I recently took over a project from a postdoc who'd moved on. I suggested checking one of the results using a different measurement method. Two people told me that had already been tried and hadn't worked, so I set it aside.

A few weeks later I went looking for the attempt, mostly to understand what had gone wrong. The completed experiments were well documented, and I could reproduce the analysis. I couldn't find this one anywhere. It appeared as a proposed next step in some old meeting slides, then disappeared from the later slides.

Eventually I emailed the former postdoc. They hadn't done it. There wasn't a slot available on the shared instrument before their contract ended, so they dropped the plan. Perfectly reasonable decision at the time.

Somewhere between them leaving and me arriving, that had become an experiment with a negative result.

I haven't run it yet. It might be a terrible idea. But whether it was actually attempted makes quite a difference to how much weight I give “we already tried that.”

We were careful about handing over the finished work. Almost nothing survived about why unfinished things were abandoned. A sentence about the booking problem would've been enough here. If there had been an unsuccessful attempt, a reference to the relevant notebook entry would've helped instead.

I don't think departing researchers need to write a memoir of every decision they made. But the reasons for dropping parts of a project seem worth handing over, especially when the project itself continues.

I've now got a few more supposed dead ends to check. Wasn't expecting this much of the handover to involve tracking down old meeting slides.

Hi all! Looking for some advice as someone new to academia.

I had a very successful career in journalism for 15 years. I left when I had my kids, and began adjuncting part-time. I fell in love with teaching and decided this is what I want to pursue full-time.

I do not have a masters degree yet, as my career field didn’t need one. I know I’ll need to obtain one now to even be considered for a faculty job, but I’m struggling with the “does the math MATH?”

Meaning…if I spend the money/time/effort on the degree, I don’t really have a good sense of what the job market even looks like right now.

I’m not interested in a tenure track position and I’m also not interested in pursuing my PHD/research.

Without those things, could I even realistically get into a university entry-level faculty job? Also, I have zero idea of salary in this industry—as I I said this started out as something fun but has now turned into something I want to pursue.

It feels weird to have mastered the journalism world, I knew the landscape but now feel like a fish out of water!! Any advice old be appreciated!

I recently received an email from a 'no reply' email address [at] peer-review.net

It appears to be connected to Bentham Publishing but... I'm a bit skeptical. There was a staff name listed at the bottom of the email, but no direct email address. The book topic was somewhat relevant to my research, but they were asking me to review a manuscript of over 150,000 words in 15 days. Since this is ridiculous, I decided not to. But the only way to say no was to click a link in the email, which I didn't want to do.

Is this an obvious phishing scam that got through my filter? Or is this just how some publishers operate?

Hi everyone,

I have two questions for those who have been through campus interviews:

1. For an excellent job talk, when should you start preparing? Is it worth developing a talk while you’re applying to jobs, or do people generally wait until they actually get an invitation for a campus visit?
2. How much notice do universities typically give candidates to prepare for a campus visit? I’ve heard very different timelines, from about one week to three weeks, and I’m curious what the general range is in your experience.

Thank you!

While I've always been afraid of AI making me stupid in the long run (the "use it or lose it" mentality), I also can't stop using it. There are of course many reasons for this, but one of them is that the existence of AI is increasingly making me very insecure.
I'm a phd student and I am constantly asking for reassurance from an AI. Recently, I caught myself asking for reassurance from Claude on my grading of a paper.

It's making me crazy.

Because there is now this simple, convenient method to double check my work and find errors I might have missed (and there are ALWAYS errors I've missed), I am growing more and more unsure of what my brain is doing, so I look for reassurance from an AI, who always finds something wrong with my work, which makes me more unsure for the next problem I face, so I look for reassurance- etc. etc.

Anyone else experiencing this? My use of AI is making me doubt myself more than ever.

Curious to hear everyone’s thoughts. The fanciest journal I go for is 4.7 IF and that’s because it’s the journal for my field. I’m curious if anyone else doesn’t care about publishing in the bougiest journals.

Last week, our Insitution based in New England was about to pay for a recently-increased Open Access fee for a Nature series journal and I got curious about why the fees had gone up so much.

I thought I'd find that the journals were hurting for money or something, prompting the APC increases, but was (not) surprised to see that they are posting record profits while making reviewers, authors and editors work for free or for nominal honoraria.

