Impromptu Invited Talk

Imagine this general scenario:

You are at (or about to go to) a conference or workshop or similar, and one of the organizers tells you that a slot has unexpectedly opened up for someone to give a talk. S/he invites you to give this talk, and you do.

The question (from a reader):

Can you list this as an invited talk on your CV?

I have given a couple of these impromptu invited talks, and I have not listed them on my CV. But then, I am old and don't need to document everything like early-career faculty need to do.

So I asked myself: If it mattered more to me, would I include such a talk on my CV, and if so, how would I indicate it? Would I flag it as an invited talk? Would I specify somehow that it was an informal invited talk?

And I had no obvious answer for myself, hence this post to ask readers what they have done, if anything, about such situations.

When I was talking to myself about this (silently, in this particular case), I considered the pros and cons of listing informal invited talks on a CV, and came up with this:

Pro:

Even if the invitation was of the last-minute sort, it means that someone thought you had something interesting to say, and therefore listing the talk on your CV recognizes this fact.

You gave the talk. You should get some kind of documented credit for it.

For an early-career academic, invited talks are important for showing that you are respected and visible in your field. Of course, you may become even more visible and respected by giving such a talk, and perhaps that is 'credit' enough, but it can also be important to have such talks listed on a CV (because most people who review your CV will not have been at your talk).

Con:

It's a bit misleading to list an informal invite as if it were a formal invitation. A cynical person might interpret an impromptu invite as "They couldn't get the person they really wanted, so, out of desperation, they got someone else to fill the time."

If you simply list an informal invited talk on your CV with no further explanation and if someone took the time to search the relevant conference program and saw that you were not listed as giving an official invited talk, that could look bad. But I can't think of a good way to designate informal invites on a CV.


If you forced me to choose, I am leaning towards leaving informal invited talks off the CV and being content with the cosmic credit related to having been invited (even at the last minute) and having the opportunity to speak about your work.

If you think that the person who invited you is a fan of your work, that might be a good person to keep in mind for future external letter-writing (e.g., at tenure evaluation time). Then that person might describe what happened and mention the incident as an example of the esteem in which you are held. That's all quite hypothetical and less concrete than listing something on a CV, but it's nevertheless potentially more important (and accurate).

This all might seem like a detail, and some might say: If you have to worry about this level of trivia on your CV, you're probably in trouble.. but I disagree. CVs are scrutinized at various important stages of a faculty member's career. Many times, I have been one of the scrutinizers, and I know how important it is that CVs are complete, accurate, and unambiguous in their presentation of the essential elements of a professor's work.

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McApplication

A reader is troubled by the increasing use of impersonal online application systems for faculty positions, and finds the process disappointing, given the momentousness of the occasion, and would even prefer to mail a paper application (although correctly recognizes that doing so would likely result in an overworked staff person having to scan and compile the document into a pdf for the committee).

For me -- i.e., someone who got her first academic jobs in the Paper Era -- there was nothing particularly satisfying about sending off a physical application, including a CV printed in a carefully-chosen font on heavy weight, watermarked, acid-free, ivory linen paper with matching envelope. The result is the same. You get back a form letter or e-mail, either a week later or seconds later, acknowledging receipt of your application. Then you wait and hope that rumors will trickle back to you that your letter writers have been asked to write letters. And then you wait some more etc. The main events on the application trail are the same, even if the first step has changed in form.

I have no experience with applying for a job via an online system, but, although I can imagine that this process can be a bit 'dehumanizing', I think overall I would enjoy the convenience of this type of submission process. As someone who has used online application systems to hire postdocs and temporary staff, and who has been on faculty hiring committees that used these systems, I definitely appreciate the convenience.

I would much rather read applications as pdf files on my laptop wherever and whenever I want, instead of spending many hours in a small room rifling through files. I also like the convenience of having all the relevant files in the same format in an organized way. Imagine reading A LOT of these files. The elegance of someone's choice of paper or font for a printed CV is completely lost on a reader who has to read many of these things.

Seven hours into a marathon application-reading and discussing session today, what was left of my brain wondered which was more exhausting -- reading applications or grading. Even if I were lucid, I probably couldn't decide that right now.

