considering graduate school in either pure math, applied math, or stats. The problem is that, due to schedule constraints, I can only take either Complex Variables or Topology. How necessary is Topology for pure math admissions? Is complex Vars. more necessary? Does either matter for stats and applied? Thanks.

A note on why you are likely getting close votes. This question is a bit too rooted in a single person's dilemma. It is more a question for a chat room than a site that looks for questions that will have relevance in 5 years. The help center has more information on the sorts of questions that are most valued here. https://academia.stackexchange.com/help. But welcome to academia and good luck with your courses.

Complex variables is useful in both pure and applied mathematics, to a roughly equal extent.  With a few significant exceptions (e.g. persistent homology) topology is used very little in applied mathematics.
For instance, in the graduate program in mathematics at the University of Georgia, most students concentrating in pure mathematics take a qualifying exam in topology, and most students concentrating in applied mathematics take numerical analysis or probability instead.  All students are currently required to take a qualifying exam in complex analysis.
I have much less experience with statistics, but I am almost certain that complex analysis is more useful there than topology.  (What I don't know is much complex analysis is actually used!)
In my experience (I am the chair of graduate admissions of the mathematics department at UGA) complex analysis and topology look equally good on transcripts.  (Both would look better, of course -- it sounds like you knew that already.)
So if it's really a tossup, taking complex analysis holds more doors open for you.  However, both of these are courses that beginning graduate students (at least in the US) quite often take, so it's not exactly a life-changing decision.  In fact, I would advise you to take whichever one sounds more interesting to you.  Good luck.

I doubt that it matters. It is good, however to have a well rounded undergraduate education. If you already have a lot of Analysis, maybe Topology would be marginally better. But the difference between Real and Complex Analysis is quite profound - especially at the insight level. Likely you will find graduate courses available in whichever one you don't take now.


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Is this footnote from one of Perelman's papers meant to be a joke, or is it mandatory to list one's source of funding?
In one of Grigori Perelman's papers, on the first page there's a footnote where he says,

∗St.Petersburg branch of Steklov Mathematical Institute, Fontanka 27,
  St.Petersburg 191011, Russia. Email: perelman@pdmi.ras.ru or
  perelman@math.sunysb.edu ; I was partially supported by personal
  savings accumulated during my visits to the Courant Institute in the
  Fall of 1992, to the SUNY at Stony Brook in the Spring of 1993, and to
  the UC at Berkeley as a Miller Fellow in 1993-95. I’d like to thank
  everyone who worked to make those opportunities available to me.

Is this footnote from his famous paper meant to be a joke, or is it actually necessary to list one's source of funding, even if it is just one's personal savings?

I interpret it as he listed the institutes he visited that helped him arrive at the proof, but also wanted to point out he wasn't paid via any grant or by any institution per se. Might look a bit jokingly for you, but he might in fact be more serious about it. Who knows.

There's a preprint that I can't find anymore where people acknowledge funding from several bank robbery in the Chicago area.

Vaguely related: What are the moral and legal consequences of “not thanking” government for not providing viable grants?

I don't think it is a joke. It is clear he is a man of integrity who would rather use his saved honestly earned money to do the work of his choice then to sell out to become some circus animal used by others to play with peoples heads. There's far enough people getting paid to do that in our world already.

Note that the time period here coincides with the period immediately following collapse of the soviet union and the, a period of time where funding for academics crashed, when many Russian  Academics  were looking to leave due to the dire financial situation and lack of funding for their projects. I would interpret this as an acknowledgement of the difficulties of that time period and the enormous help in his personal transition that was facilitated by western institutions.

No, it isn't required to list your own personal resources.
But whether it is a joke or not you should decide for yourself. Perelman has interesting views. He has declined a Fields Medal, for example.

Indeed, Perelman has a very fascinating and unique personality with strong views and an intrinisic interest in staying true to them, even in situations when every other person would give in. So I also think that this statement can only be seen in context. And yes, I think it is a hint to a much bigger problem in academia.

Indeed, funding agencies require authors to acknowledge their funding, but it's not mandatory to acknowledge personal resources.
To me, however, that footnote doesn't sound like a joke at all, but a sincere acknowledgement of those who have supported him during previous years allowing him to have savings (and during those visits he might have worked on different topics).
That said, there are certainly a lot of joking acknowledgments around.

Yes, if anything he's going out of his way to be courteous, by acknowledging institutions that didn't technically support the work in question in the usual sense.

Those savings probably took him far. Science funding in non-EU post-soviet countries is all state-controlled and pretty miserable, while cost of living is also low. I remember I made $500 from my week-long research trip to Poland and made it last a year in Ukraine. Enough to push my non-profit post-doc through the finish line right before my last pair of shoes fell apart. Certainly worth an acknowledgement.

I think it is important to mention self-funding if that is your primary source. Not mentioning any research funding will cause the work's validity to be called into question (hiding conflict-of-interest, supported by an illegal body etc). So, it if is self-funded (rare and a terrible idea, but possible), that should be mentioned.

I find the dichotomy of your title question a bit strange.
No, one is not required to acknowledge personal funding sources, but in academic papers one often acknowledges / otherwise thanks people and things in the absence of any requirement to do so.
Though I do not know Perelman personally, I know him by reputation: he is a person of great integrity.  It is not a joke to thank people and places that supported you, especially if you have (by choice or otherwise) modest financial means.
I suggest that this footnote of Perelman's be taken at face value, as an expression of gratitude, which (like most expressions of gratitude!) was not required to be made.

Since you seem to be saying that you don't get why the OP might have thought this was intended humorously . . . imagine that a news article mentions someone named John Doe, and then there's a parenthetical note "disclosure: the editor of this newspaper is also named John Doe". The note serves a valid news purpose -- clarifying that this John Doe is not the same as the editor -- but it comes across as humorous because placing it in a "disclosure" notice makes it sound as if the shared name creates a potential conflict of interest. [continued]

[continued] Similarly, an "I was partially supported by personal savings" notice, in the slot where one normally discloses/acknowledges funding sources, may come across as humorous, as if Perelman were disclosing/acknowledging himself as a funding source. (I agree with you that that was not his intention. But I understand why the OP would wonder.)

I think it's worth remembering that Perelman left mathematics apparently with quite a disdain for the way academia/mathematics functions. Given that, the acknowledgements may be intended to highlight an aspect of academia that is not usually written about.

Perelman left mathematics (long) after he published his articles...

@Edi That doesn't mean he didn't have opinions when he did publish them. I don't claim to know, I just think it's an option that should be in the list.


