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Is it ethical for advisors to automatically coauthor papers?
I work in a field (Philosophy) where co-authorship is uncommon and advisors and grad students very seldomly co-author a paper. I've seen a lot of posts on Academia.se though about the ethics of co-authoring papers with mentors, such as this question.
My sense is that it must be somewhat common in the natural sciences for the head of the lab/dissertation advisor to be automatically added as a co-author to every paper that his or her graduate students produce.
My questions are:

Is this really common, and if so, in which fields?
Is this really ethical?

My view is that adding your name to something that you had no part in creating is just plagiarism: it's taking credit for the work of others.
The opposite argument, that the work wouldn't have been possible without the PI's grant funding also cuts no ice. I wouldn't have been able to write my dissertation if my parents hadn't had sex, but that doesn't mean they should get credit as coauthoring my work.
That's the way it seems to me, but maybe somebody from these fields can give us a better rationale for (what seems to be) the widespread practice.
Edit:
Another argument against the practice. Suppose I'm a billionaire who knows nothing about science, but I take it into my head that I want to be (regarded as) a famous scientist. Suppose I just spend billions of dollars to fund other people to do research. But, I ask each of those people to come and report to me for fifteen minutes ever week about what they've worked on, or discovered that week. Then, every time one of them finds a result, I demand that my name be added to the paper as a co-author, since we have "discussed" the work in progress and it is, after all, by my grace that the funds for the work have been provided. Suppose I just have hundreds of these postdocs, producing thousands of papers a year, all of which I am a coauthor for.
Now ask yourself if I really deserve to be regarded as a famous scientist at all? It seems to me that I don't, because I haven't done any of the science--I haven't suggested any research methods, I haven't designed any experiments, I haven't collected any data, I haven't even helped junior researchers know the shape of the existing literature. You might regard my existence as good for science in some sense--you might think of me as a beneficial patron of the sciences. But you wouldn't think of me as a scientist, right? And you wouldn't think I deserved to be considered for a Nobel Prize, or membership in the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, or whatever. If I demanded that I be given those awards because of the thousands and thousands of papers that I have coauthored, which have been cited tens of thousands of times, you would call me an idiot, right? We give those prizes for discovery, not for being rich. The same thing is true of tenure too. You shouldn't be able to buy your role as a tenured professor. You should have to prove that you, personally, are capable of making a serious contribution to your field. And of course you demonstrate that capability by publishing papers.
So when a prof is automatically added as a coauthor to a paper that he or she did not contribute to in any way except financially, then she is trying to buy a reputation as a scholar, or the other perks like tenure or membership in the AAAS that come with that reputation in just the same kind of way that the absurd billionaire is doing.

Interestingly, I had a first-author paper with a co-author adviser who demanded I take his name off the paper before putting it on arXiv. He didn't tell me exactly why, but perhaps his rationale was that he didn't think it was ethical to "leech" onto a student's paper.

@Suresh: The questions overlap but in my opinion are not identical.  Moreover both questions are (still in my opinion, of course) just about the most important questions one could ask on a site like this.  So I think they should be encouraged and people should think hard about giving good, broadly applicable answers.

Your example of a billionaire who knows nothing about science doesn't hold water. The billionaire clearly made no intellectual contribution, since s/he knows nothing about science. Discussing something with the head of a scientific laboratory for 15 minutes a week could result in a significant scientific contribution, though this is not guaranteed.  (For example, "I can't get X to work." "Did you try adjustment Y?" Next week, "Hey, Y allowed me to get great results!")

Here's a conversation I have with my grad student colleagues occasionally. "Hey, look at this for me. I've got these three premises that should entail this conclusion, but I can't get the proof." "Yeah, you missed a negation here." "oh, yeah. there it is." I would never want to be a coauthor for something like that.

@DavidRicherby They don't even need to suggest anything, just make the them talk/think aloud

@izkata, are you suggesting making the rubber duck a co-author?

The billionare in your example would not in fact become known as a scientist in this situation, nor would he merit (or be awarded) any of the skill certifications you mention. But with giving authorship credit, the scientists are getting off easy, actually - I'd expect him to require something closer to having his personal logo be included in the header or footer of every single page.

I think they key word in your question is "automatically". Most of the time a research advisor ought to be able to help you make your paper better to the point of deserving co-authorship. And in many fields, the name of a well known co-author will increase the chances of the paper being read and cited - which will benefit the first author. In some sense, the "authority"'s name on the paper conveys additional credibility that goes beyond the fact that the work passed peer review. Unless the journal is known for exceptionally tight review standards, that helps.

Nobody has a problem with people who deserve credit getting credit. What I have a problem with is people who don't deserve credit getting it. Leave the issue of how the practice victimizes grad students aside. It would still be wrong for a prof to receive credit for work she didn't do.

With the benefit of having been through grad school and am now doing something else, I would say yes its ethical, because of the funding situation.  Natural sciences grad studentships are based on grant funding.  The advisor had to create the grant in the first place.  The work the student is doing is based on the grant.  So yes the advisor really should get a large share of the credit even if they did nothing to directly support the paper.

I agree with @shane that it is totally unethical to add your name in manuscript just because of administrative reasons no matter whether your are advisor or head of laboratory or any other person influencing the author just because of administrative reasons.

With your billionaire scientist idea: actually, I would have no problem with putting someone who funded billions of dollars of science projects, and actually talked 15 minutes a week with the scientist, as a coauthor.

@CliffAB The standard way to correctly attribute the provider of funding is in a daggered/asterisked footnote on the first page of the paper.

Some of the answers on this question might give you insights about the field differences: When should a supervisor be an author?

No, automatic co-authorship is not ethical – irrespectively of the discipline!
The following is from the "DFG Proposals for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice" (pp.82f, emphasis added), which, for instance, strictly forbids "automatic" co-authorships and gives a couple of common negative examples:

Authors of an original scientific publication shall be all those, and only those, who have made significant contributions to the conception of studies or experiments, to the generation, analysis and interpretation of the data, and to preparing the manuscript, and who have consented to its publication, thereby assuming responsibility for it. [...]
Therefore, the following contributions on their own are not sufficient to justify authorship:

merely organisational responsibility for obtaining the funds for the research,

providing standard investigation material,
the training of staff in standard methods,
merely technical work on data collection,
merely technical support, such as only providing equipment or experimental animals,
regularly providing datasets only,
only reading the manuscript without substantial contributions to its content,
directing an institution or working unit in which the publication originates

Help of this kind can be acknowledged in footnotes or in the foreword.

In fact, DFG (the German Research Council) requires you to sign strict adherence to this ethical code on each and every grant proposal. Other funding agencies have similar regulations.

+1: this seems like a very important answer.  Some people on this site have suggested that in certain scientific fields the practice is just not regarded as unethical.  One wonders why such a basic academic principle -- which for instance makes contact with the universal condemnation of plagiarism -- could be so field-dependent.  This answer provides convincing evidence that there are some common ethical principles at work here.

@PeteL.Clark: I think the issue is that there are also unethical traditions in some fields that are so common that young researchers just internalize them without ever questioning them. One trigger for DFG to make this explicit was the extreme case of a med school professor, who had "co-authored" more than 400 papers in a single year. Still, surprisingly many researchers I have talked too consider this as "pretty normal".

Perhaps the problem is that writing successful grant proposals, that take a long time, are not considered a metric in the academic career; so there is a tendency to unethical practices.

@Davidmh, why think that winning grants isn't a metric in an academic career. Everyone I've ever known who won a grant put the name, date, and amount of the grant on his or her CV. That's an appropriate way to take credit, and I think everyone in academia appreciates those kinds of contributions--especially deans who make crucial hiring/promotion decisions.

@shane Some people put the positions of their former PhD students (makes sense if many of them go to Caltech and Princeton), but in many cases, only articles are counted (or mostly counted). After all, "he has 20 papers in Nature" sounds way better than "he funded 20 papers in Nature".

But those same people also claim the PhD students they've directed elsewhere on the CV right? under a section titled "Dissertations Directed" or something like that? If so, then they've taken the appropriate credit for the work they've done, and their peers will take that into account when evaluating them for promotion, merit pay, etc. But it would be unreasonable to count the students that way AND then also demand to be the automatic coauthor of all of their papers.

"have consented to its publication, thereby assuming responsibility for it" This is an important test. If the paper is later found to be flawed, no author should be able to disclaim responsibility. i.e. every author should be involved enough to know if the paper is fishy.

It's maybe worth noting that those guidelines do not rule out automatic authorship for individuals providing intellectual responsibility for obtaining the funds for research, and do forbid the standard practice in experimental particle physics, gravitational wave physics, and other 100+ author science. Though I appreciate the good intuition behind them, I also appreciate that they're principally convenient guidelines for a funding body which wants a simple interpretation of ‘authorship’ which supports a nice measurable connection between author statistics and funding decisions.

Is this really common, and if so, in which fields?

