I’m getting towards the end of a long project and am required to write a dissertation (Bachelor of Engineering) and we have been advised that it’s a good idea to include an acknowledgements page¹. What I’m wondering is: Is it considered a requirement to thank your academic supervisor, regardless of whether they actually helped? My supervisor was not particularly helpful and I ended up not bothering to ask them questions about half way through the project. Is it considered poor form to leave them out of the acknowledgements?  My original question was similar to a  asking about whether they should publish a PhD Thesis without acknowledgements due to difficulties with supervisors. My question is slightly different in that I would like to include an acknowledgements page to thank family and friends etc. This would make it more obvious that the supervisor has been left off the list of people who have been acknowledged.    ¹ The guidance provided says:     It is common courtesy that you acknowledge assistance received whilst undertaking the project and preparing the dissertation. You should consider carefully all forms of assistance received and these may encompass academic, technical, secretarial, administrative and personal assistance (e.g. family and friends). A set of simple statements is usually appropriate and adequate acknowledgement should not normally exceed one page.
26697
During the process of writing my PhD thesis, I was close to falling out with my adviser, the advice I received from other staff at the lab (including the director) was unhelpful at best. I have since made up with my adviser and have successfully defended the thesis. I now have to publish my thesis.  The department says that one can include acknowledgements. All of the theses I have seen in my lab and in my department feature acknowledgements. Due to this special situation,  I don't quite feel that acknowledgements are called for. Yes, my adviser helped during the first half of the project but then almost completely reverted his stance. In terms of contribution, it is my opinion that he comes out at 0%.  I do not want to address any of the issues in the acknowledgements. I do not think that this is the right place. Likewise, I do not feel like thanking any of the involved people. Therefore, I would just leave out the acknowledgements completely. In academia, is this considered worse than lukewarm acknowledgements? Should I actually care about the acknowledgement, because others do?
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.
115245
I have a grant proposal that I'm ready to submit, and I would like to re-use a significant amount of the text (on the order of 5-8 pages) in a paper that I intend to submit to a journal for publication.  Is this considered self-plagiarism?  As I suggested in the title, I am also interested in the reverse direction of this.  Is it okay to take significant amounts of text from (e.g.) my own unpublished doctoral dissertation and use it in a grant proposal?  If this were an issue of paper-to-paper copying I know both of these would be clearly off-limits.  The key issue that I am wrestling with is whether the rules are different for unpublished works like dissertations and grant proposals.
68211
I am a first year Ph. D student, and I have been working on a new topic of research.  I worked day and night to prove something new and verified it. I began my Ph. D while my supervisor was on travel, but he returned before I had been here for long.  When he returned, he told me we have to stop and not continue without any reasonable reasons.  After a few months he began treating me poorly---always belittling and underestimating---although I got two grants from a top conference, made videos and podcasts, and constantly received praise for my good work and personality.    It seems that I have been treated as a competitor, not a collaborator.  Although agreeing with my approaches in private, my supervisor said false words to the committee to take the decision and stop my Ph. D work!  It is not surprising, as there was another former senior Ph. D student who I met on campus, who was not allowed to defend his Ph. D: this same supervisor claimed he was not able to finish his dissertation although he had published in a peer reviewed journal and having citation as well, it was scary and not familiar.  In front of committee, he lied, and said something without proving. I asked if he can make a detailed constructive criticism, but he could not.  All I can say that they are a gang literally, and he said words that show that he is jealous and doesn't want to see me having self confidence in my self. I know no one will believe me, but this is the truth.  Honestly, I am distressed and I'm losing sleep.  I had this dream where there were many people who saw me fail.  All things considered, I don't know whether what happened is good or bad, and I definitely don't know what I should do next!  I would be grateful for your advice and whether there is someone has encountered any similar situation.
35494
I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering with supervision from three people. Very hard times during PhD as there was not much supervision from the three. Presently, I am working in an industry doing R and D, but look forward to apply for post doctoral positions. One of my advisers have told me he won't recommend me for any university in the foreign country, the second one is not reachable and the third is very rude fellow. In short, I wont get recommendation from any. What are chances for a post-doctoral position in a reputed university.  I have 3 international journals (2 Elsevier and 1 IEEE) and 3 conferences from my PhD work. I also have a Best Paper Award from one of the main IEEE conferences (EMBC 2014). I can manage reference letters from my masters advisers. Will recommendation from my masters advisers sufficient for applying to post-doctoral studies? Chances of getting a recommendation from any faculty from the university where I did PhD is very low.