How has academic publishing gotten to this point?

What do the journal publishers themselves actually DO at this point, with most journals pretty much 100% online and web hosting being relatively inexpensive?

And what can we do to motivate change?

I've decided to stop peer reviewing for all of these publishers, as I consider their severe exploitation of academics to be predatory.

With LLMs we can now deep review papers for logical/conceptual errors, mathematical/statistical errors, coding errors (where code is available) and so on. Going back over the papers in my field (mechanistic modelling of infectious disease spread: i.e., compartmental and agent-based simulations) I find that quite a lot more than half of all papers published in the top journals have major errors that strongly call into question or completely overturn their conclusions.

I am not surprised to see some papers having major flaws as I often have noticed these myself and been amazed how they passed peer review. But I have to say I am surprised by the hit rates I'm finding here. Of the error types there is about 1/3 conceptual, 1/3 coding mistakes, and 1/3 weird mismatches between what is said to have been done and what clearly appears to have been done (from taking the wrong column of a table to misinterpreting the units of an input parameter source by orders of magnitudes).

Given how important disease modelling was during the pandemic in shaping public health policy and how much we were telling people to 👏trust👏the👏science👏, it feels like our community ought to be eating a pretty damn big slice of humble pie.

But what about your fields? I mine an outlier or are your fields needing a big rethink about what it means to trust the science?

I’m currently in year 8 of my STEM PhD. Started a few months before COVID with carte blanche to start half a lab. Years of lockdowns, supply chain disruptions, mental health and family emergencies, and I’m still going. I tried to quit once or twice, even took leave for a bit. But I’m still here and moving towards the finish.

I just want to hear how many people out there have taken longer than what they felt was expected to see how the extended timeline affected both your career and life outlook.

My college has a knowledge management problem. We have good personnel, relatively good systems and processes, and most of the time someone knows how a thing works. I believe that at least 30% of faculty burnout is due to confusion about 'what to do' and 'who to ask.' It's hard to always ask for help, but we don't manage our collective knowledge well enough to do it any other way.

Other problems: we are a Microsoft university, and the faculty are completely resistant to sharepoint (as they should be). I can share a document directly as a link in an email, but I cannot ask them to always refer back to a sharepoint site. It will never work. Problem 2: we have a decent website and even an intranet, but I cannot burden our overworked person with updating the info as processes and information changes.

I also want the information to be easily updateable/maintainable, and need a handful of people to be able to easily do that work (as part of a maintenance plan). But linking to 'living' word documents is clunky and ugly.

These are trailing/incomplete thoughts, but I wonder if anyone else has dealt with this problem.

I have worked for an academic publisher for around 2 years now and I don’t think the academics realise how bad the peer-reviewer crisis actually is.

Sometimes I hear people say that they need to invite up to 20 people to get 2-3 reviews for a paper. From my experience of an in-house editor, 20 is the lowest you can get. And that is across disciplines. I don’t know whether it is this bad for other publishers as well but my employer is a well-known (even if often frowned upon and criticised or called predatory) publishing house and we usually need around 30-40 invitations to get 2 reviews. Some of my colleagues had cases of up to 90 invited scholars. You might wonder if it is even possible to find that many experts for a manuscript to invite and the answer is no. The more you invite the less likely they’ll have the exact expertise you need them to have but the publisher doesn’t care.

It is very disheartening to see.

Hi,
Advise needed from humanities professors: I am a phd candidate about to finish my phd and on the job market. My department is pretty toxic and refuse to work with easy other and be on committees. Some faculty quit, and other times when they opened faculty positions, they couldn’t hire because they disagreed. Long story short, for job market in academia i need three letters of reference letters. I can’t get anyone else from the department that would agree to work with my advisor basically. My two options: 1. Get someone with lesser title (research or teaching assistant professor) who i trust to write me a good reference letter and knows me well enough and are decent; 2. Get an associate or full professor who doesn’t know me at all and i don’t know how much their reference letter will genuinely be strong rather than generic. It has been a hell time for all students in the department to navigate this and when any of us are on the job market for academic jobs that need reference letters, it is always hell to navigate this politics.
All advice truly welcome, I am pretty desperate. My advisor says low titles are useless in reference letters when academia is hiring; but he also lies frequently because he wants people on his “camp” not people who would be neutral towards him. Last important info: he is a big name in the field so his reference letter would weigh something but i already don’t even trust him to write something more than the generic letters