I guess it is reasonably common in many fields. As a rule of thumb, it seems to me that the more applied a field is, the more likely you are to see groups where the lab head co-authors every or almost every paper in the lab. In my field (software engineering), I would say at least 50% - 75% of all groups operate like this. Academia.SE tells me that this is not the case e.g., in Theoretical CS.
Note that this does not necessarily mean that the lab head is added to each paper without contribution (although there are certainly groups where it means exactly that). In some cases, it is just that all research in a lab directly runs through the lab head (i.e., nobody works on research without the direct involvement of the lab head). In such cases, co-authorship on all papers may be academically warranted (but this might actually be the worse practice in reality, as it allows for no growth to independence at all for the PhD students and postdocs in the lab).

Is this really ethical?

I would argue that things are more complicated than you seem to think, mostly because the funding argument that you claim "holds no ice" is in fact not so bad. Your comparison with your parents having sex is pretty silly. Big research labs depend on senior researchers acquiring grant money. This takes a lot of time - time, that said researchers cannot use to write actual papers. Researchers on any level are mostly evaluated via papers. Under these circumstances, if senior researchers don't get a "kickback" on some level from the money they acquire, what would motivate them to write grant proposals in the first place?
There is also the added difficulty that in many STEM fields it is just darn difficult to decide whether somebody has made a contribution (see also here: What are the minimum contributions required for co-authorship). Is discussing ideas enough? What if all the important ideas and suggestions came from the advisor? Oftentimes, the research work of a PhD student is basically an implementation of a high-level plan laid out by the advisor in the funding proposal. In that case, has the advisor not by default "contributed" to all papers?

"nobody works on research without the direct involvement of the lab head". What does this mean, exactly? The head cannot be participating in all the projects in a large lab, or even in a medium-sized one.

@FaheemMitha I guess this depends on your definition of 'participating' (and also on large/medium-sized). A lab head can certainly forbid (or strongly discourage) research that does not directly go back to his own ideas, as written down in grant proposals and position papers.

"can certainly forbid (or strongly discourage) research". Well, that's an extremely loose definition of participation. Giving orders does not equal participation in my book.

@FaheemMitha It is not so much that he contributes by giving orders, it is more that no research work to which he has not contributed can be done. I have seen this in a few labs with very tight research plans. I don't think this is exactly a model system, but it certainly happens.

Ok, I see what you mean. That's sounds like an "interesting" setup. Regardless, I don't see how a single individual can scale so far as to be significantly contributing to on a bunch of different projects at the same time.

@FaheemMitha It's the old "you have been hired to work on this grant, you shouldn't have time to work on something else as well" argument. You can see in popping up on Academia.SE sometimes as well.

let us continue this discussion in chat

"Your comparison with your parents having sex is pretty silly. Big research labs depend on senior researchers acquiring grant money. This takes a lot of time - time, that said researchers cannot use to write actual papers." That argument would hold just as true of the dean and the president of the university as it does of the head of the lab. Why should the the head of the lab get credit, just because he paid for the materials, or researchers that made a project possible? There are other ways to give credit for securing grants, and funding research. But attribution as a coauthor isn't one.

I think the idea of X implementing Y's plan should count as a reasonable co-authorship situation--X and Y both contributed. But "discussion" isn't contributing. If X just tells Y what X is working on, without Y suggesting any methods, or background knowledge or whatever else, then X and Y are clearly "discussing" but also obviously Y isn't contributing anything to X's work and so shouldn't be a coauthor.

@Shane I am not sure how one would realistically "discuss" without providing any input of value at all.

@xLeitix, to see the phenomenon in action, I recommend attending a panel discussion at the American Philosophical Association.

It's fair that The Money gets acknowledged, but is authorship the right place?

@Raphael, nobody has a problem with those who provide funding getting acknowledged in the acknowledgements section of a paper. But authorship is a totally different thing.

@shane: That's what I was (trying to) say(ing).

In fundamental mathematics, at least in France, the custom is for advisors never to co-author (important) papers with their students. If an advisor does coauthor a paper with a PhD student, then it is assumed that he or she had to help the student more than should be expected, and this can prevent the student from getting a job afterward.
This goes to the point of being arguably unethical in the opposite way than asked in the question, as most of the time advisors do have a role (if only of suggesting the question and the angle of attack) in PhD student papers.

Well, in case there was significant input by the advisor, this is unethical as well.

The point is that this unethical aspect, while certainly arguable, is on the community itself. A given advisor that would not follow the custom would put a strong handicap on its PhD students.

The term "unethical" is bullshit. Is it morally wrong to not give coauthorship to the mentor? Of course not, because the math community does not expect it.

The correct analogy to draw in fields where grant-writing is a critical aspect of the research is architecture: the act of preparing the grant is akin to doing the conceptual design of a new building; the work of the graduate students and postdocs (or other researchers) is the research equivalent of fleshing out the design into a practical design, and converting it into a real building. The master architect (the one overseeing the vision) is going to get a substantial amount of credit, regardless of not being the one to plan everything out to the finest detail. But the important thing is that the end product (the building in one case, the research in the other) would not result without the initial rough sketches for the specific project (the conceptual design or the grant proposal).
This is very different from the billionaire example provided above, because writing a grant requires the construction of a specific framework in which the research will be carried out, not just handing over money to others to do work within some grandiose but completely unspecific vision.
Now, as a further practical matter, very few advisors are "absentee landlords" who merely acquire the grant, and then do nothing else. They almost certainly don't run the code or perform the experiments, but they are active in helping to interpreting the data, design future experiments, and evaluating and editing the manuscripts that are produced. In part, this is a matter of safeguarding one's reputation: if you let people publish bad work under your name, your reputation will suffer as a result in the long run.

But the important thing is that the end product would not result without the initial rough sketches. — No, that's not enough.  All research builds on earlier work.  The same argument implies that every paper on cosmology should have Albert Einstein as a coauthor.

very few advisors are "absentee landlords" — [citation needed]

@JeffE: No, it doesn't, unless Einstein wrote the grant and specified the major design elements of the project. (I hope my edit has clarified this.)

I agree that a student who is carrying out part of a project that someone else has received a grant to work on should list the PI as a coauthor if she is using the resources of the grant.  But the OP asked about more than this: "My sense is that it must be somewhat common in the natural sciences for the head of the lab/dissertation advisor to be automatically added as a co-author to every paper that his or her graduate students produce." In other words, the question is about advisors being added as authors to papers for work done which has not been commissioned as part of the grant research.

That presupposes a fact not in evidence: that students are going to produce papers outside of the main grant research. Once again, in fields where advisor-provided financing is the norm, such behavior is very much the exception, not the rule. (If I'm providing their full salary, I expect them to be working on the project full-time unless they've cleared it with me in advance.)

Suppose you get a grant to work on a problem in field X. You want to know whether or not p, and you get a grant to investigate the problem. Then, in the course of that work, one of your students discovers that q, which follows from the fact that p, but q isn't really important in field X, but it is important in Y. Then the student writes up the proof that if p, then q and publishes it in the Journal of Y Studies. You didn't know that p implied q when you wrote the grant, and you didn't discover that fact either. I'll grant you credit for p, but you don't deserve any for q, or the connection.

If all the advisor does is provide funding? Perhaps. But if the advisor is actively involved in the work—again, in planning experiments, troubleshooting, interpreting data, and reviewing and editing the manuscript—then the advisor still deserves credit. Also of note: this is again a very rare case in such fields. Not non-existent, as I do know of a few such cases, but we're talking less than one in a thousand (at least in my field).

At the same time, though, if the student's funding is dependent on X, then he better not spend vast amounts of time working on field Y without letting his advisor know in advance what's going on. (This is doubly true depending on the source of the funding—especially if it's coming from either a three-letter agency or a corporate sponsor.)

aeismail: I am not "presupposing facts not in evidence": I am considering a certain case.  The question asked whether an advisor's name should automatically go on all papers the student produces.  In other words, the OP is inquiring whether a universally quantified statement is valid.  To argue against such a statement it suffices to exhibit a counterexample.  That is what I am claiming to do.

"If I'm providing their full salary, I expect them to be working on the project full-time unless they've cleared it with me in advance." This attitude would in my field be frowned upon.  What does "full-time" mean for a graduate student?  Many students spend much more than 40 hours a week on their teaching and research.  If you are funding a student then you have the right to specify a certain amount of time in which they work directly for you.  Whatever they choose to do outside of that time is certainly their own choice, and in my experience the best students will do other work in this time.

Full-time means 40 hours per week (or whatever full-time is in your location). But the critical issue is foreknowledge: I don't have a problem with students going off-topic—but I would want to know about it at the time. Another reason this is important is that in experimental fields such side-projects often involve use of limited resources (materials, equipment use, supercomputer time, etc.). The researcher needs to be able to show that the diversion of resources and their labor isn't going to have an adverse effect on the existing project.

aeismail: In the US, graduate school is not a nine to five job: no one is checking to make sure that students clock in and clock out at certain times, and most graduate students do a large amount of work after hours and on weekends.  Moreover students are not employees of faculty (and no faculty that I know of are really "paying" students; money coming from grants is ultimately coming from another source).  The idea that students need to clear everything they do with a faculty member would be considered a disrespectful treatment of students by many faculty I know.