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How to deal with advisors who seem to not like me?
I'm an undergraduate researcher that's been doing research with another undergrad over a summer. Our project was supervised by a grad student. For some reason, sometime throughout the summer, that grad student began making derisive comments and began to devalue my work.
After I'm away, since I've barely interacted with the PI, that grad student will tell the PI about my work when the PI has to write my letter of recommendation. I figured that since I have done valuable work, it would be a good idea to tell the PI myself about the specifics of the work I've done before I go, so that he's aware. So I asked the PI if he would mind meeting at some point before I leave, and he agreed, but seemed annoyed at the request, citing that he was just going to hear what the grad student had to say.
Have I just ended up in a bad group? Is there any way to approach this situation so that the PI is aware of my work and gives me an appropriate letter? I'm afraid the grad student will say something ridiculous like that the other undergraduate did most of the work.

In my experience (which, beware, is in pure mathematics) a faculty member has very little incentive to describe undergraduate research done under their supervision in negative terms: it is hard for the reader of such a letter not to view the student's failure as their failure.  Also in my experience (which, beware...) it is quite common for an undergraduate working over a short period (like the summer) not to end up contributing anything much to the larger research project, so that even this outcome need not be described in negative terms: after all, the student still got the experience.  I am aware that in the laboratory sciences a student is working on a piece of "the real project" much more so than for student research in pure mathematics, but still....would an experienced PI really give a critical piece of their project to an all but unknown person?  Again, if they do so and it works out badly, it seems to reflect badly on them.
All this is to say that I find it unlikely that you will get a negative recommendation.  What you risk getting is a recommendation that is not positive enough to help you with your graduate school applications.  If that happens, and if as you say you did good work over the summer (both your grad student supervisor and your PI are much more experienced in this regard than you, so without further information we have to at least contemplate the possibility that their judgment, rather than yours, is correct), then yes -- you probably did end up in a bad group.
What can you do?  Well, you booked an appointment with your PI, and I think that's wise.  During that appointment your goals are (i) to the extent that seems reasonable and reasonably polite, make your case that you did good work over the summer and (ii) suss out your PI's opinion of the work to see what kind of letter you will get.  Here I will observe that if you are overly aggressive or defensive on point (i), that might hurt you on point (ii): the PI may not want to give their honest opinion if they have already had to argue with you too much.  If it turns out that the PI has a not very positive opinion of your work, then indeed you may not want to get a letter from them.  That's a bit of a shame, but the lack of it should not really hurt your application, and an equivalent way of saying that the PI's opinion of your work is unreasonably low is that all your other academic work will be evaluated much more positively by others...so go with these other, better recommendations.
Anyway, all this is just one summer: if you stick around, there will be others...Good luck.

In my experience (which, beware, is in pure mathematics) - This answer exactly matches my experience in various life sciences.


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Are problems in PhD science labs not present in math phd research?
I must say that I am shocked at the number of questions on this site that reads like the following,
"my advisor has stopped funding me"
"my advisor has been completely ignoring my emails"
"my advisor is stealing my ideas!"
"my advisor wants to be 1st author, when I did the majority of the work!"
"my advisor wants to add another student to the paper and this is unfair!"
I was wondering whether these pervasive problems go away, when one is doing mathematics research?  I imagine that in math research, one has more control / ownership of their work, there's no lab to be a part of and contribute to, one's funding is typically in the form of teaching stipends, and the meetings are typically one-on-one, with no group meetings to attend.
Is a math PhD a better experience than a science PhD, in the sense that there is significantly less risk of working for a problematic, unethical, malicious scientist / professor who only cares about himself / herself?

Beware of two things: first, this site collects questions about pathological cases and not questions from all labs where everything works ok and the advisors do answer the questions of their students and behave ethically; second, the word lab is here used not only denote a science lab with different pieces of equipment, but also a computer lab, where you have only computers, that is, a situation that can be close to that of a math researcher.

This probably also varies by country. That said, my experience in math programs in the U.S. is nothing at all like this (4 different graduate programs throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and yes I realize this many is unusual). For one thing, virtually no one was involved with publishable research except maybe near the end, and generally people bent over backwards in trying to be fair, at least this was my impression. Probably the most noticeable behavior remotely like this is the sometimes hypermasculine competitiveness common in math.

Maybe I should ask a question "I like my supervisor and I'm getting a lot of good publications out. is this normal?"

Keep in mind that the number of questions on this site doesn't give any indication of how common such issues are, since people usually only post when something is wrong.  We don't hear about all the cases where everything is fine.
I don't know any reason why math advisors should inherently be better people than in any other field, and I don't know of any empirical data that attempts to measure this.  However, a few of the specific issues you mention are perhaps less likely to arise in mathematics, due to cultural and structural reasons.

"my advisor has stopped funding me"

In the US, at least, the main avenue of funding for math graduate students is through teaching assistantships, since math departments teach a large number of service courses.  Faculty who have grants can sometimes offer their students a research assistantship instead, so that the student doesn't have to teach.  But a student really isn't completely reliant on their advisor for funding.  Moreover, there typically aren't major expenses for the research itself (no expensive equipment, etc), so as long as the student is getting paid, research can continue.
(This is not necessarily the case in other countries.)

"my advisor wants to be 1st author, when I did the majority of the work!"

The general practice in mathematics is that all authors are listed alphabetically, and the concept of "first authorship" does not exist.  As such, people don't bother to keep track of who did the "majority" of the work.  So this particular issue doesn't arise in mathematics.

"my advisor is stealing my ideas!"

While individual departments may vary, I think there's a general sense in mathematics that a joint paper "counts" about the same as a solo paper.  As such, if a student has contributed to a project, the advisor has no particular incentive not to include them as an author on the paper.

"my advisor wants to add another student to the paper and this is unfair!"

As above, it isn't any particular disadvantage to a student if another student is added.

I agree with most of this, except that in mathematics I think a joint paper published by a student with their thesis advisor is usually worth distinctly less than a solo paper by the student -- within the standard culture of mathematics, the former indicates an unusual amount of help.  In my experience, it is more common for this to be violated in favor of the student, so that e.g. certain solo papers arising from student theses were largely told to the student by their eminent advisor.  Our community seems bad at recognizing that there are still victims here...just not the student.

@PeteL.Clark I agree (and it's like this in France in any case), but there are also some regional variations apparently. I have friends in Switzerland (or who did their PhDs there) and it's not unusual for the advisor to be coauthor, although it's expected that the student has at least one solo paper, which is then necessarily a true solo paper. One of them had a hard time explaining that to job committees in France. (Though this had a very happy ending!)

@PeteL.Clark That is unfortunate, as my PhD supervisor insists on publishing my thesis results jointly with me, even though I proved the main results myself without "an unusual amount of help". (Of course, since he is my coauthor, he is involved in the formulation of the idea as well as some parts of the write-up, so being a coauthor is not unreasonable/unethical.) I do have a solo paper from the results of my Master's thesis (different supervisor). What I said may indicate that my PhD supervisor is ignorant of this unwritten rule you mention, but shouldn't mean I am a weak student...?

@Earthliŋ: Since we are talking about cultural norms, there is (i) some subtlety and (ii) some geographic variation, as Najib Idrissi mentioned.  From your profile it looks like you may be working in Asia?  I don't know much about the academic culture there, and anyway, this is one reason why the letter from the thesis advisor is so critical: the amount of independence of the work ought to be described (and argued for) therein.