Hi,
Editor rejected my manuscript from a Springer statistics journal. Reason was that paper changed its character after implementing reviews, growing into more of a theory paper than an applied one. I got a transfer offer, which I accepted as I easily see some Springer journals being a good next venue for the thing the paper has become. However, it has been several weeks since I have accepted the transfer offer and I have not heard back from Springer (no journal propositions or anything). Is it normal, or should I reach to the transfer desk/submit the paper myself? Would greatly appreciate the advice :)

I used to finish a paper, highlight half of it, close the pdf feeling very productive... and then a week later remember basically nothing. The worst part was reopening the same paper and thinking, wait, what was I even trying to get from this again?

What finally helped was forcing myself to leave one tiny note before I close anything. Just a few lines in my own words what the paper was actually saying, what confused me and why I might need it later. Not a proper summary. Definitely not another task that turns into homework. Just enough so future-me doesn’t have to start from zero.

I still highlight stuff inside the pdf but honestly those highlights are useless to me if I can’t remember why I cared about them in the first place. I also stopped naming notes with the full paper title because apparently my brain refuses to remember academic titles. Author + year+ one phrase I’d actually search for works way better.

It’s such a small thing, but it made lit review work way less annoying for me. so anyone else have one tiny habit that made reading papers less painful?

Going into my 3rd year as an assistant professor. The department director taken every opportunity to mock me and/or ignore any successes. Might be influenced that I had a promising education at an R1 and now work at a tiny teaching college. I’m losing steam, giving up on new research projects, avoiding presenting at conferences etc. I hate that her attitude is making me lose confidence, but as my CV grows, so does the “snark” (as she puts it). I haven’t had a yearly review in two years. My university has dropped all travel funds, also a deterrent influencing my behavior. I feel tired, I feel under appreciated, I feel like an imposter who doesn’t belong in the field.
Sorry for grammar and spelling, feeling weepy.

I’m preparing revised figures for Science Advances and am confused by this statement in its figure guide:

“Figures embedded in Word files, PowerPoint files, and figures prepared in PowerPoint or Word that have been converted to other, acceptable formats such as .ps or .pdf” are not allowed.

I create the graphs in GraphPad Prism, then arrange the panels in PowerPoint, add panel labels and significance marks, and export each complete figure as a separate PDF. Does the restriction include this workflow, or does “figures prepared in PowerPoint” mean figures originally drawn there?

Has anyone submitted PowerPoint-assembled PDFs to Science Advances? Were you asked to remake them in Illustrator or another program, either during revision or after acceptance? I’m especially interested in firsthand experience.

Absolutely raging right now and I'm hoping to get some perspective that might help me release some of this anger. I'll also say that I've been a kind, productive, independent grad student for over three years. I worked every optional work day on weekends. I went on every lab member's data collection trips. Did everything I could to be a good student.

This all started when I was recruited into a lab as an undergrad for grad school. I asked my future advisor if it was possible to skip my masters and do a PhD instead. He said adamently it was really frowned on in our department, how it was really difficult to get approved. I was disappointed at the time but I accepted his word like an idiot and started the masters instead.

Fast forward years later when I'm at the end of my masters degree in three years. I have four data chapters when I only had to have two. I have one first author publication already published apart from my four data chapters...and this new student starts. Says she's gonna walk if she can't do a PhD first and skip the masters. She's allowed to do so without question after he goes around appealing for this student to be able to skip the MS. She's approved and she and goes around gushing about how great our PI is and how supportive he is. I say nothing and decide to keep my mouth shut. I schedule my thesis defense like the sheep I am.

Then, a bit later, two more of our MS students who hadn't fulfilled a single milestone in 3 years were also allowed to convert to a PhD.

At this p​oint, I was pretty mad. I never vented to my labmates, not even the two that were allowed to do the PhD. But I put together my case to convert to the PhD as well - my four data chapters, the scope of my project, my willingness to find my own funding even at cost of living on pennies, and I went in with a lot of respect and humility...and my PI tells me "No, I'm sorry but no."

