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Comment by jjjjjj__ | Hacker News Reader

Fraud?

Are you kidding me? I have publication in MICRO with a very famous institution in US. (Top 20).

You know how my professor published his paper in MICRO? Relationship! Relationship! Relationship!

As a graduate student coming from a third world country, I totally lost my hope on the system when I saw a venue as famous as MICRO, is only based on relationship.

Don’t judge me, who can I report it? I am graduate student, means losing my supervisor means losing my visa. I am even posting this via anonymous account (thats how scared I am).

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That's a huge bummer. When I was doing research in physics, I found it easy to get published, even without having a PhD - though it didn't hurt, I think, to be working at a university with a group that had already published in that publication before.

With that said, my PIs didn't assist me at all in preparing, submitting, or defending my research, except to inform me of what to prepare for.

I was really pleased with that whole experience because it felt like there were very distinctly not gatekeepers in that field. It could very easily be that there are not really any professional stakes in the field I studied in, so maybe that makes a difference.

My team was all researchers, not tenured faculty, and we funded ourselves with government grants.

With all that said, it's really helpful to get a different point of view - thanks for sharing this, and sorry for the trouble you experienced, nobody should be put in such an awkward position.

I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science.

And the only reason I left my home country was because I wanted pursue science. (Science is what makes my love beautiful)

But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not give me letter of recommendation).

You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do what you want and try to do honest research if you still feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently. I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more independent and while I still have to put up with professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and independent projects from time to time.

Thank you for those kind words. I really needed it. A honest person to talk too.

You can imagine how much of a shock it is to my believe system to come from literally other side of the world, in hope of doing genuine research, and turns out, it is based on lies.

I ended up dropping out of graduate school, but the advice I was given before entering was this:

Choose your advisor, not your area of focus.

Your advisor single-handedly decides how smoothly your PhD will go, and once you have your PhD, you can decide where your career goes.

Obviously, area of focus does determine a bit of your future, but within that area, optimize for a helpful advisor.

Also, I am sure your university has resources, and ways you could report this behavior, but it's often very difficult to unseat/challenge university faculty, so I totally understand an unwillingness to act. I agree with the other commenter: finish what you started, get out, and focus on doing good work.

> Choose your advisor, not your area of focus.

Absolutely this.

Worked on my master's dissertation with my initial supervisor. He went off to try and find funding for a year or two to get me to come back for PhD.

Turned up, he passed me an ACM magazine article and asked me to have a look and see if anything stuck. Got hooked. He knows I like weird and trippy stuff ;)

I'm in a bit of rubbish situation as he left his position here for greener pastures. Totally fair decision on his part from what I've gathered of the back story

Now supervised by someone else and it's just not the same. Have to go over old ground quite often.

So yeah, choose your supervisor wisely. If they "get you" then they'll get what you're interested in. Then they'll be able to work with you find an interesting area to study.

I have to comment on this. I strongly disagree with the assertion that all professors are dishonest. In my experience the vast majority of academics are honest to a fault (much more so than in many other industries).

I acknowledge that there is a problem, there is a percentage of professors which are abusive, dishonest... The problem is like in many other areas those guys (and it is mostly main) often raise to the top. The other issue is that the way academia is set up (and there are some good reasons for it, e.g. academic freedom) , it's very difficult to detect. You almost always only hear rumors and its very difficult to act on the rumors, especially if nobody wants to come forward (which is a problem) and the rumors are from different institutions.

Another aspect to this is, that there will often be some conflict/disagreement between PhD student and supervisor. This can be for when to finish, when, where and what to publish... That does not always mean there is abuse of power, it's mostly professional disagreements similar to disagreements between an engineer and their manager.

We must navigate very different fields then , because what I'm seeing cannot be "professional disagreement" mistaken for something else. But even so, this is a sterile debate. What is important is that our academic system selects for bad actors in all fields through the "publish or perish" motto. In my field at least, dedication only will rarely propell you to full professorship, because you are competing with those who are dedicated to both research and academic misconduct. Noone becomes important by being nice. A second and important downside specific to medicine is that most academics also do clinical work. Now what do you think happens when the guys running the clinics are hiding in their office most of the time to write papers? Lack of supervision of juniors, in addition to the fact that hiding in your office often does not make you the best clinician.

What's truly sad is that people will often push for being cared for by the big fish professors when it's actually often the worst choice they have.

Don't do this! Try to do the best research you can. When you are make your own way as a researcher you can learn from this bad experience and conduct yourself with more integrity. Once you have a post PhD job what you did during your thesis won't matter, to be honest - 10 years on people will judge you by your more recent publications.

So don't get off track - changing schools/advisers/topics can be very disruptive and you can wind up becoming a tenured ("ten-yeared") graduate student. I was forced to change advisor due to my first one leaving and it took me from 'on track to get out quickly' to 'slowest guy in my year to finish'.