I certainly agree that students who use materials or equipment need to clear that usage with the personnel in charge.  In many branches of academia, no materials or equipment beyond libraries and the internet are needed to do research.  I know of no branch of academia in which sitting, thinking and writing is not a major component of research.  Students are free to sit, think and write without faculty permission, and it distresses me that any students anywhere would be discouraged from doing so.

I don't make my students fill out timecards, but ultimately, I have to certify that my budget has been appropriately spent. If my grant is for X, and my student has spent so much time working on Theta, that nothing happened in X, that can be a problem for both of us. If the student is making satisfactory progress on topic X, then spending some time exploring other areas isn't a problem. But if it's going to amount to a substantial fraction of their effort for an extended period of time, that's something I need to know so I can plan for it (and help justify it, if possible).

"If the student is making satisfactory progress on topic X, then spending some time exploring other areas isn't a problem. But if it's going to amount to a substantial fraction of their effort for an extended period of time, that's something I need to know so I can plan for it (and help justify it, if possible)."  That sounds entirely reasonable to me.

This depends on many factors, and there is no general answer. In a field like experimental particle physics, you can have a paper with 500 authors. These experiments are huge collaborations. For people doing theoretical work in the sciences, it's more common to have only one or two authors; the question is then whether the adviser made a significant contribution.
Yes, it does happen sometimes that people get added as coauthors when they shouldn't. At a lab where I once worked, the director of the lab got his name on every paper done by anybody at the lab, even if he had made no contribution. (His c.v. proudly listed his vast number of scientific publications.) I once had a coauthor who refused to read and comment on the paper before it was submitted, but who also wanted his name on it. He was backed by our PI, because he had done work on the experiment.
In the natural sciences, the norm is basically that if you made a significant contribution to the work, your name goes on the paper. Typically a grad student's adviser will make a significant contribution to any work the student carries out.

I don't have a problem with people who made a contribution being added. What I have a problem with is getting credit for somebody else's work.

I doubt I have anything too original to say here, but I couldn't resist a chance to add my 2c. This might be the most fraught question in academia, as least if you are a student or a post-doc.

Is it ethical for advisors to automatically coauthor papers?

I assume that by advisor you are also including a postdocs PI, for example. So let us consider the question as this more general one. The basic answer in my opinion, is... No, of course, not.
I've seen various positions/justifications on/for this. They include:

That's just the way it is. The advisor provides the funding. Without
him, you would have no funding, no job, and no paper. So be
grateful. This might be described as the "capitalist justification"
for this practice. Similar viewpoints are expressed to justify why
capitalism and capitalists are good things.
Well, the advisor is providing value even if you don't think or know
it. It is easy for a junior researcher to underestimate the value of
an overarching research plan, and the value in discussion and the
perspective of a senior researcher.
Well, the senior faculty need a payoff, or else why is it worth
their while? This was expressed by @xLeitix for example.

That might be some value/validity in all these viewpoints, but I personally don't think that any of these is a justification for such practices.
As far as 1 goes, you can basically use the same justification for a sweatshop.
As far as 2, I think that the help provided by one individual spreading himself as thin as the kinds of people we are talking about do, is likely to be realistically very low, unless the person in question is very energetic and very talented. Such people are rare. Plus senior people don't usually have that kind of energy anyway. Also, research questions are just too hard, complicated, and non-obvious. You need to dig in. But you can't dig in 20 holes at the same time.
Additionally, in the kind of complex multi-disciplinary areas that are getting more common these days, it is increasingly difficult to have a sufficiently broad skill-set to be able to keep up with more than a fraction of what is going on in a typical research lab.
My experience of mentors/advisors contributions is that their contributions tended to be useless/rubbish because they did not really understand the issues, either because they didn't have or didn't want to take the time, or their training had simply not equipped them to do so.
3 is really the hardest to respond to; I'm not sure I have a good response. However, it is not really a justification so much as a pragmatic observation.
So, to the subquestions

Is this really common, and if so, in which fields?

It is really hard to know this. You can't pass out a survey which includes a box to tick saying "yes, I'm a crook and fraud". However... @xLeitix writes

I guess it is reasonably common in many fields. As a rule of thumb, it
  seems to me that the more applied a field is, the more likely you are
  to see groups where the lab head co-authors every or almost every
  paper in the lab. In my field (software engineering), I would say at
  least 50% - 75% of all groups operate like this.

Based on my experience, I think this sounds pretty accurate, though I would not venture any percentages. I've worked in more theoretical fields, notably Math and Statistics, and in Biomed type fields; this kind of thing is much less common in the theoretical fields, and practically the norm in Biomed. In fact, I didn't see any of this in Math. I don't think this is because mathematicians are inherently any more virtuous than anyone else. I think it is because
applied work just inherently has more overhead in practical terms than theoretical work, at least in the implementation end of the work. If a mathematician has an idea, he has to prove it, which may not be so easy, but once he has done that, he is basically done. In an applied area, if you have an idea, you are just getting started. You have to collect data and/or perform experiments, probably write some code, write the paper, make figures, etc. etc. So there is just more room for monkey work which a junior person can do.
If I am an applied researcher, I'm probably under immense pressure to perform, to get tenure, or maybe just keep my job. I could try to be good, and contribute to every paper that I am putting my name on, but given the immense overhead of applied work as described above, and also, given that your colleagues are probably happily abusing the system, there is immense temptation, I imagine, to abuse the system as well. Just to keep up.
In any case, in my experience, most people who do this seems to have completely internalized this behavior, and seem to take it for granted.

Is this really ethical?

No, of course not. Ultimately, my objections are really that of straight morality. I think it is just wrong. These practices are a form of fraud and a form of reputation/credit theft. Granted, in the grand scheme of things they are fairly minor offenses, but regardless...
I think Shane (the poster) makes a good point with his billionaire hypothesis.

Thanks Faheem. I think the way to respond to your #3 is just to say that there are other ways of giving PIs credit for mentoring grads. At every US university I've ever heard of, tenure decisions are made in terms of: (i) scholarship, (ii) teaching, and (iii) department service. Getting grant funding and mentoring PhDs should count under (iii). Trying to count those papers as research, i.e. get them to fall under (i) as well, strikes me as pernicious double counting.

Good points, @shane.

I like a lot of this answer. What concerns me, though, is that you seem to think very badly of senior researchers in general ("senior people don't usually have that kind of energy anyway", "research questions are just too hard, complicated, and non-obvious", "their contributions tended to be useless/rubbish", etc.). For individuals this may be true, but in general - how do you think those senior researchers became senior researchers? By not having the slightest clue how to do research? That seems unlikely. Occam's razor suggests that their might have (also) been a problem on your end.

Thanks for the comment @xLeitix: First, I'm not talking about all "senior researchers", just those that have "advised" me in the Biomed area. So, we're talking about a small group of individuals. I would like to think my experiences are untypical, but my experience talking to other people has suggested, that, sadly, it is not. Of course, without direct experience, I have no way of knowing. One point that is worth noting, if one has a bad experience with individual 1, then this significantly increases the odds of having more bad experiences later. Why?

Because your first bad experience could have caused a career hit, which can be difficult to recover from and would have limited your choices. To put it in statistical parlance, bad experiences are not independent. As to "but in general - how do you think those senior researchers became senior researchers? By not having the slightest clue how to do research?" I never said they didn't have the slightest clue how to do research, or even implied it. Read my post again.

Getting grant funding and mentoring PhDs should count under (iii) — At least at my university, grant funding is used as evidence of scholarly reputation (i), and mentoring students falls under education (ii).  Yes, both are taken very seriously.

@JeffE, why would getting a grant testify to a person's chops as a scholar? I get that grant writing is important, and that it is a difficult skill to acquire, and that a person who wins lots of grants deserves recognition of that fact. But what winning grants tells me is that a person knows how to write a good grant app, not that they are a really capable researcher. EDIT: It also seems likely to me that people who are good researchers would also tend to be good grant writers too--so the two skillsets might in practice be found together often. But still they are conceptually distinct.

At least at NSF, research proposals are evaluated by a panel of peers, who tend to favor proposals written by researchers with proven track records.  A great-sounding proposal won't get funded if the panel doesn't believe the proposer can actually carry out the proposed research.  Conversely, panels are much more willing to believe in the future quality and impact of someone's research if their past research has demonstrably high quality and impact.  It's a textbook example of the Matthew effect.

That said, grants are definitely not taken as the primary indicator of high-quality scholarship.

@Jigg The analogy is of the person with the money sitting in his/her office with a piece of paper saying { they are the PI / the owner of the actory }, telling everyone else what to do, and profiting from their labor. Here money == grants. IMO the analogy is pretty good.

I work in pure mathematics, where advisors are not co-authors unless they have significant input. My perception is that the convention the question speaks of occurs primarily in the laboratory sciences, so my point of view is that of an outsider
Nevertheless, I do not consider the practice unethical. First of all, there is no deception, because in those fields it is well-established convention that the last name on the paper is the lab PI, and other scientists reading the paper will recognize that she didn't contribute to the paper in the same way the first author did, but that the research was performed in her lab with her grant money.
Secondly, the lab PI doesn't just bring in the money, she also decides which direction the lab's research should focus on, and she often has to organize a large team of people- something that an advisor never has to do in say, mathematics. This is where the billionaire analogy breaks down. If your hypothetical benefactor also has to make decisions what equipment to buy, which skills to recruit in postdocs and grad students, and which (and how much) resources are worth pouring into which scientific questions, then yes, she deserves last author credit.
Thirdly (and I may be a little unfair in this point) my perception is that the standards of co-authorship are lower in the lab sciences compared to math and philosophy, e.g. people who perform tedious monkeying with equipment, or perform statistical analyses in data get their names on papers  despite not contributing to the "thinking part" of the project. So if Joe who did nothing but mess with a spectrometer for a couple of days has his name as third author, then Susie who manages the lab should get her name on it too.

