83
votes
Accepted
Why are so many professors' websites out of date?
As an example, my "official professorial" web page is on my college's website. The institution formally controls what's published there, such that any change has to go through multiple ...
- 40.7k
69
votes
Accepted
What's the purpose of writing one's academic biography in the third person?
When I wrote a biography of myself, it was because someone in administration asked me to so they could put it into a prospectus, where there would be lots of biographies in a row all in the same ...
- 924
62
votes
Are lay articles good enough to be the main source of information for PhD research?
I find the entire premise of the question quite odd. First of all, to answer your question: I’d say that in most cases I’ve encountered the answer would be no, you can’t use popular science articles ...
- 28.3k
56
votes
Is it unusual for a math department not to have a mail/web server?
I've found out that the department (or the university?) is doing away with the server and instructing everyone to instead use the G Suite email and Google services that the general student body of the ...
- 41.1k
55
votes
Accepted
Why do universities delete professor's personal web pages after they leave?
In my experience there are two common situations.
The university's provision for web-hosting is centrally managed, and tied to the user's university-wide access credentials. These are themselves tied ...
- 21.7k
52
votes
Why are so many professors' websites out of date?
Various reasons:
Sadly, course content is becoming a walled garden. When I was a student, many professors had a page with their own course notes; today the same course notes are more often hosted on ...
- 47.4k
48
votes
Are lay articles good enough to be the main source of information for PhD research?
From the way you describe, this sounds really strange especially since there is a lot of real research in AI.
I cannot believe you could only use those articles. However, your supervisor is the right ...
- 471
45
votes
Criticizing other people's figures on my webpage
I can't even imagine a situation in which criticizing published academic materials on their merits would be wrong or immoral.
How would it be different from criticizing someone's selection of an ...
- 16.4k
45
votes
Untrue negative comments on RateMyProfessor website
As the comments suggest, just ignore it. You will always have disgruntled students even if you do a great job. Some will blame you for their own shortcomings.
But the best "defense" against such ...
- 399k
44
votes
Accepted
Where should I host a (simple) personal academic webpage?
This doesn't sound like your website will have special requirements that an all-purpose CMS couldn't handle. My advice is to go for one of those "all included" packages by a mainstream ...
43
votes
Why do universities delete professor's personal web pages after they leave?
A university website is not an archive, and the people working at the IT department are not professional archivists. If you want to seriously think about preserving knowledge from people no longer ...
- 46.7k
38
votes
Can I copy text from a scientific paper onto my website without directly referencing?
You must quote copied text and cite it where it is quoted.
Citations at the end are vague and can be misleadingly general. Specifically, it can give the impression that the cited works support all ...
- 1,969
36
votes
Is it too pretentious for an undergraduate student to have their own personal page?
Yes, it is fine, but if you intend to maintain it into the future, keep it professional in all respects.
It isn't likely to be found by many people, however, unless you also make it useful in some way....
- 399k
35
votes
Why are so many professors' websites out of date?
The other answerers have covered most of the reasons. Elaborating on two problem areas that I find personally compelling:
University administrators and history of this technology.
I started ...
- 854
32
votes
How do some researchers have such beautiful figures in publications, while their homepages look simple?
What is good web design depends on the purpose. I am sure Wells Fargo Bank and Google both have access to expert web page designers, but I find the current versions of news.google.com and the Wells ...
- 33.5k
31
votes
What are some typical reasons for a professor to not list their publications on their school website
There are several reasons why this would be the case. The most prominent of which is simply they don't have the time to do it. Most institutions have departmental and faculty websites which contain ...
- 1,191
28
votes
Is it legal to use Sci-Hub in Germany?
The paper of
E. W. Steinhauer - Die Nutzung einer "Schattenbibliothek" im Licht des Urheberrechts Einige Überlegungen am Beispiel von Sci-Hub
says that downloading is probably illegal and viewing ...
- 487
28
votes
Accepted
Is it unusual for a math department not to have a mail/web server?
It is becoming less common for individual departments to operate their own IT infrastructure - things are usually being centralised.
It is also becoming more common for parts of that centralised IT ...
- 11.3k
27
votes
Importance of professional website to search committees
I look for and use the websites of job candidates all the time, and I know many of my colleagues do as well. The reason is that we can find things there that are not on your CV, for example:
Links to ...
- 105k
27
votes
Why are so many professors' websites out of date?
Effort and reward.
Effort: Updating a website takes effort. Maybe a lot of effort (see Daniel's excellent answer), maybe a little less. But not everyone knows how to update their site, and there's no ...
- 5,092
22
votes
What are some typical reasons for a professor to not list their publications on their school website
I want to address another point in your question:
What are some typical reasons why he wouldn't want to list his papers online, especially in the publish or perish culture of academia?
I notice some ...
- 2,562
21
votes
Are lay articles good enough to be the main source of information for PhD research?
Answering for anyone who comes across this question from social science etc. as it is a bit different. We can use popular media sources, but only for certain things.
As someone who uses popular ...
- 5,639
21
votes
Is it too pretentious for an undergraduate student to have their own personal page?
I had a webpage as a grad student where I had a lot of tutorials on how to use the various tools that we used in circuits classes. I also had some of my lectures, and tools. It got about 100k hits a ...
- 639
21
votes
Is arXiv strictly for new stuff?
Assuming the content type and contents are appropriate, submissions that are of scholarly interest are welcomed even if old. Here's an example of a never-published preprint from 1981, that was only ...
- 29.8k
20
votes
How can I add an animation or video to a peer review report without using "unprofessional" sites like imgur or youtube?
It is the responsibility of the journal to provide you with the means to effectively do your job as a reviewer. So, if you need to share an animation file, you can ask the journal for advice on how to ...
- 202k
19
votes
Accepted
Are lay articles good enough to be the main source of information for PhD research?
It sounds to me that there's a confusion between two things:
Motivations of the research: imho it's completely fine to use non-academic sources to justify why the research is being done, especially ...
- 13.6k
18
votes
How do some researchers have such beautiful figures in publications, while their homepages look simple?
Researchers don't have much interest in and time for design (exception: Edward Tufte), otherwise they would have become designers. Luckily, they can rely on the work of others for "beautiful figures" -...
18
votes
Importance of professional website to search committees
The improvement in your chances is marginal but nonzero.
The reason for this is that the first thing people will do is read through your application package. If they can’t find a reason to advance ...
- 175k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible