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1500 questions
57
votes
7 answers

My student told me his mother has cancer, what do I do?

Today I saw that one of my students in the class was looking very sad. He sat down at the end of class and he looked like he was in a bad mood. After all the students left the classroom I called him over. He told me that his mother has cancer. I…
M R R
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5 answers

Is Lambert Academic Publishing a reputable company?

I was contacted by the Acquisition editor of Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) to publish my bachelor's thesis as a printed book. Is LAP any good? I have no idea about it; I have just heard that it's a freelance publishing house.
vini
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57
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7 answers

Popular proprietary program or obscure open source substitute for reproducible research?

For a long time, I had been using open source software for my work to make it reproducible. I believed that if I made my code open source and the software to run the code was also open source (or at least free), my research would be reproducible.…
user107
57
votes
7 answers

What to do with spare research topics?

A while back I reached the stage where my ideas for research topics/papers exceeded my capacity to personally work on them. As a PostDoc, I tried to head-hunt students or more junior researchers in my area (or at conferences, etc.) to talk with them…
badroit
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57
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3 answers

Realised afterwards that I committed mild plagiarism in a paper I wrote as an undergraduate, what should I do?

A few years back, while still an undergraduate student, I wrote and submitted a paper to a (low-tier) journal. It was accepted and published. None of the professors in my college were familiar with the subfield in question, so I did it all on my…
feeling-guilty
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2 answers

A journal editor has pretended my referee report actually came from two separate referees

I have encountered another weird situation as a referee. A couple of months ago, I submitted a referee report for an article, asking for major revisions. (This is theoretical physics, in which getting only a single referee report for published…
Buzz
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57
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12 answers

Student continuously makes insulting comments during my lecture - how do I handle him?

I teach in a small college and one student seems to have an obsessive need to make comments aloud during class. Sometimes those comments are funny (he is the class clown) but sometimes they feel abusive and critical when aimed directly at me. …
Radiology Prof
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57
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21 answers

Is "no late work" a common policy?

When I wrote my syllabus for this term, I added the line "Late work will not be accepted." In the past, I just took off a large percentage of the grade per day, but I became tired of the added work of managing papers that students handed to me at…
Village
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57
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11 answers

What to do if assignment is against student's religion?

What is the proper course of action if while teaching an undergraduate or even secondary school course an assignment violates the religious beliefs of a student? For a more concrete example of where this might happen, let us consider an art class…
Juan Sebastian Lozano
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57
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8 answers

Co-author keeps rewriting the article in poor English

I am writing an article with a senior colleague. Although English is not their first language, they keep re-writing the entire article in their own words. I would not normally care, but the way he re-writes it is semi-grammatical and very hard to…
Tom
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57
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6 answers

Is there an inflation in the number of authors per paper?

In most (or at least many) fields of academia, peer-reviewed publications are essential. For a compilation thesis, no papers means no PhD. For tenure, you need papers. To get grants, you need papers. Universities may distribute internal funds…
gerrit
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57
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15 answers

Do I have to include my pronouns in a course outline?

I am a TA in a US school and my professor told me to include my pronouns in the course outline. I personally would rather not for social and religious reasons. Her argument was that I will confuse students because they do not know what my pronouns…
poman
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57
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7 answers

Peer review: Is this "citation tower" a bad practice?

I am peer-reviewing an article "A" and I found something interesting. The authors use a mathematical lemma (which is just an inequality) for which they cite article "B". I have used this inequality before for many years, but noticed that "B" is an…
FeedbackLooper
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57
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7 answers

Can two PhD students publish without involving their supervisors?

I am a theoretical computer science PhD student. My childhood friend (my present roommate) is in the 3rd year of his pure mathematics PhD program. Very recently we both worked on a problem on combinatorial geometry and got some interesting results…
usr032456543
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10 answers

How can a software developer best volunteer to help childhood cancer research?

I have 30 years of professional experience as a software engineer and I'm at the point in my career where I can volunteer lots of time. I have helped with several childhood cancer organizations over the years but mostly was pulled into raising…
Arthur
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