Answers to your question of the ethics of co-authorship need to consider what is the role of (or signal conveyed by) authorship in a publication. This role may 1) differ among disciplines  and 2) be evolving all the time.
In the case of large research groups or collaborative projects—as some seen in genetics or physics—the roles of a head researcher involve managing the direction of the research and to create an environment where that research can thrive. The latter may involve obtaining funding, hiring post-docs & PhD students, managing people so research happens in a productive way. Whatever output from that group would probably not happen if it wasn't for the head researcher; in that sense, he/she has a very strong involvement in the creation of a research output. Good research heads will know very well where the different pieces/outputs fit in the overall research project, although they may not be familiar with the details of a calculation in a publication. They will guide provide post-docs and students so their publications fit within the overall project. In my book, this merits co-authorship in a publication.
In addition, there is co-authorship as a signal of group productivity, which is then used to improve the standing of the head researcher when it comes to funding application. This is a game played by many labs in the world; one may not agree with the 'corruption' of traditional authorship, but it is certainly used that way. Thus, I do not think we can discuss the ethics of co-authorship in a vacuum, without understanding its role in modern research practice.
Disclaimer: I do work in a small group, where there is no assumption of automatic co-authorship. I am, however, evaluated on the 'creation and support of research environment' when applying for academic promotion.

"Whatever output from that group would probably not happen if it wasn't for the head researcher; in that sense, he/she has a very strong involvement in the creation of a research output."  Are you saying that if the head is not involved in the research for a paper, then that paper doesn't happen? If so, this is not true at all, in my experience. In many cases I know of, a post-doc has done the work completely and published it himself/herself, with no help/involvement by the head.

I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that there would be no research group without the head. No post-docs, no PhD students, no papers.

Well, if that was what you were trying to say, it was not clear. Paying someone's salary is not involvement in research, imo. Please see reason no 1. in my answer.

I did say 'create an environment where that research can thrive', which is much broader than paying a salary. I could hire you, pay your salary and, at the same time, put you in a non-productive environment. Deciding the lines of research and putting together a team to achieve them is not a small feat. In fact, it is often harder than doing the actual research.

Any question involving the words "Automatic" and "Authorship" raises red flags for me, and my inclination is always to say "No".
From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which is the group that sets authorship guidelines not only for medical journals, but also many journals in closely related fields like public health:

Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The following recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.

Automatic authorship doesn't confer either this responsibility, or imply that they've made substantive intellectual contributions to the papers. Their four suggested criteria is as follows:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

I think that in most cases an advisor should have met the first criteria, and should have met all the subsequent ones for papers with their name on it done by one of their students (otherwise, what exactly is the advisor doing besides signing the occasional form?), but it's entirely possible they haven't.
For example, in my dissertation, I have two papers that do not have my advisors name on them - one because it was a side musing born out of trying to graph a set of results, and pretty much the product of my own brain over the course of a week, and another because they felt they hadn't met those criteria.

I don't think one can claim this is ‘unethical’ in general.
We can (at least for the purpose of argument) take ‘unethical’ to mean ‘deceptive’, in which case ‘is automatic authorship unethical?’ can be read as ‘is automatic authorship deceptive?’  But that depends on who, in the readership, is being deceived, and different disciplines may ‘read’ the author list differently.
My presence in an author list may indicate a claim that:

I contributed to this paper, and my position in the list order reflects the importance of my contribution.
I contributed to this paper, and my position in the list reflects the alphabetisation of my name.
I contributed to this paper, and my position in the list represents the order in which the various authors first committed edits to the text in github.
I at least read this paper, and my inclusion in the list reflects the fact that I, along with 800 other people, was during the relevant period funded 50% or more of my time to work on this collaboration (actually, in this case you can't really tell whether or not I'm even aware the paper exists).
I'm aware of this paper (which happened in my lab) and am the PI who got the funding (I get the impression, as others have remarked, that this is common in biomedical fields).

As long as the readership of the paper parses the author list in the way I expect, then no-one has been deceived, even if someone from a different area, who parses author lists differently, would get the wrong impression, and might think I was claiming something I'm not (and therefore reproach me for being unethical in doing so).
So – I think the answer to the question ‘is “automatic authorship” unethical?’ is: it depends on what you mean by ‘automatic’, ‘authorship’ and ‘unethical’ (we can perhaps take ‘is’ as unproblematic), and depends crucially on what author and reader believe is being communicated by one's presence and location in an author list.

I've written papers under each set of rules apart from the fifth.  In one similar case, however (anecdote alert), I was on a five-author paper where almost all of the actual writing was done by the PI of the grant and me, in that order; the PI sequenced me first in the author list, then the second, third and fourth authors, then him last, to log the fact that he was the PI, even though you couldn't then tell how much he'd written.  I didn't think this was very fair to him, but he asserted this was the norm in his discipline (a different area of physics).
Some disciplines seem to observe more than one of these parsing rules.
Of course, all of this means that bibliometrics which count things like ‘first-author papers’ are so errorprone as to be essentially pointless, for this as for so many other reasons.

Related: What is the point of listing 1000 authors for a single scientific paper?, and also this answer

@ff524 Indeed: thanks for the links to these (I hadn't initially appreciated this was a 2-year old question, which I must have come to via the sidebar!)

First point to counter the "taking credits away": it is your choice to add an "author's contribution" chapter to your manuscript. If you feel pressure to put your supervisor or chief of lab you can do so. If they did not participate in your research, you can simply write "chief - responsible for project fundings". Two things can happen, the reviewers or the editor in chief reject this author for not participating enough. Then it is less pressure that you yourself offended your supervisor, who will later grade you. Or they do not care and the paper goes published, but with exactly this authors contribution. You always have the chance, to not even write this on your own. You can ask all coauthors to give you a summary of their contribution. Formulate that you consider this too sensitive to write on your own and sent to all co-authors. An "empty" co-author has to visibly lie in their response, which is a lot less likely to happen.
Also question yourself, if your supervisor is really not participating? If it is only 5 minutes per week discussion, but within the 5 minutes he/she prevents you with their knowledge from wasting 2 weeks on the wrong statistical method, there is no ethical conflict to grant and offer them co-authorship. If they never participate though it is unethical in my opinion. Regardless of the field. But strongly question yourself, how much has this person influenced your scientific thinking.

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Is it common for doctoral dissertations from for-profit schools to be unavailable?
I've been trying to find the dissertation of someone who advertises that they hold a "doctorate of management" from the "University of Phoenix". The degree requires a dissertation, but the school does not require the dissertation to be published, apparently, because neither is the work listed on ProQuest, nor does the University's own library hold it. My liaison indicated that the author may have deliberately chosen not to distribute the work. I have not yet been able to obtain a copy.
Is this obscurantist practice rare at good universities & common at for-profit universities?
Any other factors at play in the unavailability of a graduate dissertation in the United States?

Do I understand right that you are saying someone got a doctorate from the University of Phoenix, the degree requires a dissertation, but the University of Phoenix does not possess a copy of it?  [I'm checking that "university's own library" is the University of Phoenix, not your university.]  That sounds terrible.

Yes, this makes sound like it's bordering on being a diploma mill…

You specifically asked about the US, hence only as a comment, but in Austria dissertations can be "locked" for public access for a defined period of time (up to 5 years). Note that this does not mean that the uni does not have a dissertation, but it is not given out before the lock time is over. This is allowed if the applicant has stated financial interests (e.g., if he wants to submit a patent application or make the dissertation into a product). Whether one agrees with this practice is a question of its own, but it is not "shady" or "obscurantist" in that sense.

Interesting! This would strike me as very unethical approach. For example, here in Serbia, defense of doctoral dissertation must be announced in newspapers of note quite a bit in advance and the dissertation needs to be available at the university library both before and after defense.

@xLeitix - Diplomas in the US can be "locked" as well for a similar period for similar reasons. For example, I locked mine because I was still preparing publications based on the work. In my case "locked" did not mean "hidden". You could find my thesis, both through electronic means and through the library. You just could necessarily get a copy of it to read.

@BenNorris I would need to check whether the dissertation can be found online but simply not in fulltext in this case. Anyway, if this also exists in the US, I would assume that this is the most likely explanation for the OP's problem.

a "doctorate of management" isn't going to be locked to protect patent ideas. I'd ask the candidate directly for a copy of his/her dissertation. If the candidate doesn't have a copy of his or her own dissertation, then you'll know that they just money to get a diploma.

@gman I disagree with the edit on the question title. The OP was not asking how to verify the dissertation, only whether it's common for the dissertation itself to be completely unavailable.

