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1500 questions
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2 answers

Can you share some screenshots of editor's control panels?

Most journals use similar manuscript handling systems such as ScholarOne. I have seen both author and reviewer accounts (which are similar). I wonder how an editor account looks like. I mean how you search for reviewers, how they are assigned,…
Kitoshi
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59
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13 answers

Is it fair to my PhD student if I ask them to do "miscellaneous" work for a paper they're not going to be a coauthor of?

I've started work as an assistant professor recently, and my first PhD student has just started her first semester. I'm working on a paper with my collaborators which is almost ready to submit. I am thinking of asking my PhD student to help us in…
I Like to Code
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59
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8 answers

Is it normal that a peer reviewer would ask for an executable file in order to check my results?

I have just received a decision letter for my submitted manuscript to an Elsevier journal. It was a revise and resubmit. However one of the reviewer asked for an executable file in order to check my results. (I felt distrust from his comment..) This…
Marvel LePont
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59
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10 answers

What is considered appropriate women's attire for a PhD interview in Germany?

I have an interview for a PhD position (engineering) at a Central German University. I am not sure what to wear (formal wear for woman). Since certain countries are very particular about what you wear to an interview, I want to make sure that I…
Das
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59
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5 answers

Lecturer in a course I'm TA'ing refuses to give feedback on student assignments

I am a teaching assistant in an undergraduate bioinformatics course. A few weeks ago the students in the course handed in the final assignment (which is worth 80% of the final grade), which we (me and the other members of the course staff) are…
user1614062
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59
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8 answers

If you're black, how do you answer "Oh you're a professor? So you teach African Studies?"

In a comment to How do you answer "Oh, you're a professor? What do you teach?", @JohnSmith wrote I'm black so it generally goes "Oh you're a professor? So you teach African Studies?" I generally storm off. John's reaction is understandable. But…
aparente001
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59
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9 answers

What prevents reviewers from providing biased and very negative reviews?

One of the fundamental features of science, maybe even the most important, is that publication of scientific results is peer-reviewed. I want to understand why peer review is effective in the scientific community, because I want to apply principles…
algorithmic_fungus
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59
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7 answers

Can I get a refund if I bought an article that contains a major flaw?

Is it possible to get a refund from a publisher if I bought an article that contains a major flaw (i.e.,one that invalidates the main results or the main conclusions)? Assume the article was bought through one of the main academic publication's…
Franck Dernoncourt
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59
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2 answers

How to clarify that supervisor writing a reference is not related to me even though we have the same last name?

By chance, I have the same last name as one of the supervisors of a project I worked on. If I ask him to write me a recommendation letter, will the admission committee misconstrue that we are related and how do I provide proof that we are not? By…
Mat.S
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59
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13 answers

I am reviewing a very bad paper - do I have to be nice?

I received a paper to review that I can only describe as very bad. Not only are there structural issues that anyone that has previously published a paper in a respectable journal should know to avoid (like providing sources for images that are…
Sursula
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59
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7 answers

Is requesting to change US units to SI units reasonable?

A paper I am reviewing very clearly originates from the US. The authors don't use SI units. As a European, I am always put off by non-metric units and I would like to request to change the units to SI units, not only because I am more familiar with…
Sursula
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59
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9 answers

My PhD advisor sent me a plagiarized draft

While working on a paper, my PhD advisor (at a prestigious school, if that matters) sent revisions that included three pages plagiarized from a book. Thankfully I caught this before the paper was submitted, but otherwise it could have had terrible…
Jason
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59
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14 answers

What is a "Safe Space"?

My organisation has recently started advertising certain meetings as being "Safe Spaces" without describing what is meant by such a thing. Merriam-Webster describes it as: a place (as on a college campus) intended to be free of bias, conflict,…
DrMcCleod
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59
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8 answers

Quoting a book whose title contains a racial slur

I'm writing a paper on the Front de Liberation du Quebec; a homegrown Quebec terrorist organisation in the 1960s. As research, I've extensively studied a book by one of the intellectual leaders of the organisation Pierre Vallières called 'White…
anseltan014
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59
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10 answers

Fifth year of my PhD and I hate my project. What should I do?

I am a PhD student in mechE. After paying the first year tuition out of pocket, I accepted a PhD project due to desperation for funding. However, after an year I realized that I hate the project. Here I made a mistake of not leaving/changing the…
user050220
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