You need your advisor to graduate and get your first academic or research job. After that, it's all up to you. Get through it and you have many more options.

Changing supervisors is possible, but probably not a good idea.

This part I don't understand. You did get it published, thanks to connections and whatever 'broken' reasons. I'd guess you research in the domain that you want. By all means it helps your progress. So much more reason to accomplish your research, get it done so you feel no guilt about the quality of the result.

This indeed is under your control. The faulty system, may it be, is beyond your power, at least at the present standing.

Find a new advisor. Having a body of dishonest work is problematic.

I am a Full Professor. Before we submit a paper, I do my best to make sure our code does what we say it does. We make sure we understand the results as a second check on our implementation. Then we hope we caught all the important bugs that might invalidate our results. Now to be clear, we are not building industrial grade systems and so new benchmarks might expose bugs we don't know about. I am pretty sure that we are not the only group that does this in the field of Programming Languages & Compilers.

I wanted to do theoretical science, after few years at the university, seeing how corrupt the system and the people are, and tired of living in such an environment, I wrapped up after master degree. Best decision of my life.

I recommend getting out as soon as reasonable, then get a real job, do science in your free time or as part of a real job. Better work/life balance, higher self-esteem, putting up with and fixing academia corruption is not your problem anymore. Academia does not have exclusive rights on doing science.

Unfortunately the data science craze has resulted in a lot of these corrupt academic politician types coming into industry, so you definitely don't want to go into "machine learning" if you want to see decency.

You should report it to SIGARCH executive. More information on this blog post

https://www.sigarch.org/other-announcements/joint-investigat...

You really shouldn't, those people are likely corrupt as well and may get you deported.

Maybe a stupid question, but do you know whether it is really true that it only got publisher due to his relationships? I can imagine some professors also have an interest to convince students that they are 100% in their power (or at least that the student needs them). It might well be that you got published for quality and he wasn't really needed but lies/makes a bit of a show so that you will add him as co-author or similar.

I saw this in my university too. It's common in many labs (not all) for all the researchers, even masters students who might've just proofread a thesis to put their names in there.

If you have concrete issues to report, I think it would be best to talk to your department head and probably look for a new advisor. If that's not working, the college.

Dealing with these problems is hard, switching advisors is difficult, but, I feel sticking with a bad advisor is much more difficult long term. Hopefully you can figure something out. I do not envy the position you are in.

I feel sorry for you. And I understand it is a very difficult situation. If you speak up and report it with evidence, yes you should have evidence, it will be really good for the community. And I believe there are good professors will support you and would like to advice you because you're as honest as them.

Are you still a grad student? I already graduated and have the same sentiments as you.

In your opinion was your paper good enough to be in MICRO?

It's kind of sad, but I think even good science needs help to be seen.

Not at all. The idea maybe was good (in long term with solid work). But none of our code were working, or works right now for that matter. Nothing works. And I am not saying they does not work as research codes tend to be ugly. I am saying that in literal sense of the word.

It was totally wishful story glued together with beautiful sentences, published via a serious relationship in MICRO.

There are sentences in that paper which even I don’t or my professor understand. It has been written in that way!

1) Write in a way that nobody understands,

2) use big words, (put them in beautiful sentences, so nobody would have any doubts, particularly in introduction and beginning of the paper and in conclusion).

3) a relationship inside MICRO.

Wow you have published a paper in MICRO now.

It does seem the prevailing writing style of academia is a big part of the problem. Papers a lot of time leave the reader feeling stupid. “Surely there’s wisdom here!?” the reader hopes. Maybe if papers taught the underlying concepts in a clearer, more transparent way we’d get better, more reproducible science

That's really up to the reviewers. I've definitely been told that I need to clarify different parts of my paper in my reviews.

Ultimately, peer review is only as good as your peers. If they won't call out bullshit, then bullshit gets published.

This is also a recent phenomenon. If you go back and read papers from 50 to 80 years back, they are shorter, more concisely written, mostly devoid of confusing language, and they are a pleasure to read, rather than a chore. It also comes from the practice of writing solely in the third person; it wasn't previously common, and authors could freely express their own opinions and thoughts directly without hiding them behind flowery language. With the extreme formalism of today's papers, it's made them sterile and devoid of any human connection.

Today, it seems that using unnecessarily complex language is required to make work seem more impressive than it really is. Perhaps because much of today's published work is not that significant. I've been asked to rephrase perfectly clear and simple sentences solely to use fancier language and currently in vogue vernacular. None of that aids clarity or understanding.

I wonder if the code was not working, how you plot the results?

when i publish my research it definitely helped when my prof is a co-author. He did help a lot though, but I know many who would just attach their names to thing.

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