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1500 questions
167
votes
18 answers
What does first authorship really mean in field X?
In my field (theoretical computer science), authors of any paper are always listed alphabetically; our papers don't have "first authors". (Well... hardly ever.) In most other disciplines, at least within science and engineering, the ordering of…
JeffE
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166
votes
8 answers
Grant fraud, should I bust my PhD advisor?
tl;dr: Should I report this large grant fraud, and what consequences could it have for me?
For obvious reasons, I will try to maintain some anonymity here.
So I defended my thesis. Which was funded through a government grant.
In order to obtain this…
ranting PhD student
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166
votes
13 answers
Do I have the legal right to demand information on plagiarism of my work from another university?
A student of a German institute has translated my Russian thesis word by word to English and submitted it as her own work in 2014. I informed the university providing them with my work in Russian and presentations of the work I made in 2013.
Upon…
Need legal advise
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165
votes
8 answers
Why don't researchers publish failed experiments?
The following might be a slight generalization for all fields but something I've noticed especially in the field of Scientific Computing:
Why don't people publish failures? I mean, if they tried some experiment and realized at the end that they…
user107
162
votes
10 answers
In a formal paper, should I censor "brainf**k", the name of a programming language?
I'm working on a formal paper about programming languages. I am going to talk about two intentionally difficult languages, brainfuck and JSFuck. Should I leave the names as they are, or censor the names? (e.g. brainf**k, JSF**k)
max
160
votes
20 answers
How do you judge the quality of a journal?
A colleague and I recently submitted a paper to a journal with an impressive-sounding name, the "International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Research". According to their website,
IJAICR is a referred [sic] journal in the…
Alan
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159
votes
9 answers
Prof's neurological health is declining rapidly. What can I (TA) do?
I'm a law student acting as a teaching assistant/fellow for a tenured and notable law professor. Between last year when I took the course myself and now when I am a TA/TF, his mental acuity and health has declined significantly. He has essentially…
Anonymous
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159
votes
9 answers
What to do about questions that are designed to embarrass the speaker?
I've attended a lot of seminars and lectures by now, and it's typical for the chair of the seminar to offer audience members a chance to ask questions of the speaker about their work after the presentation.
Most of the time, the questions seek…
James
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158
votes
15 answers
How to deal with failing a student?
I supervise a student who is working on her bachelor's thesis. The problem is that she has not delivered anything, never asks for any help, and when I offer her some help she claims that she understands and she will work on it. But nothing really…
Ali Alavi
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158
votes
7 answers
My paper is being cited in vaccine misinformation. What do I do?
I have recently discovered that anti-vaxxers have been citing one of my papers on Twitter and elsewhere as evidence of a specific 5G-related conspiracy theory surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine. Of course, my work has no relationship with any vaccine,…
Icyfire
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157
votes
3 answers
How are Ph.D. applications evaluated in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students? Am I likely to get into school X?
This is a special community wiki 'canonical' question that aggregates advice on a frequently-asked question. See this meta discussion. Please feel free to edit this question to improve it.
When applying to a PhD program in the US, how will…
StrongBad
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157
votes
14 answers
Teaching a class likely meant to inflate the GPA of student athletes
Premise
My department recently finalized the faculty teaching assignments for the Fall 2019 semester (starts at the end of August 2019). As these assignments were being discussed a few weeks ago, my department chair approached me and asked my…
Vladhagen
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156
votes
8 answers
Why are most scientific articles locked behind a paywall?
Can someone give me a legitimate, convincing argument as to why scientific papers should be locked behind subscriptions and paywalls? That unless you happen to be on a campus, you can't get view a manuscript without paying an often extortionate…
Fiery Phoenix
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155
votes
13 answers
How honest should one be with their students when talking about the realities of academia?
January seems to be that time of the year that I ponder this question often. After the grades have come out, I always get a few students with very low grades (D or lower) coming to talk to me, and wondering whether this grade will have an impact on…
Sana
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154
votes
4 answers
Is Obama's JAMA paper OK?
As some of you may have heard, Barack Obama recently published a paper in JAMA describing the US health care reforms (link). First of all, I am not trying to start a discussion on the validity of the content of the paper.
Maybe I am overreacting,…
Marc Claesen
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