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Dear Search Committee

Last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, there was an advice column that provided a how-to guide to writing a cover letter for applications for faculty positions. In this particular case, the focus was on 2-year colleges, institutions with which I have no direct experience. I have friends, colleagues, and former students who teach at such institutions, but have never worked at (or applied to work at) a 2-year college.

Perhaps this reflects my ignorance, but I was dismayed at some of the advice about writing cover letters. Some of it was excellent and practical -- don't emphasize your research when applying for a teaching position, do your homework about the institution, provide the most relevant information about your background etc. All of that is good.

This type of advice is what filled me with dismay:

Be sure to address the cover letter to a specific individual by name, even if no individual is named in the job ad or application instructions. Apparently, certain people, who are nameless, want candidates to seek out their identities so that the cover letter can be addressed to "Dear Ronald Zook" instead of "Dear Search Committee". If this information is not available on any webpage, applicants are supposed to make some phone calls.

Why do I hate this advice? I do not like the fact that someone on a hiring committee would really care about such a trivial issue. If you want the letter addressed to you by name, put your name somewhere prominent; don't play games. If there is an administrative reason why your name is not listed anywhere, then don't make it an issue. And why should the letter exclude the other members of the committee and be addressed only to you, the head of the committee? Does the greeting really affect your impression of a candidate? Is that reasonable? OK, maybe if the greeting is something like the e-mail we get from some of our students (e.g., Yo! Proff! or Hey!), maybe that would be unprofessional, but "Dear Search Committee" should not be a reason to start forming a negative impression of a candidate. "

Ask for an interview. I had no idea it was so easy. Actually, it seems that asking for an interview doesn't necessarily get you the interview, but not asking for one is apparently bad. How strange. I personally would find it obnoxious and pointless for someone to write in a cover letter (as advised in the column in question): "May I travel to [name the city] to discuss this position with you in person?". This would be seen as deeply strange in a cover letter to my department. Is there really such a difference between 2-year and 4-year institutions? I could be very wrong, but I would have thought that both get large numbers of applications for most positions and that this particular approach would not be fruitful. When someone applies to my institution, I assume they want the job unless there is other information that shows this is not the case.

I have saved the two weirdest ones for last:

Below your signature and printed name, type the word "Enclosures". Otherwise, the idiot search committee members may not know that you have included your CV and other application materials.

Print the letter in black ink on good-quality white or ivory paper. Paper? What is that?

I do not mean to denigrate this well-meaning writer who is seeking to help applicants, but I am bothered by the fact that some of the cover letter advice implies that hiring committees focus on minutiae and that an application can be downgraded by things that have nothing to do with the applicant's qualifications or degree of interest in the job. Applicants should not have to worry that committees are mulling over their choice of font or whether they get the greeting or sign-off words exactly right for the unknown preferences of the unknown persons who will be reading the application.

In my experience with hiring committees, it does not work that way. We look at the substance of the application, we make allowances for inexperienced applicants, and we expect there to be wide variation in the approach applicants take to their cover letter, from terse but informative to long, pleading, and repetitious.

Of course we want the cover letter to be articulate and useful, but beyond that, an applicant can go wild and use a sans serif font, sign off with "Warmest regards" instead of "Sincerely", and address us impersonally. Many (most?) of us won't notice, won't care, or will be able to deal with it without developing a deep loathing of the applicant. Just don't ask for an interview.

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Google Scholar v. Web of Science

From the comments to yesterday's post:

ISI/Web of Science (WoS) is " better than Google Scholar by an order of magnitude."

"..my citations are definitely higher on Scopus than on WoS."

"Web of Science has a few errors in my records, though not nearly as bad as Google Scholar.."

"I prefer Google Scholar.. My prediction is that WOS will decline in popularity over time unless it makes drastic changes."

OK, so let's do the numbers.

I compared citation data in Google Scholar and Web of Science for 25 of my publications. (I did not search in Scopus).

I looked at a range of publications in terms of publication date, my place in the authorship order, and type of publication. For 18 of the 25 publications, Web of Science counted more citations, so I definitely like WoS better. For these 18, Google Scholar's citation count ranged between 0-92% of the citations in WoS; the average was 62%.