In many countries it is not unusual to have an embargo in a thesis (for, say, up to 2 years) if there are commercial implications. An example would be that the student and professor are patenting the results. However, they are always the minority of theses and are usually listed in the catalogue, although not available to the public. Any university worth its salt will make theses available for free via their university library, particularly now that they are a PDF.

Many students do not "publish" their dissertations due to cost.

I don't know about for-profit universities, but the practice at "good" US universities is generally as follows.  Before being eligible to graduate, the student must submit a copy of the dissertation to the library and to ProQuest.  By default, after being processed, it is then immediately available to the public from both sources.  (In some cases it might not necessarily be available online, or might require a fee, a visit to the university's library, or an inter-library loan request.)
The student may be able to request an "embargo", in which case access to the dissertation's text is restricted for a period of time.  For example, this could be used if the student intended to commercially publish the dissertation or related material.  At my PhD institution, this period can be up to 2 years; any longer embargo requires the special approval of the graduate dean.  Even in such cases, I would expect that the library and ProQuest would still show the dissertation in their catalogs; they just wouldn't allow access to the text.
In your case, "embargo" sounds like the only possibly legitimate explanation. But if the student graduated several years ago, or if the university library and/or granting department cannot confirm the dissertation's existence, I would declare shenanigans.  (Maybe NSFW).

In my department, we are only required to submit a copy of the dissertation to the department library (not ProQuest, not the university library, not the school library). It won't appear in the university's library catalog. (My university is highly ranked, I don't know about "good"...)

@ff524: But the university library would surely tell someone inquiring for a dissertation to contact the department instead, right?

@BenVoigt it probably depends on who answers the phone at the library! And in any case, only if you talk to a human; if you only look through the university library catalog, you'd never know. It's not clear how the OP determined that "nor does the University's own library hold it"

@ff524 FWIW, i found a "Social Media Community Manager" from the school on Facebook who offered to look into it for me. he then wrote, "I heard back from the library – they weren’t able to find [the] dissertation either."

Have any of you considered that the person simply did not graduate? I am attending the University of Phoenix in the Doctor of Health Administration program at the dissertation proposal phase. The requirements are some of the most difficult I have ever seen and include publication in the ProQuest Dissertation Abstracts. One of my committee members is a graduate of NYU and when we tried to view her award winning dissertation in the abstracts it was no longer there because she graduated over 10 years ago. Why doesn't the person you are referencing have a copy of her signed dissertation, I certainly will? Did Phoenix have any evidence that she graduated from there? If not, I would take a look at the candidate not the school. Consider this example, One of my committee members' dissertation was not available online even though she is referenced in nearly every scientific article written since her graduation, was lauded in newspapers for her work, and now sits as a department chair for an Ivy League university? She was surprised that there was no record about her dissertation based on her status as a highly prized employment candidate. SHe ultimately had to send to the education clearing house to get her transcripts. She didn't even realize that NYU should have given her copies of her transcripts and didn't seem to know that she had transcripts at the doctoral level.
Maybe you guys are just looking at the entire process wrong and should simply ask the University of Phoenix Office of the Registra rather than friends.
Good luck

the subject got a job based on holding the degree. i highly doubt the registrar would respond to a public request for student information. if you are able to look around within the institution then i would appreciate your help!

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text:
Is it more ethical to hire a tutor to prepare or to cheat on a test?
This question was inspired by this fascinating discussion about cheating.
If grades, degrees, test scores are important for getting a job/internship/assistantship, even more so than the actual knowledge that they measure, I can see how cheating on a test can be considered unethical. Is it ethically better to hire an expensive tutor to prepare, say, for the SAT or for the GMAT, or for some test at school, than to attempt to cheat on the exam?
Here is some context: New York Times: Tutors Hold Key to Higher Test Scores, for a High Fee .
Assume that the tutor has no secret/insider knowledge about the test. Assume that the tutor is essentially teaching you only some tricks for beating this particular test, no real knowledge. Assume also that many people in class do not have the money to hire a tutor of the same qualification.
Conversely, is it okay to cheat for those less financially fortunate, if they cannot afford a tutor?
As further context, Princeton Review explicitly states that their SAT prep program does only one thing: raises scores. Princeton Review argues that test prep is right and ethical, because (paraphrasing) SAT is a stupid, almost meaningless thing, and those without quality test preparation are put at a disadvantage.

"Assume that the tutor is teaching you only some tricks for beating this particular test, no real knowledge."
This is a pretty strong assumption which I think makes the question quite hypothetical.

Hiring a tutor to prepare for a test is considered ethical in my location(Taiwan), to the best of my knowledge.

@scaaahu Well, it is surely acceptable in the U.S. After a year or so in the tutoring field, I was astonished by the number of students from places like Columbia University requesting help with homework and even take-home exams.

@scaahu but the question is not about simply hiring tutor, but hiring tutor that is insider and knows insider tricks, which is, effectively, bribing.

@Łukasz웃Lツ No, it was. I'll correct the question.

@Łukasz웃Lツ I think we are not operating on the same definition of bribing. It may be bribing if the tutor is also the examiner, but generally those are pretty different things IMHO.

@xLeitix it's enough if you're efectively forced by the system to take the insider tutor. It doesn't have to be the same person.

A while ago, I asked a question http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/q/775/546 on meta. It explains what's happening in Taiwan.

"If grades... are important for getting a job... prepare, say, for the SAT" -- IME, potential employers only care about GPA (if they care at all), so the actual SAT score is largely irrelevant. Of course, a good SAT score can get you into the university where you get the GPA, but I feel like that's a layer of abstraction away from the issue at hand. I don't have experience with graduate studies and the jobs which that leads to, so I can't comment on the relevance of the GMAT.

Phrased another way, one might say, "Is it more ethical to learn arithmetic or to pretend that I know a lot of arithmetic?" It will be a lot easier to do the latter, but it won't make you any more able to solve quantitative problems. If everybody pretended to know a lot of arithmetic instead of learning it might well be more 'equal', but then there would be no point in assessing it in the first place since the measure would have lost ts meaning.

Measuring the ability to learn tricks (including financial ability) is actually of use to most employers etc., while measuring the ability to cheat is if anything a measure of what employers etc. want to avoid (since typically the risk/reward scheme for them is very different from individuals).
Thus, while having a tutor is not completely fair to those who cannot afford it, it is still a reasonable proxy for desirability.  Cheating is (usually) not.  So it's ethically better than cheating inasmuch as the right people for the positions will tend to be selected for them.

You mean it is more effective for the society as a whole to consider hiring a tutor ethically better. This gave me a new insight into the concept of ethics!

It's in no way better for the society, because it's creating a social classes system, like in the middle ages.

@Łukasz웃Lツ - I didn't say it was ideal or even good for the society, just that it is not as bad as cheating.

Perhaps some employers want people who know how to cheat, in order to cheat whoever sets the rules for the employers (such as the tax system).

@gerrit - This is why I was careful to say (usually) not instead of merely not.  Still, clever workarounds (akin to tricks taught by tutors) are typically preferred that outright cheating, since the latter can have unfortunate consequences should you get caught.

Very theoretical, but let’s think this:

If you cheat, you are doing sth. very unethical, as you are not following the rules that every one must obey, thus, you're obtaining an unfair advantage. Rules are for everyone and you’re breaking them – that’s bad.
If you pay someone (who doesn’t have any real knowledge about the questions in the exam) to help you with the exam, you’re following the rules. So, you aren’t doing anything bad.

Some people may complain saying: “But it’s unfair for those poor little guys who have no money to afford a tutor. They’re in disadvantage; it’s not ethical; it’s unfair.” And I respond: “Yes, it’s unbalanced. People with money will have advantage. But people who don’t have to spend X hours in work will have more time to study, having an advantage too over the workers. And people who can study in silence will have advantage over those who live in noisy places, …”
So, we must put some rules to try to give the same starting position to everyone. But there will be always disadvantages. The better the rules, the less the disadvantages. So, the student can’t do anything unethical if he/she follows the rules.
The question should be: Is it fair/ethical that exams are made in a way that someone with knowledge of tricks not related with the subject can obtain a huge advantage enough to overtake those who don’t know the tricks? Why are those “tricks” not published by the “teachers” or the exam providers?
The problem is in the way the exams are, not wether people can pay a tutor.
In any case, cheating is explainable, but never justifiable.
Edited to include my own comment:
Are you doing something that breaks the rules? No. You are pursuing a finish line, with all your effort and possibilities. If you have the money and the will, pay for it. If you have the time and the will, study more than others. If you have skills, use them to learn better than others. If there are rules and you follow them, nobody can say you’re doing something incorrect. You’re just doing as best as possible – through effort, money, skills … If you stick to the rules, you’re ok.

I follow your last sentence, thus an upvote. However, a question: Is hiring a tutor justifiable?

Are you doing something that break the rules? No. You are pursuing a finish line, with all your effort and possibilities. If you have the money and the will, pay for it. If you have the time and the will, study more than others. If you have skills, use them to learn better than others. If there are rules and you follow them, nobody can't say you're doing something incorrect. You're just doing as best as possible. Through effort, money, skills... if you stick to the rules, you're ok

I suggest you to put your comment above into the answer.

