Can both a grad. student & faculty member cosign a recommendation letter?

Can two people, a professor and a graduate student, sign a recommendation letter? The concern here is that the professor knows little about the student and the graduate student knows all about the student.

My concern here is that if the professor is contacted, he will not be able to provide further information, where as if I was listed as the primary contact: I could.

Answer

Like Noah, I had a situation where two advisors co-signed a letter of recommendation. I should mention that the people reviewing the letter found this an unusual situation—and had claimed that they had not seen that in twenty years of reading recommendation letters. So this is definitely not standard practice. I suspect it would be memorable, but I am not sure it would be actually useful.

However, the difference was that my two co-signers were equal in rank. Your situation has a professor with a graduate student providing most of the insights. I suspect you will need to have the professor adapt the graduate student's comments, and then sign the letter. In the case where feedback is needed, the professor would then need to get the relevant details from the graduate student.

grades - What can a professor do about an exam that was too long for the allotted time, after the students have completed it?

I just finished a midterm exam. It was very easy but I was only able to finish about 3/4 of it. And I rushed through some parts in the final moments.

Talking with other students, there's a consensus that there wasn't enough time. Some of us mentioned this to the professor as we were leaving, and he acknowledged it.

What can the professor do to remedy this situation?

Answer

I found myself in a position similar to your instructor's. I considered and rejected several possibilities:

• Adjusting the curve or grading scale to compensate can be unfair to students who cannot read and understand English quickly, especially if the exam is text-heavy or the students are not native English speakers. The result of this approach is that the exam grade reflects speed of English reading comprehension more than mastery of the course material.


• Dropping the lowest exam grade, or allowing a grade on another assessment to compensate for the midterm exam grade, only works if there are other assessments that cover the material that was on the midterm exam. Otherwise, a student could get an A in the course without having mastered some of the learning objectives.


• Adding another assessment that wasn't on the syllabus, or adjusting other assessments to cover the material that was on the midterm (in violation of the syllabus), isn't fair either, especially to students who have other commitments and need to make plans in advance and schedule their time very carefully.

Ultimately, I decided that the fairest approach is to give students another opportunity (but not in the form of a required assessment) to demonstrate mastery of the course material. Depending on the course format, the size of the class, etc., several possibilities are:

• Allow students to submit a correction to their exam, and earn partial credit for answers that they didn't complete correctly on the exam but did successfully in the correction. There is a possibility that students will receive unauthorized assistance on this correction, though.


• Same as previous suggestion, but have the students explain their corrections in an oral exam. This reduces their ability to benefit from unauthorized assistance, since by questioning the students it is easier to see who really understands what they are saying. However, it is unfair to students who get nervous or have trouble expressing themselves in an oral exam.


• Grade the original exam on a curve, but allow students to take a makeup exam covering the same material, if they feel like their "curved" grade doesn't reflect their knowledge of the material. For students who take the makeup exam, the makeup exam grade replaces the curved exam grade. This may be unfair to students who have limited time to review for and take another exam, possibly because of outside commitments, and have to manage their school and other commitments very carefully.

As you can see, none of these are perfectly fair, either. Depending on the particular circumstances (and possibly with input from the class), an instructor may decide which is the least unfair.

journals - What does "Awaiting Reviewer Scores" mean within the context of a ScholarOne submission system?

I submitted a paper to a Taylor and Francis journal that uses the ScholarOne submission system. The manuscript status has changed from "Under Review" to "Awaiting Reviewer Scores".

What does this change mean? What is the flow chart of the different statuses for a manuscript?

Fear of someone having the same idea and doing the research before you do

I am a young researcher, and recently, I find that the drive to publish and advance my career has created an unhealthy mindset. In particular, I find that when I have a good idea, I am worried that someone will have the same idea, carry out the analysis, and publish before I do. While this worry has greatly speeded up my research, sometimes I feel it is unhealthy, in that my work becomes more sloppy, my analysis is less careful, I check for errors less, and as a result I'm more prone to making mistakes. I think this is an undesirable outcome, because it can potentially reduce the quality of my research results.

However, the tradeoff is real - the more time one spends vetting one's results for accuracy and making improvements large or small, the later one publishes, and the risk of getting preempted is higher. Even if one is still able to publish, not being the first will reduce the impact of your publication.

I am interested in hearing what others think about this, and approaches to dealing with and think about this issue, to have a healthy mindset and research environment.

Answer

I worked on a project during the summer and fall of 2014 that I never published. Someone else beat me to it, publishing a very good and very thorough paper that did everything I had thought to do and more.

Do I regret that time I spent on that project? Not at all. I learned some useful new methods that I have since been able to apply to other ideas. I have a much deeper understanding of this problem than I would have just from reading my competitor's paper, and I'm sure that will come in handy someday. I've taken my version of the idea in a totally different direction, and it's stronger for it.

I suggest you consider the potential consequences of being "scooped":

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  Maybe you'll read their work and discover that although it seems very similar, the details are fundamentally different. Great! You'll cite the work in your own paper. The fact that other people are paying attention to this area shows that it's relevant and helps motivate your paper. Also see: Scoopage

  
  


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  Maybe you'll read their work and discover that it actually does accomplish everything you set out to do. Now you get to be flexible and take your project in a different direction. After you've done some preliminary work in this new direction, get in touch with them and propose a collaboration, which is likely to make your own work even stronger.

  
  

Know that being scooped doesn't necessarily mean everything you have done is wasted. (This article has some more advice on moving on from being scooped.)

Also, there are steps you can take to help avoid being scooped (although you can't guarantee anything, of course):

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  Know your strengths. If you're working in a crowded area, what can you contribute that you already have some expertise in? If you can apply what you already have to something new and interesting, you're ahead of those people who don't already have that expertise.

  
  


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  Read a lot. Identify the people in your field who are doing similar work, talk to them at conferences, generally keep track of what they are working on, so that you're less likely to be caught off guard.

  
  


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  Be open about what you are working on: give talks, poster presentations, chat with people at conferences, etc. about your ongoing work. If everybody in your field knows "LCW is working on X," then people interested in X may come to you for collaboration instead of working independently. When you do publish (a careful, accurate, not-sloppy paper), everyone working in the area will know about it and will probably cite it in their own work.

  
  
  

These are measures that can help alleviate your anxiety and improve the quality of your research.

publications - Is it appropriate to add a co-author at the stage revise & resubmit?

Context

I've submitted a paper - it was sort of a side-product of my main project - to a high ranked journal from an adjacent field. Recently I got a revise & resubmit that was close to a reject, but the editor sounded really interested in the paper being multidisciplinary. I'm suggested to contextualize my research stronger within the journal's field. I feel like getting one of my experienced in that particular field colleagues involved in the revision in order to get the paper accepted.

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The question

If a person helps you a lot during the revision, are you allowed to include him as co-author?

Answer

Absolutely you can add a coauthor in revision, if there is good reason for doing so: in fact, I have recently done so myself on a paper where revision involved some new experiments with the aid of a colleague not previously involved.

Most journals that I know consider authorship changes routine and even explicitly support such changes by asking you to review and, if necessary, modify author lists as part of submitting a revision through their system.

biochemistry - How does botulinum toxin enter the blood stream from the digestive tract?

To my understanding, large polypeptides such as botulinum toxin cannot pass the intestinal lining intact. How, then, can it enter the bloodstream and cause botulism poisoning?

Answer

Transcytosis is a process by which large macromolecules are transported across a cell, such as those in the intestinal epithelium. It is used by many toxins and even whole organisms to enter the body. Botulinum toxin also apparently uses this mechanism. I'm not sure how detailed of an answer you want, but the linked to-review is pretty in-depth.

publications - What do you do when you find yourselves with an unreadable/inaccessible paper?

Since I started my life in Academia, I sometimes found that there are some seminal papers to which I cannot get any access.

Either they are very old, and the journal that published them charges for it, or they are simply not to be found anywhere in the internet. I have to admit I never went to look for the physical copy in the library, but I'm not sure they would have it either.

When I asked a labmate about a reference he had in his paper and I could not find, and that seemed to be ubiquitous in any other paper in the area, he mentioned me he had never read it, but that reviewers usually demand that you should put that seminal reference.

How do you try and solve this problem?

Answer

• Search the web for it: open archives, search engine, authors webpages, whatever (you've probably done that already…)


• Ask the contact author for a copy, which she'll usually be very happy to provide. I regularly get such requests from other researchers in my field, and it feels very good to know that people are actually interested in your work.


• If the contact author doesn't respond, try the senior author, then other authors.


• Try your local library. Look into their database, and also ask the librarian there if the document might be available through loan from other libraries. I've never had much success doing that, but you never know…


• Ask a few colleagues at different institutions if they can get it for free (see this question). If you have friends at large/famous/well-funded US universities (Princeton, Harvard, …), they probably have a more comprehensive access than you.


• If it's a really important paper, pay for it!

Whatever happens, make sure you make a copy for others in your lab/group, and archive it. When I started my PhD, there was a folder (the heavy paper type, not the computer type) labeled “important but hard to find papers” that the group had accumulated along the years. It was the most treasured object in the whole lab.