I work as a researcher in a private company and my supervisor, who was previously working as a university professor, asked me to review papers for a conference he's co-organizing. He mentioned the review will be under his name.   Is it normal for a researcher with a PhD to review papers without any type of exposure in return? Do you have tips on how to proceed? I have to mention that I come from a different field.
54201
Is it common to supervisors to email their students papers to review (which were apparently assigned to the supervisor, and not to the student). The field is Computer Science, but I  would also like to hear from the other fields.
4680
I am reading a paper and have questions about the details of the procedure described. I have read other papers by the same team but they don't explain too much about that procedure anyway. I think it might be common, but my supervisor doesn't know it too.  I am stuck and I want to get out of it. As a student working on my master thesis, can I email the contact author for the manuscript cold out, or should I ask someone to contact him for me? I would ask my supervisor but I don't want it to imply that I'm avoid taking initiatives when I could do it on my own.
63771
I'm new to the journal publishing world, and I can't but help wonder why the review process isn't completely blind?  By blind, I mean the reviewers don't know who performed the research or (more importantly) what university the research came from.  It seems that knowing the identity of the authors could influence the review such that the quality of the research no longer stands by itself. You should be able to read an article and, assuming that the experiment was conducted accurately and ethically, decide if it is a significant scientific advancement. Why are reviews not routinely double-blind?
30860
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   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.
85767
I am a bachelor student majoring on computer engineering and working on robotics. Last year as a part of my research, I worked together with a student and one teacher as a supervisor, so we published our article for conference together. But later we finished our research and all of us left the team. Now I am working on other research problem by myself and got some results and want to publish it. But this time I am alone, I have no supervisor on that research problem or any student partner. So I'd like to ask can I submit a paper for conference/journal by myself? P.S. My current research project has no relationship with old one.
68384
I have finished my master thesis and now a couple of colleagues who were involved (one of which was the supervisor) are interested in "extracting a paper" from it. We have already written one paper on a topic covered in the thesis, but in a bit more detail. I am worried that this would be considered self-plagiarism since I have already done the thesis and am only really summarizing one part of the thesis.
113656
We are two students working in the same field under the supervision of the same professor within his chair and all of our publications are done together.  Hence I am curious: Is it generally possible in academia to submit a PhD thesis with two authors?
61819
I am putting together my application for a postdoctoral position in theoretical condensed matter physics. The position is not a fellowship and is a regular postdoc position. If you have gone through the process of applying for such positions a number of times, or, even better, if you have reviewed such research statement letters, what are the main points that are sought/you seek in such letters? Specifically, should I put more emphasize on my PhD research to demonstrate my "depth of knowledge" on projects I have worked on (past research), or dwell more on things that I want/am capable to do (future research)?
82653
I'm currently reviewing a paper that has an uncommonly large number of references compared to the average number for that particular venue (more than 60 versus around 30). This is a regular paper, not a survey one, and although there does not seem to be wrong references, it feels like some are not really necessary, and the fact that one particular author is cited more than 15 times makes me worry that this paper is used to inflate the number of citations of that author (the submission is anonymous).   Should I mention this in my review, and try to examine which submissions are "abusive", or just let it go?
33673
I am a undergrad student, and I am currently conducting summer research under a professor.  During our last meeting, I have revealed that I wish to go to school A for my graduate study. But my prof rather wanted me to stay at my current school for master/phd; i.e., stay and work for him.  Well, I have already spent 3 years in my current undergrad school and I know it too well it is not where I want to go.  The problem is that, this prof is the only person who can comment on my research experience/potential.  (Because I have been working 2 years with him; this year is the second year).    Right now, I can sense something not right in the relationship between my prof and I. At the end, if I go ahead and ask him to write me a recommendation letter, I am sure he would write one. But the question is, there can be a chance that he writes negatively, such that I would get rejected everywhere, and have nowhere to go except staying at my current school and do graduate study with him.   What should I do?    More detail info:  There used to be a PhD student who published quality paper and taking care of things in the lab. The Prof is almost always away so he definely need someone to do this kind of lab managing job. As far as I know, none of his graduate students publish paper for 3 years in a row except for that Phd student. Currently, that PhD student is graduated this year so I guess he was looking for a candidate as a replacement.