@scaaahu Suggestion accepted and followed, thanks!

+1; "unfair" != "unethical". As the platitude goes, "life isn't fair."

I think your answer provides the right framing for answering the question: Cheating is simply a trick that breaks the rules, while a tutor (in this case) gives you tricks that stay within the rules. As long as "staying within the rules" is a desired behavior, the tutor is more ethical route than cheating.

Both are dubious. But cheating is a problem with your personal ethics, and you risk being caught. If the exams are based on some secret knowledge, which is not available to wider public, the whole system is corrupt. If you adapt, you support that system, but you don't risk getting 'caught', since you know something that is accepted by the system.
The problem is quite abstract since you won't have either-or situation in real life. If the system enforces bribing the examinators or buying secret knowledge, the system would enforce no-cheating policy on the exam very well (because it's in the financial interest of the examinator).
For me, it's like the pickpocketing vs. corruption dilemma. Both are bad. But cheating is easier to fix (more control on exams etc.). In case of paid tutoring the whole system needs fixing, which is hard to fix because the system will oppose and you need some external force to change that (like revolution etc.).

Thing One: The exams are generally intended to measure how good you are at performing certain tasks (working out or knowing the correct answers to questions). On a given day, etc.
Thing Two: the exams are actually used to estimate how good you might be at other tasks (studying for a degree, doing a job, being "smart"). Of course SATs and the like are not great at estimating those things. For that matter intelligence doesn't easily admit being measured at all. But it's one piece of evidence and people seem to care about them.
So, get one consideration out of the way. Is it unethical to train for the test at all? Maybe, because that makes it a less good proxy for general ability. But you can train for the test with or without a tutor (perhaps more effectively with). Just practicing questions makes a significant difference. A good (but not off the charts) SAT score from someone who has never seen a SAT-style test before is impressive. A good (but not off the charts) SAT score from someone who has seen them before just means they're capable of studying. I think in this question we're not interested in whether receiving tuition is unethical. We'll assume it isn't and then we're interested in whether paying for it is unethical, right?
Cheating on the test subverts both Things. The first because what ends up getting measured is not anything you can work out for yourself (aside from avoiding getting caught), but something someone else can do for you and pass you the answers to fill in. The second because you won't always be able to cheat at your job and you won't be able to cheat at being "smart".
Paying for a tutor doesn't subvert the first thing at all. You really can work out the questions on the day. The reason you have that ability is in part because you have money to spend on the problem of learning it, but the test doesn't set out to measure how the ability was acquired, only that you have it. So from the point of view of standard testing, cheating is unethical and tutoring is not.
Paid tutoring may well subvert the second Thing, since you won't always be able to hire a tutor to teach you how to do any task you need to complete in life. SATs are quite predictable (intentionally so), challenging tasks in real life aren't. You can reasonably argue that if someone uses SATs (or GMAT, or IQ, whatever) as a proxy for some other activity then it's their problem to figure out what correlation there is (if any) between what ability you need to pass the test and what ability they really want.
Personally I hold to some socialist principles, so I think it's regrettable that opportunity and power in the country I live in is distributed primarily according to wealth. Which in turn is primarily inherited, at least when talking about people's early education, where any benefits like this coaching are typically paid for by parents. It's possible that this question is inspired by similar principles, in which case I sympathise, but the only way to apply those principles is to consider what it is and is not ethical to acquire through wealth. Different people will have different answers. Education? The ability to pass silly standard tests? A house to live in while you're educated? You can acquire free time through wealth, does that make it unethical after all to practice for SATs? If you think it's unethical to acquire advantage through wealth, sure it does.
In a perfect free market, people for whom a SATs tutor is a worthwhile investment would be able to borrow money to do so regardless of their economic background, and get the same benefit. In a perfect socialist state, access to education and jobs would not be based on wealth at all (indeed, 'wealth' could be meaningless or at least would not significantly vary across the population). Each system has its own idea of what equal opportunity means.
The actual world is neither of those things: some people can get an educational advantage by paying for a better education and others cannot, purely by the wealth of their parents. Society is not fair. Tutors are part of that privilege. As such I think they are part of the broader question of whether it is ethical to be rich, but there's nothing special about tuition in particular that makes it less ethical than spending money on anything that gives you an advantage of those who can't afford it.
It's probably less reputable to pay for coaching to a syllabus like the SATs that (for the purpose of this question) we assume to contain no real knowledge, than it is to pay for tutors to teach you something more educationally worthwhile. The more people train directly to a test, the less valuable the test becomes under Thing Two. But I don't think either is held to be actually unethical except by those who want the student's wealth taken out of education more generally.

This is not so much a self-contained answer, as a longer comment in response to a number of the answers here.
Cheating seems to be categorized here into a single huge category, but it seems relevant to split it up:

Cheating by copying information from other students: Absolutely unethical and requires no useful skills from the student.
Cheating by using cheatsheets: Absolutely unethical (as the playing field isn't equal), however it still requires the student to comprehend the material and even more so requires the student to behave more similarly to real life where, unlike in exams, forced memorization isn't all that relevant.

Now, getting to your question, is it more ethical to hire a tutor? Definitely, as there are academic rules and expectations a student has to play by. Which one will teach a student more:

Learning self made cheat sheets by hard
Learning by hard
Cheating by using self made cheat sheets
Using a tutor learning only tricks as defined in OP
Cheating by copying

Is what follows from the presented argument.
Lastly I would like to point out that in real life cheating by copying isn't called cheating but called collaboration (in the context of colleagues working for the same institution as is the case with students). In a lot of positions it's more important to know when to 'cheat' then having all the knowledge at hand by hard. This does not however in any way justify cheating, nor is the current system designed in a way that would allow correct measurements in spite of such cheating, but it is worth noting in the context of this question, especially as there is a slow paradigm shift from individual examinations to more heavily graded group work.

Though cheating by copying can be called collaboration in real life in some cases, it can also be called industrial espionage or copyright/patent infringement in other cases.

@Wrzlprmft: Added a note to clarify that it was within the context of colleagues working for the same institution as is the case with students (well, technically students are clients buying a service from the same institution, but that's not how students see it)

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text:
Tattoos in the Workplace
I'm an undergraduate mathematics student finishing my degree.  I plan to go to grad school, and ultimately aspire to become a professor.  I really like tattoos, but I'm hesitant to get one because it could affect my future job.
Of course, if I did get one, it would be discrete and innocent.  What I really want is the axioms from ZFC wrapped around my upper arm.
I'm very interested in hearing people's thoughts on tattoos in the workplace, particularly from people who work in mathematics.  Do you think it is acceptable?  How would you judge someone based on their tattoos?  Do any of you have tattoos?  What are your experiences?

Related: Are search committees biased in terms of a candidate's looks, such as long hair for men?

One of my math professors has a clearly visible tattoo on his arm of his wife's name. I haven't seen or heard anybody complain about it, and it wasn't even parodied at our annual grad student skit show making fun of the department (although granted, this prof is very parody-able in other ways).

Someone I knew in college had $e^{i \pi}+1=0$ tattooed on his arm. He was a big tough Marine, though, so nobody ever said anything about it. Anyway, wearing long sleeves is always an option (and at an interview you probably would anyway).

I have a friend who's a masters student in mathematics, and he has numerous tattoos. The students and faculty frequently see them because of the way he dresses. It's never been an issue. I have another friend who's a PhD student who also has numerous tattoos, and it's never been an issue for her, either, and hers are also clearly visible. I think the attitude toward tattoos is generally changing.

I never seen a professor has a tattoo. At least not on the neck. Actually, for me; it is strange to see a professor with visible large tattoos. I dont think your upper arm would be visible a lot to students/professors.

No tattoos, but just before I got tenure, I could literally sit on my hair. Nobody cared.

Promoting the ZFC axioms is unacceptable, because proofs which involve the axiom of choice are nonsense or at least less informative than proofs which don't use it.  Also, the axiom of extensionality gets rejected by those working in "fuzzy logic".  Would it be acceptable for a mathematician to tattoo the law of the excluded middle or any of the laws which "imply" it like Pierce's law or the law of Clavius?!!!??  Would it be acceptable for a logician to have a tattoo which said "The Key: CCNppp" on his body?!?!?  HEAVENS NO!!!!!!

I'll also throw in that one of my professors wears T-shirts, has a tattoo of his wedding ring on his finger, and wears a tongue piercing, and he seems to be pretty respected because -- importantly -- he does good work.

@DougSpoonwood Pierce's law would better be used in form of a piercing ...

Tattoos that can be easily concealed in sensitive times (during interviewing, etc.) should never be a problem. Further, academia is in general a pretty tolerant place when it comes to looks. As Suresh says, we are used to much weirder things in terms of look than a small tattoo. You'll be fine.

I don't have any tattoos, and I work in CS, which may be a little more relaxed than mathematics. I would have no negative reaction to seeing someone with a tattoo, and would merely be somewhat envious :).
I've had colleagues who wandered barefoot in the hallways, and others who rarely showed up in anything other t-shirts and shorts.

