"Fewer U.S. scientists are pursuing postdoc positions, new data show" 📉
"The trend underscores concerns that the academic community is facing a postdoc shortage and that early-career scientists are increasingly favoring higher paid positions outside academia."
“It’s not a situation that’s good for the country.”
Interestingly, in the US PD salaries have risen faster than inflation and kept pace with average salary since I was a postdoc there (NIH starting salary is $58k today, or 12% more than national median. In 2011 it was $38.5k, $46k in todays dollars, or 13% more than national median).
This is not true of the UK, where postdoc salaries are now £37k, but would be £45k if they had kept pace with inflation or median salary.
"An experiment was conducted. It was preregistered. The results section was written up in a way that reads as if the experiment worked as planned. But if you go back and forth between the results section and the preregistration plan, you realize that the purportedly successful results did not follow the preregistration plan.
They’re just the usual story of fishing and forking paths and p-hacking."
"The easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.
[...] and those papers are what the supervisor uses to apply for more grants. The result is a paper production machine, in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution. Most of that money come from your taxes."
Pay for graduate students and postdocs has been stagnant for DECADES in Canada.
"Budget 2024 is currently being finalized - let decision makers know graduate students and postdocs are important! