stagename

Excessive in term of price? I don't know, I consider LOR writers to be such an important part of my academic life, i.e., they helped me with my doctoral application both by reading it and writing me a reference letter, and then for scholarship applications. I know their time is extremely valuable but still they spent a lot of it writing the letters, tailoring them when need and filling out specific forms when some unis requested them. 3 LOR writers at 50$ each makes 150$. I don't think it is excessive. At all. I've never been told it was, and I've been giving them for the last 4-5 years now (master scholarship applications, then uni applications, then doctoral scholarships applications). You can always pick a half-bottle. Then again, it might be a cultural thing. I'd prefer to receive a champagne bottle than a personalized gift that would collect dust on my desk. And did I mention that everybody loves champagne? ;) Point taken for the abstemious.

Champagne. No need to be creative. Everybody loves champagne. A good wine bottle or whisky as an alternative.

Just as a precision, I was talking about recommendations to students. I'm not on the tenure committee. I might have wanted to specify this in my first post, sorry for the confusion.

Latest news was that JCP has been pulled from rankings because of self-cites? I was mostly referring to JCR, JM, MS and JMR. For precision, here the rule is that if you're not publishing in those four journals, don't bother publishing.

Misperception or school specific? That's the ONLY thing we talk about at my school. Our publishing politics is: Not thinking of publishing in a FT journal? Don't publish.

I think we should split the question in 2, as they required different skills and, for me, softwares A -> What do you use to keep track/tag/cite papers when you're writing and/or search for spceific articles on your computer? B -> What do you use to "get the bigger picture" when reading multiple articles? A -> Usually noting. Sometimes Mendeley+Endnote. B -> Already posted about this, but any mindmapping software does a great job helping you clarifying relations beetween authors and articles. Particularly useful for projects where you don't really know where you're heading.

As a PhD student, one of my professors, out of complete naivety, wrote to a very, very, very well-established figure in our field to criticize his views on marketing. This got him an invitation as a visiting student to U of Chicago. I'd say it all depends how the message drafted, are the criticisms appropriate, what is the overall tone of the message, etc. Also, I'd say go for it to write to professors. It's better if you can get introduce by a third party, though. I didn't do that out of "fear" when I was applying to different programs, but now that I know a good number of professors, I believe most of them would reply to you. Make it concise and direct, though. Everybody lacks time, it seems. Also, I'd say this might be field-dependent. My field is pretty open and filled with nice people =) To the poster who said that professors did not have a word in the choosing of students, I'd say this is highly dependent on the university you're at. Most professors I know, here and at other universities, usually have the final word when it comes to getting students, or get students they want to work with.

There are a couple of papers about rankings. The one I prefer states that the ranking of your school does have an influence on your propensity to get a good job. Let's say that the normal relationship between getting a job (y) and different factors (e.g., pubs (x), conference proceedings (z), who is your advisor (u), then your university's rank would have 2 roles: first, it acts as a booster, (eg. "+2") and second, as a catalyst (e.g., 2*). So let's say the equation for someone coming from a normal university would be: y = x + z + u, then someone coming from a highly ranked one would be y = 2(x + z + u) + 2. Math is far from being a well-developed ability for me, so I hope this makes sense. If you want further info, use the search function this has been talked about again and again (and again and again and aga...)

A zoo.

I second possible_phd. Since your job prospects are based on your output in term of pubs, it's quite a bad decision to try and do your PhD as fast as you can, since it will greatly restrict your capacity to publish papers. MBA courses and PhD courses are completely different, in my opinion.

I disagree very much with this. I forgot the exact figure, but about 5% of marketing scholars are published in top journals. Of those 5%, about 5% have 2 or more articles. This 0.25% drives the field. Some scholars consistently publish top material. The issue is not crappy research, it's crappy researchers. This "I would only respect someone who says he is doing a PhD for the job security, teaching interest or the money. Or to escape their poor country etc." might point to why.

Thanks! Can you tell the last time I opened MS was in 2010? =) You don't even need to! There you go: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/zombies/

It is. But the sweats come from the methods, not the difficulty of publishing. Modeling. Brrrrr. =) @ffsmaster: Hummm?

Brrrrrr. I get cold sweat whenever somebody mentions MrkS. ;P

If you're in marketing, just check out the docsig's survey who went where.