Let me also say that the message conveyed by a student publishing with their advisor is not very clear.  Does it mean (i) they are weak, (ii) they were strong enough to truly collaborate with their advisor to arrive at a result better than what either could have done independently, or (iii) neither, but their advisor is more honest with regard to putting their name on the paper if they were crucially involved with the work than the not-so-honest "standard mathematical culture"?  Speaking for myself, I have coauthored papers with students under both (ii) and (iii).

I have written a recommendation letter for finishing PhD who was not my student where I pointed out (iii).  At least in North America, these things tend to get sorted out in letters.

But a student really isn't completely reliant on their advisor for funding — They are, however, reliant on their advisor to give a positive enough evaluation of their progress that the department will give them a TAship, or even let them continue in the PhD program.  Advisors still hold considerable power in math departments.

@JeffE: Certainly.  On the other hand, funding isn't tied to any particular advisor, which makes it somewhat more possible to switch to a new advisor if the relationship with the current one isn't good - without having to worry about whether the new advisor has funding available.  There are still issues involved in doing this - potentially having to start over with a new project, time limits, willingness of new advisor to spend time working with you - but taking funding off the table at least removes one complicating factor.

@JeffE: The funding model also means math mostly avoids the situation where external funding for a project dries up, and the advisor has to cut off a student despite being satisfied with their progress - or where an advisor has to choose which of several satisfactory students to support because there's no longer enough money for all of them.

I'll point out that most of the comments above are about "pure mathematics". In applied mathematics, these days, solo papers are rare. Student papers are almost always with their advisers, and often other collaborators as well.


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Best practices for sample size in disaggregation of data on educational outcomes
The California community college where I teach has a prescribed system for collecting and analyzing data on students' success and then disaggregating the data by race. As a department, we are required to use these numbers to calculate an "achievement gap," defined as the highest success rate minus the lowest success rate. This tends to lead to statistically silly results, since many of the racial categories are very small. For example, we may have one student in our department in a given year who clicked on "other non-white" to describe their ethnicity, so then that racial category is assigned a success rate of either 0% or 100%, depending on whether that particular student passed the class they took. I have raised this issue with the relevant faculty committee but was rebuffed, apparently because any proposal to change these statistical practices was perceived by some members of the committee as bad for promoting racially equitable outcomes. Disaggregation in general is required by our accrediting body, but there are no specific requirements, e.g., we could disaggregate according to categories that have nothing to do with race, or we could use race but not define an achievement gap in this way. Their requirement is:

The institution disaggregates and analyzes learning outcomes and achievement for subpopulations of students. When the institution identifies performance gaps, it implements strategies, which may include allocation or reallocation of human, fiscal and other resources, to mitigate those gaps and evaluates the efficacy of those strategies. (2014 ACCJC Standards, Standard I.B.6)

Googling shows that the national K-12 establishment seems to have considered these issues very carefully, including consideration of privacy issues that arise when a racial group is very small, so that individuals can be identified. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) makes a specific requirements that:

the statistical rigor that informed the selection of the minimum n-size should be documented and how this minimum number is statistically sound should be described.

However, I'm not turning up much information relating to higher education. I came across some state legislation in my state that in its original version would have required statistical significance in both health and educational statistics, but the educational part was stripped out during debate by the Senate before the bill was passed into law.
Are there laws or recognized best practices that apply at the college level? The whole thing seems to me like a pretty trivial exercise in freshman statistics, but it seems that mathematical facts and competence, in and of themselves, do not count for much unless stated by some authoritative body. I would think that academic publications on this topic would also command at least some respect.
[EDIT] After some discussions in comments with Buffy, I think the following clarification may be helpful. I do not advocate the use of these statistics for these purposes, so I'm not asking for a magic prescription as to how to use them so that they will be valid indicators of something. We are currently being forced to use them for a particular purpose, as part of a required program review process that occurs at intervals of a few years. These statistics are used by administrators for making decisions that affect us. For example, if we want money to be spent on lab apparatus or a new tenure-track position, we are expected to explain why that spending will improve our students' success, according to various measures, including the "achievement gap" described above. What I'm hoping for is basically suggestions for harm reduction, such as publications that I might be able to point to in order to show that the practices being imposed on us are not in line with best practices. It may be that the entire exercise is so totally flawed as to be unusable for any serious purpose. If so, then it would be great to have an answer making the case that that is so, but in order to be helpful, such an answer should point to something like a peer-reviewed paper, procedures at a specific institution that the answerer considers to be a model, or guidelines by a national organization. Our accrediting body requires us to do something with data like this, so I don't think it's going to fly if I tell my colleagues that we need to lobby for change at our accrediting body because anonymous-internet-person makes a good argument.

It would be novel for the ACCJC to use a robust methodology.

I think you are missing the purpose of gathering such data. While statistics has quite valid procedures and rules for measuring the probability that a sample accurately reflects characteristics of a population, that isn't the purpose here. In particular, your samples aren't random, most likely, so even the interpretation with larger samples becomes problematic.
Even more problematic is the question of determination of the population itself. If it is just the local students, then you aren't in the world of statistics at all, as you are querying the entire population.
However, the purpose of gathering such numbers is to provide warnings when things seem out of balance leading to possible policy steps to correct them. All such things are fraught, of course, but they are really just triggers that might generate action. On the flip side, they  can be "soothing tones" that suggest all is well when perhaps it isn't.
In the best case, "bad" numbers lead to discussions and further "research" which may lead to corrective action if it is deemed necessary. But scientific "accuracy" isn't necessary unless it is being built in to automatic actions applied without thought.
However, with such small numbers, it is unlikely that one should try to publish "scientific-ish" papers that suggest something has been "proven" when it really hasn't.

This answer seems to be in two halves. (1) You point out that there are issues with sampling procedures that would tend to make the results statistically suspect, regardless of sample size. This is a great point, thanks, but I don't think it helps with the problem that our institutionalized practices are already statistically wrong because of sample size. (2) In the second half, you suggest that statistically insignificant results can generate discussion. I don't follow. If a result is at the 0.2 sigma level, it's a meaningless fluctuation, not an indication that we should investigate.

@BenCrowell Read the paragraph about populations. This isn't statistics at all. There is no basis that I see here for even discussing sigma levels. If in your student body you have 3 students who identify as (just for fun) gamers and all of them have failed. What can you conclude about gamers. You can only conclude something about those three people in your population. You aren't trying to extrapolate to the total California student population, I expect. If you were, you would need to use some sort of randomized selection, which this isn't. You are misusing statistics in a classic way.

You are misusing statistics in a classic way. I don't quite understand what you mean here, since I don't advocate using these data in any way, for any purpose. I'm describing an administrative system that requires us to (mis)use them in a particular way. In the second half of your answer, you do seem to advocate using these data in a particular way (to initiate discussions, etc.), which seems odd since you seem only to give reasons why the data would not be meaningful. You have not given any reason why they would be meaningful if used for some purpose -- as you seem to claim, and I don't.