The answer is, unfortunately: It Depends. There are indeed people who will judge you on a tat or piercing or other body mod, just as there are people who will judge you if you come to work in ripped jeans and a T-shirt with three different colors of housepaint and a layer of cat fur. This tends to be less of an issue in places where you either aren't dealing with customers who might react badly, or are expected to be a bit eccentric; academia and "research" types can get away with more than folks in the main line of business can, and sales personnel are generally expected to be well-turned-out but otherwise non-distracting so the customer can concentrate on the transaction.
If it isn't something that's displayed during the interview or at work, it's unlikely to ever be an issue. If you want it more visible, you are gambling. It's not a major risk, but don't assume it's 100% harmless.
And of course a tat which implies you're involved with anything resembling a violent or hateful group is likely to get you invited to interview elsewhere.
Basically: Don't be stupid. If you do it, get something tasteful, don't shove it in people's faces and force them to react when they'd really rather not deal with it, and for gods' sake don't get a tat until you've wanted the same design for at least a full year. (If in any doubt, friends who do skin art tell me, consider a temporary and see if you keep buying and re-applying it.)

The last sentence consider a temporary and see if you keep buying and re-applying it is very much worth noting.

Temporary tattoos are only for people under 10 years old. You either have a tattoo or not. It is like advising someone to wear a wig to see if his colleagues would object to him having long hair.

"abreact v 1: discharge bad feelings or tension through verbalization." So, it is a word, albeit an obscure and psychoanalytic one, but doesn't seem a good fit in the sentence. Did you mean to write that?

@Alexandros: You could replace that advice with "post a picture of your tattoo in places where you will see it everyday."

Noticed a typo that annoys me, and since SE insists on not letting us edit comments I need to delete and repost to fix it...........................
Alexandros: I'm afraid I know folks in the 40-to-50 age range who would disagree with you vehemently. It depends on whether you care about the art, or the posturing inherent in committing to the art. They, and I, lean toward the former. Having said that, Aeismail's answer is another valid alternative. If you haven't lived with it for a year while still liking it, you're taking a needless, foolish risk committing to it

Like this one (not mine)? I guess it won't make you any problems.

In most places in academia people do not care that much how you look (as long as you dress decently). But it may depend on the culture of a particular place.
However, the aesthetics, size and content of the tattoo may matter.
You referred to a geeky tattoo, but if the tattoo associates you with a group that is (even subconsciously) looked down in academia (e.g. that is which is, or is perceived as, expressing unpopular views, being less or anti-intellectual, etc) - it might be a different story.

In this day and age in America, I think most people are so accustomed to seeing tattoos in different settings - including academia and the workplace - that it's not an issue at all. In your case, especially something that shows your passion for math, I don't see it being a problem. I got my undergrad in Math. My career is a Unix sysadmin. I work in Silicon Valley at a large internet company, and quite a number of engineers and programmers here have tattoos. I personally have tattoos but they are mostly on my upper arms and get hidden by my shirts.

I think that many here have made great points, but having worked in academia (administrative)  for many years, currently it would be ill advised for you to get a tattoo (small or big, classy or otherwise, provocative or mundane) that is visible or has the potential to be visible. Most search committee are still old fashioned today; I hope that once you are on one, you'll work to change this bias, but in my opinion, as for now, it still stands.

You cannot live your life according to other people's illogical rules, as to what you are going to do with your body, hair, clothes, skin. Standing out from the rest of the crowd, either being prettier, cooler, having long-hair, tattoos, working-out is always a double edged sword for all work environments. Some people will like you more and respond to you positively, other will hate your guts. As other answers have stated, Academia is one of the most tolerant workspace you may encounter. So, you probably will not have a problem either way.
"Raising a flag" by showing hints of your real personality (besides your academic achievements) may also make other (academic or not) people approach you easier. In this way, it might also help in some cases. As for the others who respond negatively, who would really want to collaborate with someone, who judges people strictly by their looks?

While generally your answer is correct, the statement "You cannot live your life according to other people's illogical rules" seems a bit naive. Let's assume tattoos would be a huge problem in academia for some reason - would you really suggest going ahead anyway, possibly having some severe career disadvantages, more or less to prove a point?

Also, you are living your life according to other people's rules all the time. It's what is called "not living in an anarchy". Not agreeing with some of those rules does not make you exempt from them.

"Not living in an anarchy" has nothing to do with tattoos. So, you are clearly out of context.

If someone's tattoo is offensive or suggests membership in or affiliation with an "inappropriate" group, that will have consequences.

@aeismail. I think you should give OP some credit. He is not going to put a tattoo about his soccer team or his political ideas. But even then, having a tattoo in no different than wearing a t-shirt.

I believe Tattoos are a great way for self expression and shouldn't be restricted,having said a person with visible tattoos are frowned upon in the academia/ business circles. I am a PhD Student in the US and my professor has a small tattoo on his hand. I guess small tattoos are ok, but bigger graphic ones maynot be a good idea.


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How to explain to my boss where not to publish?
I have some continuing misunderstandings with my advisor. For some time I am actually doing my research as a one man show, but due to my faults and a lot of work I still did not finish my PhD. I am paid by him, so I still need to have good relations with him.
However, he often gets some real and spam "invitations" to journals and conferences and he always tends to send my work there (he doesn't have more or less anything else). The problems is these journals are often fake journals like from the SCIRP publishing. I managed once persuade him not to send the payment a year ago, but now they wrote him again and he sent them the money and came to me to say that they accepted our article. I do not particularly like to have my name in these "journals".
A similar problems is with conferences. Maybe this one is not that bad– I am even not able to google this random conference about everything in Gdansk now, but they promise publications indexed by ISI or SCOPUS –  but I already submitted the paper to two conferences (two disjunct parts of it) I chose and I want to publish it in a good journal from one of them or some other one. I don't know if the extended paper from that conference my boss wants to visit might spoil the better publication.
I also forgot to say he puts himself as a first author. But actually, he writes the complete article himself, but he doesn't have full access to my data, just a couple of graphs and images, so the quality of the articles is not that good, and I prefer not to waste my time to edit articles to these strange places, so it is probably better I am not the first author.
How can I persuade my advisor NOT to publish my work in these 'fake' conferences?

Change your advisor. Quickly.

Too late, I think I would be able to submit my thesis in 2 or 3 month if I stop all other work. Definitely I want to finish this year.

I miss @JeffE's don't walk, run! comments.

One strategy might be to show him examples of publication venues of researchers whose work he might respect, especially if those are the venues you want to target. The point is that your advisor is not respecting your opinion, so you have to give him an opinion that he would respect.

Sorry, been busy. Don't walk. Run. Your advisor is using you to drag his career into the toilet, and he's taking you with him. Get out.

If you contributed to a paper, it is a violation of ethics (and probably copyright infringement) for your advisor to submit it for publication without your approval.

@Max - Indeed. But if he says that to his supervisor, he won't have to wait for 2-3 months to finish his PhD!

Thanks all for your comments and answers. I am now concentrating on finishing the thesis ASAP and preparing for a change of the place afterwards. I still think it will be possible to return one day, but in a stronger position to be really independent here.

I've heard similar tales.  The realistic side: you can fret, tell your advisor he should try for a better journal, change advisors, or bring it up as an ethics violation.
Yet none of those will get your thesis finished.
You need to concentrate on finishing your thesis. & if that means you need to stop all other projects, then that's what you do.  Apparently, you're sidetracking...writing other papers, in addition to your thesis?    Or, is it that your advisor has a lot of paper ideas (or you get enthusiastic about new ideas and present the ideas to your advisor?) and you've been very willing to work on more projects?  (This can be a double-edged sword...tempting to get involved in several papers/studies, but it keeps you away from your thesis)
You should have a list of journals that are acceptable to you (starting from the best, elite journals to good solid B journals), why are you waiting for your advisor to send YOUR work to a conference or a publication ?   Based on your description of the issue, these papers are actually coauthored (with your advisor)-  your advisor did the writing, with some of your data.
Now that creates a slightly different problem,
-- and it is one you will have to resolve (maybe repeatedly) for your entire career. Some coauthors will send a paper anywhere..because some schools don't care where the paper is presented or published (oh, those schools will prefer elite journals, but at many schools, quantity is more important than quality).
My suggestion: finish the thesis.  Don't show any other work to your advisor.

You can easily argument that you opt to publish in A1 journal papers and P1 indexed proceedings and thus only the connected conferences. If your work is good enough though, or if you are willing to invest the time to make the effort.
Take a look at the impact factor of the journal and see if they (as well as proceedings btw) are in the ISI web of knowledge/science list.
You can also use this tool: publish or perish to check the impact of journals/proceedings (it works in win, osx and with wine in linux).


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Can a Ph.D. candidate at a US-style Ph.D.-only graduate school be admitted to a European doctoral course?
While most European doctoral courses require its applicants to hold master's degree, many doctoral courses in US often do not.  In these graduate schools, by satisfying conditions set by the schools, students advance to candidacy, when the school may or may not grant them master's degree.
Suppose the school does not.  Then, can a Ph.D. candidate at the school be admitted to a European doctoral course, which usually require its applicants to have master's degree?