112175
I am a PhD student, working on Applied Math while my wife is a software engineer. I plan on going to academia after PhD and will start to job hunt soon.  A few weeks ago, I thought of an idea that hadn't been done before. I wrote a crude C++ code to implement the idea and it worked well. I believed that with my theoretical understanding of the problem and an expert coder, we could make something really impactful and incidentally, my wife knew how to. So, we spent some evenings together writing the code (she didn't know math, but I abstracted each step so she could help implement). The resulting code is fairly sophisticated and does an excellent job. I was wondering, now that I write a paper about it, would it look weird if my wife was listed as a co-author? Her contributions were definitely sufficient to warrant co-authorship by any definition.  Let's step aside the legalese of it (my advisor doesn't care and her company might but let's leave that aside). I am asking more from the standpoint of how it looks on one's CV, job application and possibly, tenure.
92823
I am writing my master of science thesis and I am not sure whether I should add some of the code I have written: they are not proper programs, but more like input files to be fed to a commercial program (Nastran) very popular in my field.  My concerns are related to the fact that I am not making any discovery, just applying the things I have learned reading the manual. Still, I feel the code will make the effort I put into the thesis to also learn this language clearer.
117412
I am graduating with my Ph.D. very soon. In addition to my thesis and published journal papers, my supervisor required me to copy all my work—code, figure files, data, etc.—to him before my leaving. However, all the works during my PhD have been done by myself from scratch, including the ideas and research gap searching, although he was the co-author of the papers. And my scholarship has been provided by the university. So I feel this requirement is not reasonable.  In fact, my supervisor didn't like my research topic and we had very little communication during my Ph.D. study. He gave me very little help on my work and was also never interested in my work and research field. In this case, could you suggest me on the following two specific questions:   Should I share all my works with him? If yes, why and if no, how to negotiate with him? If I can only share partial works with him. What is a good strategy?
106380
There are already questions on how to handle unpublished material in CVs. But here I am wondering if would be reasonable to cite an article in preparation in the application of a grant for a PhD or a postdoc position right after a PhD. So basically only for Junior scientists  who are still  in the process of finishing their PhD or their Masters and have one or two papers in the pipeline which are very relevant to the application in question.  I have seen published papers citing  other manuscripts in preparation, usually from the same author or a co-author. So how is this handled/seen in a grant application, provided that the manuscript in preparation exist and can be  provided if requested? Would it be better to reference a presentation at an international well-known conference?
105652
Several times my supervisor has asked me for my opinion on papers he is reviewing. I find this helpful as it encourages me to read things I otherwise would not, helps me understand how to review articles, and can lead to interesting discussions. Presumably my supervisor also finds it useful to have a second opinion or sometimes to act as a sanity check.  Recently I was wondering is this entirely appropriate. Not least because all the manuscripts for review have confidential for review only in bold at the top.  So my question is what are the legal/ethical issues with asking a student/colleague/supervisor's (depending on your position) opinion on a paper you are reviewing?  Note I'm not saying that they write the review just that you get them to read the manuscript and ask their opinion on certain points.
74664
I'm finishing up the first year of my master's program, heading into the second starting September. I had proposed a topic to my (then potential, since confirmed) supervisor in October and we agreed to work together. I changed this topic a month ago for various reasons (mostly lack of available data).  My supervisor was supportive of my topic change and throughout this process has been really helpful, responsive, and critical. But he is not really knowledgeable about the topic or the theoretical framework I am using - his helpfulness has come more from his knowledge of the discipline I'm working in (to which I am new) and his commentary on how I present and support my ideas. I feel that a co-supervisor would help focus my ideas and point out possible gaps, flaws, or inconsistencies in my analysis of the data based on their knowledge of the topic.  Is it too late to ask for a co-supervisor at the end of first year? I have a professor in mind who I'd like to ask, and he is someone I already know, but since it's quite late in the year I am wondering if it is appropriate to even ask. (And I'd definitely consult my current supervisor first. He'd probably be ok with it).