What I'm saying here is what your school is doing is not statistics at all. It is gathering data about a population, but not statistical data. Therefore the "computations" of "statistical measures" is entirely meaningless. You are plugging numbers in to formulas without understanding those formulas and their meaning. It is just noise. What you have is a census, not a statistical model.

Graduation rates clearly are descriptive statistics for the population of students at that institution and can serve many useful purposes even when they can't be used for statistical inference about a much larger population.

@BrianBorchers, but you need to specify the population and the statistical model. You also need to deal with the sampling methodology and how it fits the population model. Otherwise they are just numbers.

There is a distinction between inferential and descriptive statistics. For the former Buffy's requirements apply, for the latter the requirements are much more relaxed, which is the point Brian makes. Descriptive statistics just describes the data without assumption that the data stands for a larger unit. Since the data is the population in this case, one could easily make the case that that is enough.

Basing a proportion on one observation is silly. If your funding body needs a reference for that, then they are a lost cause. It is unlikely any argument based on that will reach them, so I would (initially) forget about that angle.
One possible alternative would be a requirement that the results are anonymous, i.e. you cannot recover the results from individual students from the numbers you report. Statistical agencies often use that requirement not to report results from small groups. This style of argument may fit the bureaucratic mindset of your funding agency better.


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I am studying at a university where only one faculty member speaks the same language as me. How can I get 3 recommendation letters?
For my Masters degree I am studying at an Armenian university. There is only one professor at the department who speaks English, who I do my Masters by research under. None of the other professors speak English and I have not learned Armenian.
If I want to continue my studies in Canada/US I need two or three recommendation letters to get admission for a PhD program. How can I acquire 3 recommendation letters when only my advisor knows me well enough to write a letter?

This is an unusual situation, but not all letters need to be from professors. Are there other people who can write strong letters about your ability and skills?

I deleted my answer since it was clearly off-topic. My understanding of the question is, Agneta Gauck studied at a university where only one professor speaks the same language as him. Now he needs three recommendation letters, how to get them?

I'm not a mathematician, so take my opinion with a bit of skepticism, but "So I will study all courses and do all research with only one professor who speaks English." is not a good situation to be in and even if you achieve the Master, you'll likely be severely limited. Input from different sources is an important part of advanced learning and professors are your most important source.

Strongly related question: If you have no choice, is it acceptable to translate a recommendation letter for yourself?

Of course this may be impossible, but I suggest you explore continuing your education elsewhere than Armenia. It seems like a disadvantage to study with a restriction that you can only get effective advice from a single person. Exploring the options might open a door or two.

@Allure nitpick, but I would guess "Agneta" is a female name ...

@YemonChoi, yes she is! :)

@Buffy, the only countries I know with very low cost of living and accepting my low GPA with studying in English are Armenia and Turkey; I lived in Turkey for a few week but literally it is impossible to live in the society no matter how isolated one decides to be: https://www.brenontheroad.com/i-dont-like-turkey-yet/

@YemonChoi Oops, should've Googled! Too late to edit the comment now though.

@Allure, what's happening is present time!

Thanks for the edit. I think my answer is still valid. And welcome to Academia, by the way.

References should be from people who know you professionally. This includes not only people from your current University. Consider asking a reference from the following groups of people:

Your collaborators or coauthors in English-speaking world.
Your professors' colleagues who know your work. Even if they don't speak English, but know what your are doing, you can get their reference and translate it to English using a recognised translation service.
The referees for your PhD work are ideal candidates to write your references. They will have to know your work and they may know English well or good enough to compose a letter, perhaps with some help from you or a translator.
People you met in conferences and discussed some aspects of your work in relation to theirs, even when it did not result in joint publications, can write you a recommendation. This is a bit unusual, but still better than nothing. I used this option once when I had no better ones.

I also think, that it is very likely that the situation is not as dire as you describe: there may be professors or lecturers with good command of English near to you and there is still enough time to make them aware of your work. The problem is mostly with the lack of networking, but this is possible to fix. Join the local English-speaking club. Check if your University has a seminar series you can present at. Check if other Universities in your area or nearby run seminars where you can go and present. Check if there is a local conference or scientific event where you can go and talk.
When you are on such events, join conference dinners, lunches and similar social events. Don't hesitate to ask people for help or start conversation in English. Many people in post-Soviet countries study some English in school and they are usually happy when an opportunity comes to finally use it. They may not speak perfect English, but all you need is to introduce yourself, share one interesting topic of discussion, and get their name, which leads you to their email address. Do not hesitate to drop an email: even of their spoken English is not excellent, people usually do much better reading an email, particularly with help of online dictionaries or automatic translation services. Stay positive, keep trying, use simple and straightforward language and you will hopefully find that communication barrier is not that high.
Good luck.

I hate to say it, but it seems that you have squeezed yourself into such a tight situation that a solution is almost impossible. But it seems that you are the one doing the squeezing, though you don't describe outside pressure (other than financial) that might exist. It is hard for an outsider to give advice without knowing you.
However, It seems to me that failing to learn Armenian may be the biggest block here. Maybe you just need to do that so that you can communicate with others effectively in your studies. If those others know you and can write letters, even in Armenian, you can have them translated easily enough. But the language will make other things easier as well.

There is no other reason than financial. In Armenia tuition is 400usd/year and cost of living is 200usd/year. I can't ind any other country which such a low cost (and easy admission for low GPA) otherwise I will switch there immediately.

(I will stay in here for a short time and I will never need Armenian when I move out and I need to spend time on research (maths) esp when Armenian language is very difficult to learn)

@AgnetaGauck As Buffy says, translators can solve the language barrier for a recommendation letter. The difficulty is in that you only know one person, when you will always need three or four.  The only solution to that is to get to know more people on a professional level, and in your situation that pretty much requires you to learn the language.


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A long gap between BSc and MSc when applying for PhD
My BSc was in physics and graduated with GPA 2.46/4.00 about 12 years ago. I am 33 years old now and I have got an admission to a master program in mathematics in Armenia (as an international student). The department didn't care about that my BSc that was in another field, that my GPA is very low and there is a 12-year gap between my BSc and MSc. [my low GPA is mainly due to not being present in the classes and also missing some midterm exams and quizzes; my grades are normally either near 4.0 (when attending was not mandatory with one exam assessment) or between 1.0-2.0 (for otherwise) and rarely between 2.1-3.7.]
My story is that I loved physics since childhood and even used to study university books when I was in highschool. However suddenly everything changed when I 16 when my father died so I had to take the responsibility to support my family. Nonetheless at the same time tried and tried to keep my dream of becoming a great physicist alongside of spending lots of time working to support my family (we don't get any money from the government in my country); and that extreme desire for becoming a ('the') great physicist when the circumstances were the worst caused me a severe mental break down and being hospitalized too (it was about 5 years ago)..
Afterwards I couldn't think about physics anymore because it was making me sick. It took me a few years my mind to be repaired (=being recovered) and I started studying mathematics instead but this time I had a much better financial circumstances and I could finished by self-learning all BSc and MSc books that I would need to know them in my studies in MSc.
After finishing my MSc I want to continue my studies in top universities esp. in Canada. I have a strong belief that I will have a high GPA and good research results in my MSc; however my low GPA in BSc and a huge gap between BSc and MSc and also being my BSc in physics irrelevant to mathematics that I want to study in PhD makes things less hopeful when I want to apply for PhD especially if I desire to get an admission with scholarship.
If I write about my strong enthusiasm for science then I have to say my period of mental breakdown too and if I don't say about my enthusiasm they should probably consider someone who has started and finished young with better and relevant BSc.. I am sure that some universities in Canada ask for BSc transcripts as well as MSc when applying for PhD.
Please help me what should I do when there is much less hope even if I can show a dramatic results in MSc. Thanks!