This question may be of some interest as well. http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19213/phd-in-the-us-compared-to-europe/19222#19222

Although the term "PhD candidate" is used in both continents, a Ph.D program in the USA comprises of: Master (2 years) + Doctorate (3 years), meaning it takes at least 5 years, whereas in Europe comprises of just the latter: Doctorate (3 years). This means that yes, a Master's degree or something deemed equivalent or superior is required to enter the doctoral course in Europe. The fact that it's "not required" in the US is an illusion, it's just because the Master's is (sort of) included IN the Ph. D program. In the end you will get your Ph. D degree at around the same age than students in Europe.
If your University in the USA does not deliver a Master's degree per se, you will have to check with the prospective university in Europe to see whether they will count your research experience (preferably 1-2 years of lab research after your 4-year Bachelor's, which you could sum up in something that looks like a Master's thesis) as being equivalent or superior to a Master's degree. I believe it is case by case.
Also, please keep in mind that some countries like France require you to have a scholarship or to secure some kind of funding prior to admission to cover your living expenses for the entirety of the Doctorate (3 years) since Ph.D candidates have a status similar to paid staff.
The UK is probably one of the only countries in the world where it's OK to do just a Doctorate (3 years) right after your Bachelor's (=if you compare to other countries, you could say it means skipping the 2 years of Master's), however, I don't think this is highly valued on the international market, unless you managed to end up with the same amount of work and publications than the people who did Master (2 years) + Doctorate (3 years).
//Speaking for science majors//

While I agree with the overall description of the difference, I don't think it's true that a US PhD "comprises" an MS and Ph.D. In fact in many universities the tracks are quite distinct and it can be difficult to (for example) use Ph.D coursework to fulfill requirements for an MS. I've seen examples of "MS by research" as the OP mentions: get to candidacy and get an MS "for free". I think a more important underlying difference is that a Ph.D in Europe is viewed as closer to a job (so you're staff as you point out) compared to the US where it's viewed as education.

It's definitely not true in my department. Our Masters degrees have much more constrained course requirements than our PhD program. Many PhD students take the courses required for an MS anyway, but not all (or even, I suspect, most).

Just a note on the term "PhD candidate": in my institution (in the US) a person is admitted to a PhD programme on a contingent basis. After about a year, they do qualification exams (“quals”). If they pass, they advance to candidacy and are considered PhD candidates. That is, even though you are enrolled in a PhD programme, you are not considered a PhD candidate until after you pass your quals. Before that, you're just a student enrolled in a PhD programme.

Thank you all for the corrections. I realize that my answer may have not quite gotten to the point. But I do think admission in most European Ph.D programs will actually require a scholarship of some sort on top of some equivalent of a Master's degree. This can sometimes be negotiated on a case-by-case basis if the applicant can justify sufficient research experience.

One should note that the reason why there's such a big difference between the US and the European systems is the way master's degrees are handled. In the US, the master's degree is viewed as a "graduate" degree, to be completed after the bachelor's study, which is effectively independent. In Europe, however, the bachelor's degree is largely considered a precursor to the master's degree, which is normally done in succession after the bachelor's degree is complete. Doctoral candidates (post-master's) in Europe do not normally have significant coursework requirements associated with the degree.
Consequently, for most PhD positions in Europe, a master's degree is considered a prerequisite. The exception to this are programs that are more or less patterned after the US model, in which a master's degree is acquired as part of a larger PhD program. However, even in these programs, the acquisition of the master's degree is not merely "an option," as it is in many US programs. Instead, it is a necessary component of what amounts to a dual-degree program.


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Are there resources for learning how to write a scientific paper?
I have very little formal training, but I believe I have some ideas to share. I have surveyed the terrain of ideas I need and have the complete picture in some haphazard form in my head. It is seeming quite impossible for me to write anything that looks good, complete and coherent. In attempting to do this I have read my previous draft and it seems hopeless... I am not sure what I can do, at this point. I'm not in a hurry, I can spend a month on the text to get the technique right. More specifically:

Is there a text that trains you on how to write a mathematical physics paper?
Is it possible to acquire such skills informally?

A month is not a long time.  Some papers must evolve over one or more years.  To learn to write, you must read.

It's true, I have been reading a few works for a little over 4 months now and I have found some relevant material I think I can put together. I have some idea of how I want things to fit, its just  . . . .

@DavidKetcheson "To learn to write, you must read" and write drafts. send them to your supervisor. put them aside for a week or two. read them again. update them.

One of the ways I have found to try and refine my writing style is to find papers in my field that were written in a particularly clear manner then try to incorporate particularly unambiguous and unobfusticated phrases/word orders/vocabulary choices into my own writing.

craft of research may be of interest

This is far too broad to be answerable here. People do write whole books about it. And we don't do shopping list / recommendation questions.

Some resources on writing mathematics, which I assume will be useful in mathematical physics, are:
Donald E. Knuth, Tracy L. Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts, Mathematical Writing, (Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1989), ii+115pp. ISBN 0-88385-063-X. [You can download this (minus illustrations) from Knuth's website: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/klr.html ]
P.R. Halmos, "How to write mathematics". Enseignement Math. (2) 16 1970 123–152. [There are copies of this floating around online; I'm not linking because I'm not sure of their copyright status.]
However, in my own experience, guides like these are useful because they point out (1) a lot of things to avoid, and (2) a relatively small number of useful tips and tricks. Developing a good writing style is best accomplished by reading as much good writing as you can (including both scientific and other scholarly writing), writing as best you can, and seeking as much good feedback on your work as you can.
See also Jean-Pierre Serre's lecture "How to write mathematics badly", which is informative, funny, and (since his examples are taken from experience) tragic. Look out for the instance he highlights of "without" being abbreviated to "with."

My personal favourite is this paper by George Whitesides, one of the most significant contributors from the organic chemistry field. Some of his main points:

The importance of outlining, i.e. having a good plan for the structure of the paper
Start writing early! Your thoughts on how to prepare the final paper could provide useful direction on how to efficiently gather key bits of data
Tables, equations and figures are key - someone skim-reading your paper later on may just end up reading the intro, conclusion and the captions on your data, so make sure you can get your point across without blocks of texts
The word "this" requires an explicit reference
Stick to past tense when describing your experimental work
Pay attention to the formatting requirements of your chosen journal to avoid delays upon submission

None of the points made in the guide are field-specific. Good luck!

Yep, it may take a while until you are producing texts that you're happy with. Writing is hard! I'll let others advise on mathematical physics, but will recommend two general texts on scientific writing which might be helpful:
A useful book for writing articles in scientific fields is Hilary Glasman-Deal's "Science Research Writing for Non-native Speakers of English". Although it focuses on scientific writing for non-native speakers, there is also a wealth of information on how to structure an article and make the argument clear. I found it to be full of useful gems, such as, starting on page 1, tackling the introduction after having drafted the report sections.
Another fantastic general book on writing is Howard S. Becker's "Writing for Social Scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book or article". Although it's targeted at the social science community, much of the book is relevant for any scholar wishing to write well. Becker emphasizes how perfect prose does not flow from the pen of the genius scientist; rather, prose that looks effortless is (always?) the result of lengthy and repeated redrafting. He also explains how effective the act of writing can be for helping to clarify thinking.
Have a look at some related questions here on Academia StackExchange too: How to write a strong introduction to a research paper? Any place for people with fear of writing? How to improve technical writing?

Most journals have the "instructions to contributors" section somewhere near the end, and it may be the link on their website. Such sections often contain many useful hints that are more general than just formatting the paper for the particular journal, and you can read instructions of several journals even if you do not plan to submit a paper to them now.

In my own personal quest of writing the first article, I found this freely available article. While it's of most use for writing a medical technical note, it outlines the structure of the article very clearly.


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What is the difference of a BA/BS in Computer Science for obtaining a Ph.D?
I have looked around on Google, only to find zero answers. So, I hope someone could help me out with this.
So, for someone aiming to get a PhD in Computer Science (AI), would it be possible to obtain one with a BA in Computer Science? If the degree type doesn't matter, what are the positives/negatives of getting a PhD with an BA/BS.
Thank you,
Ash

A BSc can sometimes look better on paper to those who are prejudiced enough to not bother looking at what papers you took. But I sincerely hope that in academia, no one would give two hoots either way. You should care much more about choosing a high quality and comprehensive programme.

There is no difference. There is no global standard for what qualifies as a BS and what qualifies as a BA; it's entirely up to the university.  There is no way to tell from the letters on your diploma how broad or rigorous your degree program is.
Computer science programs in the US, at least in engineering colleges, are accredited by ABET. Those accredited programs tend to give Bachelor of Science degrees. But CS accreditation is relatively new, and neither graduate scihools nor employers really care whether your degree is accredited (except for some government jobs which require accredited degrees by law).
What does matter is which classes you took, and how rigorous those classes are (or appear to be, based on publicly available course descriptions/materials).

If the degree type doesn't matter, what are the positives/negatives of getting a PhD with an BA/BS.

The only advantage of getting a PhD with a BS instead of a BA is that you have one more S in your CV and one less A. This is also the only disadvantqge.

Indeed!  At Trinity College, Dublin, the standard Computer Science degree is  a BA (Mod).