For 3 of the 25, Google Scholar counted the same number as WoS, and for 4 others Google Scholar counted more citations, although typically only slightly more than WoS (84-92%). There aren't enough data for me to conclude anything systematic based on these small numbers, but I was intrigued by the fact that 2 of the publications that had a higher citation count in GS than in WoS were in topics outside my primary research field.

The publications for which Google Scholar did a significantly worse job of finding citations than WoS --i.e., finding <40% of the citations listed in WoS -- were typically in my oldest publications and in my most recent publications, although there is one paper published in 2002 in a mainstream journal for which GS found <40% of the citations listed in WoS.

These results are not surprising; it is not news that these sites are not perfect at counting citations.

These databases are very useful for doing literature searches, and should be used primarily for this purpose rather than as key data in decision-making about jobs, promotions, and awards. Nevertheless, I have been on committees in which various members exclusively used one or the other of these sites for looking up the publication records of applicants/nominees, and I have seen citation numbers listed in many CVs and in letters of recommendation (typically without reference to which citation index was used to determine those numbers).

To some extent, this is OK. A very high number of citations is impressive, whether it is 250 or 320. For some of my papers with more modest numbers of citations, though, I might as well just make up a number between 5 and 50 than rely on the count in either Google Scholar or Web of Science.

Even so, for my field (or subfield) of the physical sciences, Web of Science is definitely "better" at counting citations for most publications. For those of you who prefer GS to WoS, perhaps you could leave a comment indicating your field. Are there particular fields for which GS is better at finding citations?

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Seeking Perfection

Is your citation record in Web of Science (or the moral equivalent) perfectly correct? Or are there errors?

If there are errors, are they insignificant (not worth correcting) or significant?

If there are significant errors, have you done anything about it? (Or will you?) It is possible to request a data correction using a form provided on the Web of Science website.

There is one particular paper of mine that is particularly prone to being cited in various and sundry ways. In fact, the citations for this paper are strewn about in so many different apparent titles in my citation report that, were the errors to be fixed and the citations combined, my h-index would increase (gasp). There are other errors as well, mostly because authors citing my work used an incorrect volume, page, or year, but most of these errors do not affect my h-index.

Should I try to fix the errors, or, at least, the one that would affect my h-index? Would you, if you were (or are) in this same situation?

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If I Have to Stare at One More CV This Year..

This year I somehow I ended up on four (4) committees that review Other Faculty and their research ideas, accomplishments, and/or productivity. This seems excessive to me, but there are at least 2 explanations for this turn of events:

1. The usual reason for senior FSPs: There are so few female full professors in the physical sciences-engineering-math that we get called on quite a lot to serve on certain committees. Sometimes I just say no because I don't have the time (or interest), but sometimes I feel that it is important to say yes. This accounts for one of the committees this year.

2. There is a very nice, competent, hard-working, smart, and generally awesome staff person in charge of organizing some of these committees, and whenever she asks me to serve on a committee, I find that I can't say no. This accounts for 2 of the committees this year.

I have no explanation for the 4th committee, other than I felt that I should do it so that I had a voice in some things about which I would probably otherwise have complained.

I sort of followed my "conservation of committee mass" rule of quitting a committee if I add a new committee. The only one I added without quitting another was the least time-consuming of the four.

In none of these cases, when asked to be on one of these committees (or when I agreed to be nominated for an elected position), did I think "OK, but I really don't want to be on that awful time-wasting committee". I was lucky in that, I guess. I felt that all these committees were in some way worthwhile.

I am pretty sure that I would have said nyet if asked to be a committee that I felt a great reluctance to join because I thought it would be even more boring than most committee assignments or because I didn't think it was a good use of my time. I suppose that is a selfish, but any guilt I might feel is completely assuaged by my awareness of how much time I devote to institutional service.

When asked to be on a committee, do your criteria for accepting vs. declining to be on the committee depend on your prediction of whether you would find the committee interesting and/or a good use of your time, or does your sense of duty and academic citizenship triumph over such selfish concerns?