You do what you can with what you have. You have a record with some pluses and some minuses. That won't change. What you need is an explanation for why your record is what it is but that also suggests that you will be successful in future studies as the obstacles are behind you.
In many universities there is an opportunity to personalize the application through interviews and other communication. Contact with a specific professor with whom you wish to work is often possible - and even preferred in some places. Having an idea about what it is that you want to study/research in a doctoral program is helpful.
But in general, the time between degrees isn't a big problem. The low GPA in early studies isn't a huge problem if it is overbalanced by better performance in recent work. Having goals and good work habits is a definite plus. Knowing enough about a field to begin research relatively soon is very positive. Do what you can with what you have. Focus on the positives, not the negatives.

Does a professor in Canada have a power to provide an admission for a student even if he/she doesn't meet the admission requirements set for prospect students?

I don't think it is that simple, but don't know the rules in Canada, nor how strictly enforced. But having a personal advocate there, who is interested in working with you can't hurt and may help. This may vary by institution, also. It would vary a lot in the US since we don't have a national system.


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Multiple PhD applications
I'm a student from India who wants to do PhD(in math) in Germany in September 2019. The first thing I did was mail a couple of supervisors who I thought would be interested to work with me. Among them, I have received two positive responses. Now, the next step is to apply for DAAD scholarship. As far as I'm aware, I can only send one application for the scholarship. Does this mean that I will have to choose one of the supervisors now and hope that I get the scholarship?
Does this also mean that I cannot apply to multiple places in Germany to increase my chances of getting a position?

This is highly specific and might require reading between the lines. Your best and simplest course of action is to contact the admins in the funding body and simply ask them.


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Who or what is George Rajna?
I don't know maybe this question seems off topic but anybody get the chance to look at vixra.org archive?
It seems it is blown up by some manuscripts from a guy, which is called "George Rajna", and more interestingly all of them are about some ridiculously (excuse me I didn't find another appropriate word!) hot topics in quantum physics or general relativity. Sometimes in my spare time I just look for crazy things for fun in internet that seems really funny to me. I can't believe "George Rajna" is a real guy (I mean someone really exists with his name or identity!) but it seems it's a just article posting robot, which blow up vixra.org?!
Again, I know maybe it sounds completely off topic but I appreciate if someone has any idea about people post their article (If you could call it a real article, which I'm not sure really?!!!) in vixra.org?  People do it just for fun or really they have some serious intention?!

I do not have any real info about this, but it seems to me very much on-topic, since we certainly have concerns about publication... whether "peer-reviewed" [sic] or less... and denial-of-service attacks, or denial-of-credibility attacks, are genuine problems.

@paulgarrett - well, if it were on arxiv I'd be concerned, but vixra is a much lower level of concern (if any).

I just wasted some time to read about vixra.org history and it seems really crazy to me! I mean it's like a sci-fi writings! They just completely distorted pretty much everything about arxiv.org!

I have no idea who it is supposed to be, but I went into two of his vixra submissions, and googled random paragraphs. 100% of the ones I've tried are copied verbatim from different science news outlets. Go figure. More likely to be a news aggregating bot than a real person IMO.

Currently there are 2940 submissions by George Rajna, and on average during the last week or so there have been 2 to 3 papers are submitted per day. The few I clicked on and glanced at do not even try to pretend to be research papers, so I agree with @Anyon's guess.

@Anyon So what's the point of doing something like this? I mean some people are pursuing some benefits from these kind of activities (e.g. citation count) but it seems he does not have anything in google scholar, researchgate, etc.

@DaveLRenfro It sounds like the question should be "What is George Ranja?" rather than "Who".

@Thomas You are more than welcome to edit the question!

Also.  Should vixra do something about this?  If so, where should they draw the line?

@GEdgar It seems vixra's administration team does not care about papers' content and as long as it is not something vulgar or violate they will publish it. But I think the most important question is: no matter this guy is real or fake or even he's just a programmed bot but what's the benefit behind these kind of activities? It looks like a mystery to me!

Why is this question out of scope? Ok, vixra is not exactly a trustworthy source, but it somehow exists in the scope of academia. I don't see why we close this question, and questions about ResearchGate (which, to me, is a dumpster fire of similar dimensions) happily get to live. I voted to re-open.

I would be concerned about questions about specific contributors. I would try to reframe the question more generically.

Also how is George Rajna, and when, and why?

There are thousands if not tens of thousands of physics crackpots out there. People who think they’ve figured out quantum gravity far outnumber the people who are actually working on it. Why is another one of these people worth discussing?

@knzhou This guy seems more mysterious, because he does not claim that he figured out quantum gravity or found elementary proof for Fermat's last theorem, but he's just posting some nonsense materials by compiling even yellow scientific news together and upload them in vixra.org everyday! More interestingly is that despite of some known cranks out there, which are trying to get benefits from these kind of activities (e.g. citation count or being chief-in-editor of predatory journals), this guy "George Rajna" even does not have google scholar to count his citations!

So I agree @NajibIdrissi, why "George Rajna"?!

Well, whoever Rajna is, he certainly has his followers.

As for viXra itself, I would encourage you to give due consideration to its founder's arguments for why it was designed the way it was before dismissing it completely.

@E.P. Arguments of viXra's founder is not satisfactory in my opinion at least. Because, of course if you open something to public as a whole general humanity in the world it is possible by chance some of them create good research materials but nowadays science as a general is a profession and people with years and years experience are trying to develop science systematically not just by shooting randomly in the dark?! By this method I believe we just waste time and money for 90% nothing to gain 10% credible research which may help science community as a general. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't think you've really understood Philip Gibbs's arguments. I'm not here to argue in favour of viXra, though. It bothers me that people dismiss it without due consideration (as you're doing now), because it weakens our collective understanding of the problems that viXra sets out to solve; those are real problems and few institutions are doing anything to solve them (and, if anything, academia is moving in a direction to make them worse). I disagree with viXra's solution, but I also find your criticism above to be misguided.

