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1500 questions
72
votes
4 answers

Advisor drops MSci student suddenly in final semester

Today I had a fellow student (who is working on a master's degree) come to me and inform me that our mutual advisor (call her Professor WW) had just dropped her as a student for "personal reasons." I am a more advanced doctoral student and have some…
Vladhagen
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72
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8 answers

I got a paper to review from a journal that had rejected my earlier works, how to respond?

Recently, I got a paper to review for a journal (Elsevier) which is very reputed. The fact is that this journal had rejected two of my earlier works after keeping it under review for more than a year approximately. I understand that in science, it…
Coder
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72
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11 answers

I used a solution that I happened to already have on my laptop on an exam. Did I cheat?

In a programming in-class test, one of the problems was to write up a certain famous program in Maple. However, I had already written up this program prior to the test just as a hobby, and it was in a folder on my desktop [we were using our own…
ImeanH
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72
votes
11 answers

Is it inappropriate to tell my students to check their school email?

I am a new STEM faculty member at a primarily undergraduate institution. I emailed my students (through the school-mandated online course management system) before the beginning of the term about the availability of the syllabus online, as well as…
drkmno4
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7 answers

How to motivate students you supervise to produce high-quality research when other graduate students in the program don't?

I have a good friend who is in his first year as an assistant professor right now, having earned his PhD last year. He is frustrated because in his new department, standards for graduate student research seem to be lower than what he was used to in…
ff524
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72
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11 answers

Can one or two emoticons be used in a PhD Thesis?

I have a very dumb :-) question: Are emoticons (if rarely placed - one or two times) in a PhD thesis considered unorthodox? I have an introduction where I give an apt example and appended some small footnote where I make fun of the author (that's…
Gabriel
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72
votes
6 answers

What to do if reviewers reject a paper without understanding the content?

One of my friends submitted a paper to a reputable communications journal and received some reviews a week back. The paper was rejected, but the review comments were abysmal: The language was so bad in one of them that it was difficult to…
Bravo
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72
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14 answers

Can I slack off and get a PhD?

I am not a genius but I am a good test taker and a very practical person. I went through undergraduate school without studying much (skipping classes, doing homework, reading the books and doing some exercises the day before the test) with a 3.6 GPA…
Richard Broyler
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72
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3 answers

How do "scientific couples" (from different fields) find positions?

When two people in a couple are both in science, but specialised in different fields, how can they both find relevant positions but still be geographically reasonably proximate? Compromise and change fields? Work part-time from a distance if…
gerrit
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72
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8 answers

Is there a good site for holding online discussions of scientific papers?

Many of my computational scientist colleagues used to use Google Reader to share and discuss new journal articles. The loss of Reader's social features killed that, and we have subsequently tried Google+ and Reddit, but neither seems to work nearly…
David Ketcheson
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72
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12 answers

Is it OK to generate parts of a research paper using a large language model such as ChatGPT?

Large language models (LLMs) are complex neural networks that can capture and represent world knowledge present in the human-generated text as their weights. LLMs are trained on a large collection of textual documents; for example, billions of…
Hassan Abedi
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72
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8 answers

What should you do if you spotted a non-trivial error in a highly cited paper?

I have seen question on here regarding a citation error in a paper here: What should I do if I found a citation error in a published paper?, but the nature of this problem is very different. Basically, I came across an error in a paper (call this…
Lost1
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72
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5 answers

Leaving academia at 39

I am 39 and I have a good position in a European university, on my way to tenure (in the Economics Department). I am miserable in Academia, and I have been saying for many years that I want to do something else. I hate teaching, and I feel my…
user10522
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72
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8 answers

How should I respond to a worrying email from an ex student?

I run a lab at an R1 university in the USA. Almost ten years ago I removed an undergraduate volunteer student from my laboratory group for harassing another student. Today I received a multi-page, rambling, angry email from the student volunteer I…
Industrademic
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72
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6 answers

Realized a co-author inserted plagiarism into our paper 8 years ago - what to do now?

Recently, after the acceptance of a paper, the journal said some sentences were exactly copied in my manuscript. I was shocked as I was the first author. Later, we found that during the preparation of the revised manuscript, one of the co-authors…
DR A Ali
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