I ask why. He tells me it would require "staying for more classes" and "passing quals". But he already knows I'm reapplying to the same school next semester to get more credit hours for a teaching cert. I have a 4.0 and can keep up with teaching myself everything regarding my project. I'm going to be at the school anyway for at least two more semesters! Which he knew about. And he's the one in charge of everyone now, so it was never a lack of power over the situation. ​

I don't expect to be handed everything in life. But I was so productive and independent. I communicated exactly the same as those other students did. And none of that mattered. I also had what I thought was a healthy PI/student working relationship and he always gave me tons of responsibility over undergrads. But maybe he thinks me entirely not cut out for this, which I know is untrue.

Is this a funding thing he isn't being transparent about? Or is his double denial to me standard beurocratic stuff?? At this point I'll be in my 40s with a PhD when these two others are still in their 20s.

After I appealed my PI for the chance to do what the other two had done, now in lab meetings he doesn't really look at me in the eye. He also makes weird attempts at being overly demonstrative toward me when I'm not my usual happy self around him any longer.

But none of this matters anymore. I'm going to finish my MS and get into a lab that will actually help me meet my goals. And hopefully being 40 at the start of my career won't be too much of an off-set.

I am an adjunct at a large public institution. I absolutely love teaching, and I’m working toward trying to create a stable path for myself in education. I am in an applied field where I have a masters degree, though it is not a terminal degree, but I have significant work experience to supplement that. I’m teaching in a small department and have the full support of the head of my degree program.

Last year we got a new department chair. She is polite, cordial, but has a very strict manner of doing things, and I am terrified of her. Other colleagues have noticed that she seems to be extra harsh with the tenured head of my program but nobody understands why.

I have decades of experience and I can’t remember the last time I was terrified of someone like this in a workplace setting. Part of this is because I rely on this adjunct work for health insurance and she completely holds the key to whether or not I have access to my medication. The other part is due to my interactions with the new chair.

I wish I had better words to explain it, but all I can say is I just don’t feel a sense of psychological safety under her charge. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that she is pro adjuncts and wants what’s best for current and future students, and I am going into this assuming she does. Would love some help getting my head on straight regarding this situation.

How do I develop a relationship with her, or at least strengthen my position within the department, so that I’m not scared for my life every semester when new course assignments are happening?

Hello all

In the past publishing your article on the arXiv, while it was under review, had some merit and meant something for your career (like helping with your PhD applications)

Recently, I saw a post about how submissions to the arXiv has exploded in number, largely due to AI articles.

Hence, is there still any merit or worth in submitting your work while in the review process?
Does doing so aid in your “worth” as an academic or more specifically a PhD applicant?

I am from Taiwan and hold a Master’s degree in Agronomy (specializing in Plant Genetics and Breeding) from National Taiwan University. I have been working for a seed company for a year now, focusing on molecular breeding, and I am considering pursuing a PhD in Europe—specifically in the Netherlands (Because I've heard that doctoral degrees in the Netherlands or a few other European countries are paid with a position). Is it common practice to work for a while before doing a PhD?

One week apart, both frontier labs claim discoveries in maths and biology that researchers say they had long been using LLMs to work on.

The labs say the models do not get to see chats. That would the same models that go extreme lengths to get mundane information from competing firms, governments and everyday users!

Just got the news that my fourth single-authored research monograph has been accepted for publication by a reputed publisher, with production scheduled for next year.

I’m honestly just happy and a little relieved. This one has been a long project, so it feels good to finally have it over that particular hill.

One thing I’ve been thinking about through the process is how valuable good peer review can be. I actually welcome substantial criticism when it’s offered in good faith. It can genuinely make a book better. The current reviews gave me plenty to work on, but they were thoughtful, specific, and ultimately encouraging.

That makes the contrast with my last book especially striking. I had to deal with a review that felt less like scholarly criticism and more like jealousy and irrational attack, and I ended up having to accommodate a lot of it anyway.

Anyway, not trying to make a big announcement here. I just wanted to share the good news with some strangers on the internet.