@E.P. I agree that viXra's founder intention was maybe to create a truly open access preprint repository but I believe just having a good intention does not guarantee a good result. Also, viXra is close to its decade anniversary and I think its founder should reconsider his policies. I mean probably Philip Gibbs didn't want to create a place for scientific abuse but the problem is: always there are some people out there, which use good things for bad intentions, and that's the reason why a secured policy is needed to protect the profits of all members of a community.

Why are you arguing at me? (Seriously.)

@E.P. I did not argue at you. Where in my last comment you find a sentence which I pointed to you particularly? You said your opinion and I appreciate that and I said my own. That's it.

re DLR comments, if its a bot, what is its "motive"? some bots tend to have motives or agendas. eg increasing publicity for [x]. but looking at a paper it looks semi random. it does have a lot of citations. could it be trying to manipulate citation counting systems?

he's still going

When I googled some of his paragraphs, I didn't get an exact match, so it seems like a deep learning magic bot.

I don't think this is a bot. It looks more like a (somewhat misguided) real human, who may or may not be operating under a pseudonym. Based on what I think is their LinkedIn profile they seem to be a reasonably well-educated person with extensive experience working for IBM (or so they claim), so not your average crank. That said, their contributions to vixra seem fairly cranky to me, especially since said contributions mostly consist of extensive compilations of existing material, without a lot in terms of attribution.
Note that there is also a website apparently written by a "Rich Norman" praising George as "a mouthpiece of the possible". Rich Norman claims to be an "artist" of some sort, who has also written some books published by "Standing Dead Publications" (owned by Rich Norman). The over-the-top praise, strangely flowery language, and the unstructured list of what appears to be pretty much the entirety of Georges work makes me think that there is a connection of some sort between George and Rich. Maybe they are the same person, but it may also be a case of a fringe artist being intellectually attracted to a fringe scientist.

It's quite interesting itself that someone without any scientific background praises "George Rajna" because of his brilliant contributions to the physics community but he (Rich Norman) is not quite sure that George Rajna's works are correct or not?! It sounds contradictory to me! Rich Norman: "Are these ideas true?  I do not know.  However, I have studied them, and I am entirely sure they are sensible, possible, and brilliant."

@MehrdadYousefi I don't see this as "contradictory". Ideas can definitely be beautiful and inspiring, even if I can't check the depths of their truth. A person who is not physicist maybe can't check any specific result in experimental physics, but they may still find the ideas fascinating.

@MehrdadYousefi That said, the "Rich Norman" persona also appears to have gone off the deep end a little, so I am not claiming that this is a line of reasoning that an average person would take.

I agree to some extent. It's like someone see the "Interstellar" movie, which shows some "fascinating" ideas about black holes, but he/she may not be quite sure about validity of concept.

I wonder if there is some connection with this guy ...

George Rajna, a Hungarian-Israeli physicist, computer scientist, and Chess International Master, in 1987 among the Top 100 Players of the World .

Or this guy

George Rajna, Co-founder of WeSaidGoTravel.com, M.B.A., Masters of Science in Communications Disorders, is a bilingual speech therapist who has traveled to over one hundred countries across six continents.

The first guy's bio sounds more relevant to our George Rajna! Look at this profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeraina/

Also this profile: https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/31188/george-rajna

Considering other answers, there could very well be a possibility that these profiles are created to mock Vixra.org. viXra was created as an alternative to arXiv.
I feel that these profiles may be created to ridicule viXra, because it tries to provide a platform for anyone (even someone completely misguided) to publish in their journal. Their policy is of least censorship, and someone may want to ridicule them by filling their repositories by such articles.
I would like to elaborate over here:
I had a bad experience once when submitting an article to arXiv.org. I had submitted an article without any affiliation and before getting into a Ph.D program, with me being the only author.
I can understand that they receive a lot of "not even wrong" articles but sometimes they are too stringent with their rules, that they prefer to ignore some potential articles. The rules are so stringent on arXiv that a person without affiliation and a popular name cannot publish. I had to gain support from someone in the field to get my paper on arXiv. Also, even after applying for quant-ph it was put into gen-ph category.
I thought that I may be the only person who faced such a problem, but recently I found that a well known name like Nicolas Gisin also experienced a similar thing happen to his PhD students. You may want to read the story here
link

The story that you linked about Nicolas Gisin's students is not convincing in my opinion due to Nicolas Gisin's himself: "I am not an expert in this field and, frankly, have the feeling I never truly understood general relativity. I believe the paper is wrong, but I appreciated my students’ eagerness to transgress barriers established between different subfields of physics." A wrong well written paper does not have to be on preprint servers and it's even more dangerous cause may some people think it is really scientifically correct and may build their research plan on a wrong basis.

BTW the linked story is written in a language which I don't think a well established professor use this language to describe a problem such as: "During my carrier I posted more than 300 preprints on the arXiv, all in quant-ph. Actually, I might possibly be the most prolific contributor to the quant-ph section. You may consider this as positive or negative, but for sure I feel that the arXiv belongs also a little bit to me. Note that almost all my papers ended up in respectable scientific journals. I am a kind of respectable physicist." So what?!

@Alone Programmer But isn't peer review built for that, to judge if they are deemed fit to be taken seriously. Why are we so afraid of ideas? According to the scientific process they will eventually be ruled out. I have always been a supporter of a comment and discussion section in these journals, I know there could be some technical difficulties but there needs to be some way to make scientific progress efficient.

Many academics don't understand the purpose of a pre-print repository and hence get agitated when they see fringe-science or blue-sky ideas uploaded. ArXiv could've accepted any paper without moderation, and it'd have fulfilled the purpose of being a pre-print repository. Thankfully, viXra is now doing what arXiv failed to do.

@Julia There is a huge difference between allowing fringe-science and allowing papers without moderation. And no, accepting any crap would not fulfill its purpose as PRE-PRINT repository. While I agree that the line between what it should and should not accept is thin, and probably some papers fall through the cracks, arXiv would have been useless without moderation. One of the best things about Arxiv for academics is the fact that one can look for new papers on a topic knowing that the complete non-sense papers...

...( for examples the ones where the authors don't even know what the zeta function is but they prove the Riemann Hypothesis and generalizations which are clearly wrong- and no this is not fringe-science or blue-sky ideas, this is just garbage) have been weeded out. Yes, there are still junk papers on Arxiv, but their percentage is very small. Without moderation, in many hot areas there would be probably tens or hundreds of junk papers for each serious one....  Just check for example how many proofs and disproof of the Riemann Hypothesis are posted on Vixra.

