Which vesrion should I buy academic or student?

I do my Phd work about optimization & feature selection and I need to run the matlab code with 16 algorithms on 25 dataset.. which vesrion should I buy academic or student?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

It sounds as if you would be using toolboxes that are available on either license.

Officially speaking, you would own a Student license (and would be eligible to use it if you were enroll for more post-grad courses.)

Officially speaking, the institution would own an Academic license. If purchased with grants, it would probably be required to be a term license.

Academic licenses have access to more toolboxes.

A student license cannot be used to publish papers; an Academic license can be used to publish papers.

Neither one can be used to earn money in any form.

[John D'Errico]

I assume that as long as you are taking courses as a grad student, then the student license can apply. But once you are into the research phase, then you stop taking courses. Though as I recall, when I was working on my thesis and my coursework was done, then I was still taking a course, called PhD research or something like that. Which means the student license would technically apply. Not sure how other schools do it.

Regardless, since you then need to publish your work as a thesis, the student license would seem to be a problem. And it is frequently the case that grad students will publish papers before they are through. Again, that was the case in my work.

All of that suggests to me the academic license would seem appropriate.

[Walter Roberson]

If I recall correctly, Student license can be used for work needed to complete the degree requirements.

The flip side of that has always been that if you could elect to not take that course or not write that paper, that it wasn't clear that you were eligible to use Student license for it, as one could argue that such things are not required to complete the degree requirements.

The thesis itself... is a degree requirement. And if you only submit to the appropriate department and it formally gets "published" to the university library, then I believe that is within the bounds of Student license. But not publishing a paper to a journal, as that would normally be considered self-promotion.

None the less, I have occasionally encountered PhD programmes in which publishing at least one paper to a journal was a degree requirement -- in which case I think it would be covered by a Student license.

It is a lot easier to just skip around all that uncertainty by using an Academic license if you can get one.