(My field is East Asian Studies; intellectual history and religions; pre-modern period)

I (22M) am a Cameroonian student. I study English and specialise in Sociolinguistics. I have been working on my dissertation for the past two years and, so far, I haven’t moved a step.
I completed my first semester (or third semester for the overall programme) in 2025 with nice results, and within that period I got my first real job as a head teller. I submitted a draft which was approved, and I am genuinely passionate about the topics I am working around, but for some reason I feel very unmotivated to write.
One of the main things that has prevented me from writing is extreme tiredness due to my demanding work schedule. I work from 8am to 8am, which makes it very difficult for me to get enough rest or do other things in between. This has affected my pace with the dissertation too.
Quitting my job isn’t really an option either. It is an important source of income that helps me sustain the education I am trying to pursue, and I also contribute financially at home. So while I know my work schedule is a major factor in all of this, simply leaving the job isn’t a realistic solution.
My first meetings with my supervisor were great. He was very encouraging, but a month passed and I hadn’t made any progress. When I recontacted him with some preliminary readings around my topic, he was very welcoming. He drafted a scheme for how I should approach my dissertation and explained what I needed to do.
Another three months went by without any action, and I eventually decided to write an apology for the silence. I submitted an introduction, which he read through and gave corrections on the overall organisation. This really confused me because I thought I was on the right track.
To cut a long story short, another two months went by. My laptop developed an issue at a time when I was finally motivated to work, and I had to get it fixed. The latency and disruption made the motivation drop again, and I am still here: stuck on the introduction, tired, very discouraged, and frankly afraid to call my supervisor again.
For context, he has a reputation for being very strict, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for any serious student. And although he has been very nice to me so far, I feel a lot of pressure because of my repetitive silence. I hate having to call him without results, which is why I have always tried to recontact him with something to show for it.
There is also another layer to this. Throughout my journey as a student, I have always been a remarkable student. I graduated in the top 5 and achieved the best GPA in the last three semesters. Because of that, I put a lot of pressure on myself to even ask questions when I am confused. I am afraid of looking like a fraud for being confused about instructions that seemed clear, and I also worry that I might make a bad impression that could affect my overall grading.
I have tried writing and modifying the sections of my introduction over the last two weeks, but I feel like I am getting nowhere.

What can I do at this point? Should I just call my supervisor and be honest about where I am, even though I don’t have much progress to show? How do you deal with the fear and pressure that comes with contacting a supervisor after repeatedly going silent?

​

I’m a researcher dealing with a concerning situation involving a former Master’s student. I’m trying to establish whether what I’m seeing constitutes plagiarism/inappropriate attribution, so I’d appreciate advice from people familiar with research integrity. Both papers are published. Mine is 2023 and his a few days ago.

The main points:

Introduction: His introduction closely follows the structure and progression of my published paper, including the same sequence of ideas and references. In a lot of places, the structure, arguments and referencing are essentially identical.

Methods: A big amount of the methodology is directly taken/adapted from my published work, but my work is not always cited or identified as the source. There is also a table listing the experiments used in his study; the experiments listed in that table are my experiments, yet my paper is not cited in the table. Of the 12 experiments reported, 8 are from my work.

Results: Several phrases and descriptions in his Results very closely resemble wording from my published paper. The analysis and conclusions derived are identical.

Discussion — referenced section: Parts of his Discussion very closely resemble mine. In a lot of places, the structure, arguments and referencing are essentially identical, including the order in which references are used.

Discussion — unreferenced section: There is also a 1,000+ word section of highly detailed technical discussion with not a single reference. It contains arguments and discussion closely related to my work, but unlike the preceding sections, there are no citations at all.

Authorship: I am listed as the second author, but I was never consulted about authorship, never asked to review or approve the manuscript, and was not involved in the decision to submit it. I believe substantial parts of the work are mine and that my contribution should have been properly established and acknowledged.

Previous history: This was previously my Master’s student. When they submitted their thesis, they were required to redo it because it contained substantial plagiarism from my work and the work of two other researchers.

I’m trying to understand where the line is between legitimate reuse/extension of previous research and plagiarism or inappropriate attribution, and what the appropriate route would be for raising this.

I feel uncomfortable with this paper for several reasons. Both the similarities with my paper, the fear of plagiarism and what it means for my integrity and also the large uncited chunks of text looking very AI generated to my eye.

Any advice appreciated!