@Nick: All that people need to know is that they shouldn't look for knowledge on any pre-print repo. They should look for peer reviewed papers. The pre-print repository serves just the purpose of giving a timestamp. A proof of precedence. It's not meant to filter out mistakes. Why do people get so worked-up about papers in pre-print repos? Couldn't you channel all that emotion into making peer-reviewed papers more accessible to the scientific community? If Arxiv gives u peace of mind, then good for u. Use it.


text:
How can I convert my MSc thesis into a publishable research article?
Suppose (only suppose) I have implemented the following 3rd-party research article for my MSc thesis:

Deep learning and image processing for automated crack detection and defect measurement in underground structures
  F. Panella 1,2, *, J. Boehm 1, Y. Loo 2, A. Kaushik 2, D. Gonzalez 2

I have validated their theory and earned some skills in the area (say, tools, programming languages, and so on). And, now, I want to write my own research-paper in order to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.
How can I get started?

In general, reproductions of existing research is not publishable. If you want to publish, you usually need to do something new. There are two major ways that you can do new work based on existing work.

Make it better: If the existing approach works very well, you can develop an extension of the methodology that is more general than the original work. Maybe you can make a theoretical improvement, like removing assumptions about the loss function. Maybe you can find new areas where you can apply this methodology to solve other problems it wasn't meant for. Maybe you can make it more accurate, or make it's failure less likely.
Discover it's limitations: If it is a methodology that has limitations that are not widely known, that can be a research contribution too. For example, maybe this crack detection algorithm only works with certain ambient brightness. If it's too dark, it looses the ability to detect cracks. Maybe it makes some assumptions about the shape of cracks that are unfounded, and cracks that are a circle, instead of having distinct end-points, cannot be detected by this methodology.

In both cases, you need to do something that goes beyond what is contained in the paper and do something new. But it's not enough to just do something new, you have to do something that both new and interesting.
"Interesting" often means "in opposition of people's default assumptions." Showing that a cave crack detection algorithm doesn't detect cracks in hardwood floors isn't very interesting if no one expected it to. In that case, showing that it does detect cracks in hardwood floors would likely be interesting and open up many new applications for the approach.
Another way that your work could be interesting is that it solves a problem that people have talked about being interested in already. Maybe it's well-known that the algorithm breaks when it gets very dim, and there are multiple papers saying "it would be nice if we knew how to make this work for dim caves." Even if this hasn't been explicitly stated, if people say "I wish we knew how to detect cracks in dim caves" then showing that this methodology does that would be interesting, assuming the original paper didn't and that figuring out that it does work in this context is non-trivial.
These are not the only two ways to extend word, nor is it the only way to show that your work is interesting. But thinking about the problem in these terms will be a good way for you to get started.
Also, if you wrote a MSc thesis, presumably you have a thesis adviser. That person would be a great resource to talk to, both to learn about what is publishable and to get advice about how to get started doing publishable work.

Is it possible that this was the first verification of the theory and wasn't present in the earlier work?

@Buffy Yes, this is necessarily an incomplete list of how the work could become publishable. I think that in general this describes good approaches to get the OP started. If there are other circumstances or approaches that you think are noteworthy enough to mention, you’re welcome to write them in an answer.

In addition to the very good answer of @Stella Bidermann:

Apply it to a different area / change the underlying question a bit.

E.g. "underground structures in the paper means concrete pipes or other human-build structures, you could try it for caves or oil pipelines.
Since you used deep learning, the learning base / input data  might also be different and lead to different results - this could be examined as well.

change the underlying question a bit. --- rephrase plz.


text:
Should I publish as a master’s student?
I am a master’s student and have done some original research work which may not be that great.
I have asked my professor who works in that area where can I publish my work or is it at all publishable.
But he seems to be not so concerned about my work nor does he say whether I should publish it or not.
He says I might try it, but he seems more interested with his doctoral students.

What should I do?
Should I try to publish it in some journal?
If yes, how can I choose a journal?
Are there any journals which publish small works of master’s students?

Disclaimer: I can not say this is 100% without knowing the people and the research. Comment: Have you considered your professor is just being polite? I think generally most researchers would be happy to publish something if its publishable, regarthless of who/what education level the original author is at.

The practice of preparing a piece of work for publication is, itself, worth the effort. I suggest that you write up your work as best you can. Once you have a really solid draft, ask your professor, again, for advice on it.
However, you can still submit it to an appropriate venue, independent of the support of your professor, and that experience is also worth having. If you are lacking in any way, the editors and reviewers of the paper will give you additional advice that is independent of what you can get locally. This can help you evaluate a lot of things about both your work and your approach to it.
If you want a career in academia, then publishing early and often is definitely a plus. The review you get helps you improve for the next time.
But make sure you have also done a literature review to avoid embarrassment of submitting something already known. That is another valuable skill, of course. (literature review, not embarrassment).

I have some questions,i did a literature review and found that no such has been done on  what i have done but i still believe whatever I have done is not of high regard

Can  u please help me on how to select a journal

Sorry, not much help for that. The first place to look is for journals that publish things similar to what you have done, perhaps by looking at where the papers in your bibliography were published. Just make it a reputable journal, rather than a predatory one that just wants to charge you money and doesn't care what you write.

Okay ,will u please say what is a open access journal

everyone on their website open access,i dont understand what it means

The web has lots of resources. Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

when i submit a paper in an open access journal it does not charge a fee,so when will it charge it?

You need to explore that with them. But beware of these: https://beallslist.weebly.com/

Sometimes publishing too early can work against you. You don't want to amass a traceable record of inferior publications. You want whatever appears under your name to be of professional quality.

Talk to your supervisor. You write that you've already done it, and his response is "try it". In that case, try it. Write up a draft, then show it to him. Especially if his name is going to be on the paper, he should be willing to take a look at the draft.
Everything that happens afterwards - such as which journal to submit to - can be discussed after your supervisor has approved the draft.


text:
Do international politics, language, and local culture affect recognition of research degrees?
Take a look at this subject-wise QS Ranking (CS/IT).

We see that Shanghai Jiao Tong University is sitting on the 46th place, Lomonosov Moscow in on the 49th place when Delft University is between 51 and 100 (probably 51st).
My hunch is that someone graduated from Delft University will be enjoying much more competitiveness in the job market (academia and industry) than someone graduated from Shanghai or Moscow.
I can think of two reasons:

Political factor: China and Russia have spats with the USA. Since, the rule based order is dominated by the West, there is a space for a recruiter in the West to be tempted to devalue the graduate from China or Russia.
Language & Culture: China and Russia are obscurer countries because of languages. Most people in Western countries know English better. Most of us don't know how are the learning environments like in China and Russia. Also, there is an undeniable preconception circulating in the air that Western countries are much more closer to each other in terms of understanding and hence their culture of education is much closer.

If I am not mistaken, if all factors are equal (like reputation of the supervisor, etc),

probably a degree from Warsaw would be much more competitive  in the West than that of India or Saudi Arabia even though Warsaw sits on a much lower position in the ranking chart.

Is my perception correct?
Do international politics, language, and local culture affect recognition of research degrees like the way I described?

Just a reminder not to read too much into these rankings. The QS one in particular has received a fair amount of criticism. Also, a related question is University rank/stature - How much does it affect one's career post-Ph.D?.

Which job market? I feel that the question implicitly assumes that everybody wants a job in the western world.