79755
I've read at least one career advice essay that calls out asking your PhD students to call you by your first name as unprofessional.  My coworkers and I always called our PhD advisor by his first name, and a graduate student calling any professor by their last name, much less their own advisor, strikes my sensibilities as quaint and old-fashioned (undergraduates are a different story, of course).  What is the standard practice for this?
56789
I recently reviewed a paper (general applied mathematics context). During the review, I realized that the fairly general ideas introduced in the paper can potentially be applied to a specific problem in a similar context. The authors did not mention this application in their paper, so I suggested to add a short comment about it in my review.  I later started thinking about the application in more detail and tried out some things, which actually seem to work quite well for this application. Now, the paper is still in the review process and might take some time until it gets published. What is the proper way how to proceed here in order to use the ideas and results which I in my exclusive position as a reviewer saw? How can I refer to the paper that is still under review? How can I best discuss the ideas with my co-workers (and potential co-authors) without disclosing that I reviewed the paper?  The paper under review is not available online on any preprint servers such as arXiv etc
25409
I fully support the Elsevier boycott, and came from mathematics (BS and MS) into my current PhD program in an engineering subdiscipline. I'm finishing up my PhD now and starting a post-doc soon.  I've already refused to review an article a few years ago for an Elsevier journal, and the editor seemed quite angry about it.  Once again I have been asked to review an article for an Elsevier journal, only this time the journal editorial board has a prominent researcher who I have had personal contact with, is a recently retired Emeritus Professor from my department, and if he became angry about my refusal he could potentially harm my career.   Does anyone have any specific examples of, or even better statistical data showing that boycotts of Elsevier journals had negative career impacts on early career/junior scientists?
46705
There's a department at my university where the head of department is routinely put as author on papers he didn't contribute to, and where researchers from overseas who had no input (but who provide funding to the department) are put on papers.    As a pragmatic matter, how should a PhD student respond when they are told to put three names on a paper, when those people didn't contribute?  Assume that refusing to put the co-authors on is not an option, because:   There will be bad consequences if they do not, and  This practice is routinely done at a high level, and there is nobody at the university to complain to about it.   This is not a duplicate of , because its answer assumes that it is practical for the student to refuse.
46525
I've just been invited, for the first time, to review an article. The request was somewhat of a surprise to me, as I'm still a PhD student and I'd always thought that reviewers were generally PhD graduates. Judging by the article's abstract, I am moderately familiar with the subject area, as my master's thesis was on a similar topic. The article would appear in an online journal and would be relatively short (6-8 pages). I assume that my review would be anonymous.  I'm unsure whether to accept the invitation as I'm quite busy with my research.   If I agree to review the paper, what will be expected of me? How much time can I expect this to take?
3402
Recently my paper is reviewed (by a professor from independent third party) and accepted by a journal. But, my employer allows me to publish this paper only without its name there.  Publishing house is expecting affiliation for each author, i.e. I can not leave affiliation as blank.   What should I write as the affiliation?
90578
I am in the early stages of my PhD and I am trying to put together a literature review of my topic. My intention is that this review will eventually be included in my thesis, something like "the chapter that describes the state of the art in the domain."  My subject is soft matter physics and a large number of theses have already been written this topic. When looking at the literature reviews included in these other works I've noticed that:    The sequence of ideas is often the same (this makes sense, so why not?) Cited papers are always the same, even though 20 years elapsed between the first and last thesis. Moreover, papers from the 30's are cited but no one in my lab seems to have a copy available?    My hypothesis is that these theses are derived from some sort of a Mother of All Thesis, and that paraphrasing the work of the previous student is OK.   So, what makes a good literature review?  How do you notice that a literature review is sloppy?   PS: I posted this question because I assume many of you have experience with this process either in your own PhD work, or as a supervisor where you have had to deal with paraphrasing of your students.   PS2: I am not asking about making proper citations, LaTeX+BibTeX handles that like a charm.