35066
I have recently passed my qualifiers and research proposal. My research is in computational mechanics. I had two courses (continuum mechanics and finite element method) as part of my research related courses. I will be using the concepts learnt in the courses in my research, though my research will be more applied than theoretical, so will involve utilizing a commercially available software and develop few additional routines for it.  Now, I scored B+ in both the courses (the minimum grade required for being eligible for qualifying exams was a B-). I struggled through few concepts but fared fairly well in the qualifiers and answered most of the questions asked by the committee.  However, I am concerned that my average grades might be an indicator that I might not be fit for the field I have chosen to build a career in. Now, I am confident that I will manage to adequately complete my PhD thesis and publish papers as required.   But, I am worried that academia is going to be a closed door for me. Eventually, if I get tenure track position after my PhD, I will have to teach these subjects (There's no teaching assistantship opportunities in my department for me), and how will I be able to teach something in which I fared poorly? Also, I will have to do theoretical research work after my phd, and I will not fare well in that. What should I do?
120102
Phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements" seems strange. Can one submit dissertation in full fulfillment of the requirements?
45149
from reading previous posts it seems customary to directly contact a potential supervisor. Nevertheless, the school I'm applying seems to have a central admission comittee. Still, the professor in question encourages PhD candidates to contact him. Do i have less of a chance if i do not write him prior to the application and does he potentially expect some content other than explained . Also, isnt it rude to directly address a professor with their first name at first contact?
26098
Are students allowed to complete a large portion of their research independently, then enroll in a PhD program, apply for a defense panel within the first semester, and quickly finish the thesis? Has this been done before?  Update: Question trimmed. I'm looking for an answer whether students can be admitted with much prior work on the thesis already complete, to finish in a short time (perhaps one year fix and improve the work), and whether there are real examples of people who did this. I not asking whether I myself am personally capable of completing this prior work to sufficient quality.
10098
As someone supervising postgrad students, I wonder what is the best way to train these students to write high-quality research papers?    The best way seems to be through coauthorship but ...  On the one hand I can be hands-off and rather give them feedback as best as I can but let them do most of the work themselves, sort of like a "sink or swim" strategy.  On the other hand I can be hands-on and rewrite the paper (or large parts of it) and hope that they learn from the example I give.  On the one hand I want them to learn to write papers without me some day and I want them to learn as quickly as possible to take load off me.  On the other hand I want us to publish in the best place possible with as little stress as possible.  On the one hand I want them to see the peer review comments from what they themselves have written.  On the other hand I do not want them to be discouraged by the peer review system early on and do not want to submit papers I know we could have written better.  On the one hand I want them to get confidence by being published and presenting work at good venues.  On the other hand I wonder if they need to get there themselves to get that confidence boost.    At the moment I'm very hands on. There's a few factors for this: I don't like submitting papers that are not up to a certain standard, I'm a native English speaker in a non-English speaking country with non-native speaking students, publications are a high priority for me, etc.  But recently a friend/colleague warned me that I should not be so hands-on with the writing of the papers of my students. He pointed to recently graduated researchers in my area that published good work as students but who struggled after leaving their PhD supervisor saying their supervisor did them no favours in the long term ... that by being so hands on, while the students have success getting published and so forth with me, I'm not really doing the most important thing a good supervisor should do: making myself obsolete.    My question is how to train students to write good research papers and in what ways can I balance being hands-on and hands-off?  I'm also interested in methods not directly involving coauthorship.
36628
I am preparing to submit a paper with a friend who is working at a tech company.  The company that he is working with is in no way associated with our research work.  Is it appropriate to list his employer as his affiliated institution?  Otherwise, I would leave his affiliated institution field blank.  Or, should I list the institution where he graduated from 2 years ago?  Update: Thank you very much for all of your feedback, answers, comments, and suggestions.  We really appreciate it.  I discussed with my collaborator and we will likely be listing him as an "Independent Researcher".  Although, we concluded that it wouldn't be unreasonable to list his employer purely as a personal affiliation (or point of contact) as long as he got approval from their HR department.