@Flyto, not at all. the same is true in case of middle east or south Asia. Western degrees are better recognized even in china.

@yahoo.com hmm, I think this will depend a lot on what they're doing, and at what level. Russia in particular is known for producing excellent mathematicians and oceanographers, probably among other fields.

Firstly, I think you are placing too much stock in these rankings. They are close to meaningless.
Secondly, in terms of "competitiveness in the job market (academia and industry)" or "recognition of research degrees", I don't think the ranking or location of the institution is very important. Individual factors matter much more.
That being said, international politics, language, and local culture do play a role in hiring.
Suppose a US university is hiring for a faculty position. They want a person that fits in to the department and can teach students. So they will prefer someone who is familiar with local customs and expectations and has good English language skills. This is a big part of what the job interview is about.
Now a person with a US or western degree is more likely to do well in a US job interview because they have experience with western culture and English language. But don't confuse correlation with causation.
Coming back to your hunch: Suppose person A grew up in China and then went to Delft for a PhD, while person B grew up in the Netherlands and went to Shanghai Jiao Tong for a PhD. Who would you think is more competitive on the job market? Both have gained familiarity with western culture and English language, in different ways. I'd say any "familiarity advantage" has disappeared.
Now I've answered from the perspective of hiring in western universities. The picture may look very different elsewhere. Also, for industry jobs, things may also be different and prestige may play a bigger role.
Lastly, international politics is really not something academics care about. However, universities are bound by the immigration laws of their country. So a US university currently cannot hire someone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen because they cannot enter the country.

person A grew up in China and then went to Delft for a PhD, while person B grew up in the Netherlands and went to Shanghai Jiao Tong for a PhD. Who would you think is more competitive on the job market? --- the guy who grew up in China and went to Delft.

@yahoo.com Based on what? The question is not very meaningful, but I'd say person B -- I've heard of SJTU but not Delft.

I've heard of SJTU but not Delft --- practically more unlikely.

Your question is based on the wrong premise:

My hunch is that someone graduated from Delft University will be enjoying much more competitiveness in the job market (academia and industry) than someone graduated from Shanghai or Moscow.

What you are confusing is (i) the competitiveness of an individual applicant for a position, with (ii) the ranking of a university they graduated from.
The ranking of their alma mater is one factor that affects the competitiveness of an applicant, but it is only one of a very large number of certainly not even the most important one. Among the many other factors are (i) previous work experience and results, (ii) familiarity with the language and culture of the hiring institution, (iii) the strength of the university from which the applicant graduates in the area for which the applicant is seeking a job, and many other factors.
Ranking is really fairly low on the list of criteria hiring committees look at.

Please don't confuse the actions of the US government (or any other) with the way that citizens and especially academics treat people from different cultures. We (academics) all recognize the contributions of those from other places. In mathematics (my field) Russians have contributed hugely to the literature. I am also aware of the quality of, for example, institutions in India.
It is true that language may play a part in evaluation, but only because the language of instruction (and even research) may be localized to a place, so someone who doesn't speak (and/or write) that language is at a disadvantage.
One additional consideration that is at the cusp of government and ordinary people. If the government suspects (rightly or wrongly) that a person is in the country for the purpose of stealing IP, then the government's wishes will be paramount and it is difficult for the academic establishment to counter it in questionable cases. While we may wish for a more universal acceptance of ideas, governments still build borders.

This answer kind of gives the sense of "academics are all perfectly fair unbiased people, it's only governments that cause problems".  I think that's overly rosy.  Academics are people and certainly can be affected by biases, including favorable or unfavorable views of universities based on country or culture.  If you're claiming that those biases don't significantly affect decisions like hiring, I'd like to see that claim backed up by data.

@NateEldredge, no, I wouldn't make that claim. However, most of the people I've met in academia are pretty fair, while most of the politicians I read about daily are driven by fear of the "other" resulting in terrible policies.  The difference is pretty stark even if we aren't perfect. I still claim that it is a mistake to judge (all) people in a country by the policies of their government. Few countries are uniform enough in their views to support such a claim, and I think educated people in general (academics in particular) have more positive views.


text:
Meet with another professor in our university to discuss a paper that I wrote and her student is co-author with me
Recently, I wrote a draft paper based on the results, which I prepared for final project of one my courses (I'm a PhD student). In fact, I had a project partner in that course and I thought I should put her name in the paper as well.
I know it was just a short project and I did not mean to submit it to a really high impact journal (I mean I want to submit it to Computational Materials Science journal, impact factor: 2.530). Also, my PhD adviser was one of the instructor in that course.
Today, I just sent the draft to my partner and said please read it and let me know if you want to add or modify something, but she responded back that her adviser wants to meet me and discuss the work that we did. In fact, she said her adviser does not want to be on the paper as co-author but she wants to be sure that there is nothing in the paper which may have bad impact on her.
The question is: I'm not sure it is an appropriate thing to do (meeting with another professor)  without consulting with my adviser?
I said I should consult with my adviser before meeting and know his opinion. Should I talk about this with my adviser or just give it up at all? Because I don't want to make everything complicated about who should be co-author, etc just for a small side project. Any idea or suggestion is appreciated.

What exactly is the inappropriateness that you are worried about?

My purpose is that I'm just a PhD student and don't have much experience to deal with other professors in these kind of situations and I don't want to make him sensitive about something, which may not be important at all. I mean I wrote that in my spare time and I wanted to just submit it somewhere online even just as a preprint in arxiv.org? I just wrote all the codes and everything about this project just because of her that she was my partner I cannot submit just by myself which I wish I could do.

Maybe I'm unfamiliar with some cultural formality where you are, but as "just a PhD student" you are in training to be a colleague of professors. Another professor wants to review the quality of the work you did with her student. If you can't defend the work you've done in front of a colleague at the same institution I don't see why you should bother to publish it; if your own advisor is to forbid you from ever interacting with another academic you need a new advisor immediately.

No, he's not like that to forbid me to do this (actually he's really a nice guy and supportive) but he's really busy and I don't want to bother him for these kind of problems. Also, I'm in the US. I said I wrote everything and I could defend my work, which in fact I did one time because I presented this work in front of my adviser and other people.

It is typical for advisors to want to help emerging PhD students in their efforts to publish papers. Typically, advisors can give a paper a rudimentary review with little time or effort. You would typically recognize this support with an acknowledgement, not coauthorship (in the fields that I am familiar with).
This seems to be in line with what your coauthor's advisor has in mind. I would take the coauthor at their word regarding the fact that the advisor does not wish to be a coauthor.
In addition, you do not want your own advisor to be in the dark about this paper. It is good that you have presented it to him at a prior occasion. Prior to meeting with the coauthor's advisor, you should email your advisor about the paper and let him know you are preparing to submit it. Depending on schedule/your needs, your advisor will likely be willing to provide a brief review of the paper. If he does, he should also be expecting an acknowledgement, not coauthorship.