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Title X

As I've mentioned before, owing to my being on various committees within and beyond the university, and to my being sent promotion/tenure dossiers for external review, in a typical year I gaze at many CVs from faculty and proto-faculty of all ranks in many different academic disciplines. In the past year, in which I was not on a hiring committee (thereby much reducing my CV-gazing responsibilities), I have still managed to end up evaluating ~50 faculty CVs.

I find CVs fascinating, especially in terms of how they are constructed: what is included, what is not included, the order of items, and so on.

Some items are of course fairly standard, even in very different academic disciplines. Other items are much more free-form, even within a single academic discipline. It's the latter that are interesting to me.

Today's subject: Why/whether individuals should list invited talk titles on a CV. These are the titles of talks given at a university or at a government or private research lab, not the titles of invited conference presentations.

This very issue was the subject of recent discussion by some of my colleagues. I don't believe that anyone's future hangs on whether talk titles are or are not included in a CV, but it interested me that some of my colleagues had rather strong opinions about this issue.

Some people put titles of invited (non-conference) talks on their CV, some don't. Is the title of the talk useful information? Are there any pitfalls to including the title? Does it matter?

Although I vary the level of detail of my CV depending on the purpose for which it is being examined, I don't typically include talk titles, even in the most detailed version of my CV.

Note: Even though I am a full professor, I have to keep my CV up to date. Submitting an updated CV is part of the review of tenured faculty by my department/university and I get occasional requests for my CV for random reasons. It is also easier to construct the abbreviated CVs needed for proposals if you have an updated version from which you can extract the necessary information.

Why don't I include talk titles on my CV? There are at least three reasons:

1 - I don't think it is important information to include in a CV.

2 - I am lazy and don't keep track of talk titles. Sometimes I provide a talk title far in advance of the talk and then I forget what the title is and I have to dig through my e-mail inbox or check the website of the department I will be visiting so that I prepare a talk that is at least somewhat related to the title I selected months in advance. And I certainly don't immediately type the title into my CV and then I don't make the effort to go back later and figure out what it was. If I thought it was important to keep better track of talk titles, I would try to do it, but I don't think it is all that important.

3 - I tend to give a short, general title that will cover a range of possible topics that I will select when I prepare the talk just before my visit. This becomes more difficult to do when an abstract is also requested along with the title, but I can still be sufficiently general to give myself the flexibility to talk about what seems most interesting when the scheduled talk day rolls around. In general, though, the titles for many of my talks might be the same or similar, but this doesn't accurately reflect the fact that the actual content varied somewhat or that I put a lot of effort into creating a talk appropriate for each place/audience. What looks like the same talks, based only on the title, might have been quite different talks. The titles would therefore be somewhat misleading if seen in a list.

Does it matter? In fact, that second point brings me to a potential pitfall that I recently encountered, much to my surprise. If you list talk titles in your CV and it turns out that you gave talks with the exact same title at, say, 8 different places, some readers of the CV will assume that you gave the exact same talk at those 8 different places and will be less impressed than if you gave different talks.

Maybe you did give the same talk; maybe you didn't. Either way, how does this compare to someone who gave 8 talks with different titles (albeit possibly on related topics)? In my experience, the latter is viewed as more impressive.

I personally don't have such a negative opinion about giving the same talk at many places. At least the person is being invited to many places to give a talk. So what if he/she didn't have 8 different talk titles? And anyone who has given a talk many times (e.g. as a lecturer for a professional organization, or for interview talks) knows how much work it is to give the same talk over and over.

If you must include the talk titles on your CV because it is the tradition in your field or because someone else with strong opinions about CVs thinks that talk titles are important to include, let me just say that I hope that your talk title isn't a yes or no question.

In my opinion, it is much more important to include the date of the talk, even if only by year, and of course the place. Many reviewers-of-CVs want to see the pattern of talks relative to time: Were all the talks clustered in one short time span? Have you given any talks lately? Are you continuously in demand as a speaker, or did you stop having interesting things to say a century ago? This is important information; adding the talk title may obscure more than it illuminates.

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Update to my updated CV:

Last month I showed how I could organize the invited talk list part of the CV according to certain categories, but after a recent incident, I need to add a new category: Talks that I gave right after being in a minor car accident that was entirely the fault of a 'distracted' driver who somehow hasn't yet heard the news that texting-while-driving is dangerous and who hit the back of my car, which was stopped at a stop sign as I was en route to give a public lecture one evening, and whose profuse apologies made while waving an iPhone in my face did nothing to lessen the head/neck ache I had while giving the talk. I think the talk was OK but it was not as good as it could/should have been.

