Category: 3. Academia

  • Template response to Elsevier review requests

    Template response to Elsevier review requests

    Dear colleague: Thank you for considering me for providing review services to your esteemed journal. Please note, however, that I am unable to provide these services for free, because your journal is an Elsevier journal. From 2019 to 2023, German researchers were excluded from reading their own and colleagues’ research, if this research was stored…

  • Creative practice for dealing with obnoxious reviewers

    Creative practice for dealing with obnoxious reviewers

    Also, I guess for sticking it to somebody else.

  • Writing recommendation letters using a chat AI

    Writing recommendation letters using a chat AI

    It is the first week of the new year, and I already got three student requests for recommendation letters. Writing recommendation letters is an important duty of a professor, but writing letters for students who took exactly one course with with me ten years ago is stretching this duty. Thankfully, chat AIs can help–or can…

  • The attack of the Ümlauts

    The attack of the Ümlauts

    Umlauts and other diacritics are on the rise in all the places they don’t belong. How else could you explain these photos I took, all within a short time frame?

  • Industry is where the research data is

    Industry is where the research data is

    Over on Facebook, Lionel Briand commented on how hard it is for an academic research group to compete with industrial organizations on research. This is certainly true for hot topics. Right now, with a burning hot AI summer, the research world is split into the have and have-nots (in terms of GPU resources), and this…

  • Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    The most basic academic currency are your publications. While you can’t (or shouldn’t) trade them, they are the way of how other researchers keep track of you and keep score. The higher your score, the higher you are in the pecking order, of course. A publication has two aspects to it that determine its value:…