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Mentor v. Supervisor

For various reasons related to my serving on an insane number of committees that review an insane number of CVs from faculty in many different academic disciplines, I see a lot of different CVs that vary considerably in their content and style.

Fortunately, most such committees have diverse membership so that there is almost always someone who can explain certain 'cultural' differences in CVs.

Sometimes, however, no one knows what to make of certain elements of a CV. For example, lately I have been wondering whether there is a difference in meaning as to whether someone "mentors" or "supervises" a postdoc.

Are these synonyms? If so, presumably the word "mentor" is chosen to indicate that the faculty-postdoc interactions involved a range of activities such as one might encounter in the new NSF-mandated postdoc mentoring statement that accompanies proposals that include funding for postdocs?

Or does "mentoring" mean that someone worked with a postdoc who may have acquired their own funding, whereas "supervised" means that the faculty got the funding for an idea they developed in a proposal? In this case, could "mentoring" include a broad range of levels of interaction, from "I gave the postdoc some advice from time to time" to "I was the primary faculty member interacting with this postdoc"?

What started me wondering about this was a CV that involved the "mentoring" of some postdocs, but the "supervising" of others. Without additional information, it's difficult to know what that means. It seems likely that "mentoring" in this case means interacting with postdocs who are funded by some source other than the faculty member's grants, whereas "supervising" means that the faculty member was more involved in the hiring of the postdoc for a particular project.

But I'm not sure. Has anyone used these terms, either as synonyms or as distinct terms implying different types of interaction?

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My Revised CV

Based on the comments to yesterday's post, I have decided to revise the Invited Talks part of my CV as follows:

Selected Talks (2006-present)

key to symbols: * = inferior A/V equipment and/or lecture hall design; + = audiences that interrupt a lot during talks; $ = European university that hands you an envelope of cash after your talk; # = university where I got food poisoning at dinner with my faculty hosts the night before my talk

Talks that were just supposed to be talks but that turned out to be stealth interviews

University of J, 10/09
* University of O, 3/08
B University, 4/07

Talks at universities where I have a friend from grad school

BFF State, 1/07
+ Z Tech, 4/06

Talks that I gave because I was a so-called distinguished lecturer for an organization and so I didn't have any choice in where I gave the talks and might not otherwise have gone to speak at these places but ended up having a really good time

*# University of ZZZ, 3/06
Y State University, 3/06
* NW Y State University, 3/06
* NW Central Y State University, 3/06
Y College, 3/06
D State University, 3/06

Talks at the university where my collaborator Bob works

University of Bob, 11/08

Talks at universities to which I applied for jobs when I was feeling angry with my current institution

University of A, 3/07
University of N, 3/07
University of G, 2/07
University of R, 11/06

Talks that were at a university in my home state but that had nothing to do with my being from that state despite what my mother thinks

University of X

Talks at universities that have no women faculty in my field and that wanted an FSP to come and show their students and postdocs that such things exist

University of Y, 4/09
University of YY, 2/08
+ MSP State, 11/07

Talks that were totally random invitations by universities that were not considering me for a job and that apparently just wanted to hear what I had to say about my research and didn't ask me to do a pizza mentoring lunch with the female students/postdocs

* University of F, 11/09
+ University of S, 4/08
$ University of P, 4/07

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CV Q

Today: A CV question

On CVs, it is common to include a list of invited talks given at other universities, research labs, professional organizations, or companies. Ideally the list will also include the date of each talk. I don't find the talk title to be particularly useful, but some people include these.

It has come to my attention that there is a divergence of opinion on the following issue related to the Listing of the Talks:

Should you include interview talks? You don't have to indicate them as such of course, but should you even list them with other invited talks?

Some of my colleagues think this is unethical, but I don't see a problem. An invited talk is an indication that a place is interested in your research, whether it be just for a visit or for consideration for hiring. Why not list the places that invited you to give talks, for whatever reason? Am I missing something re. the ethics of this?

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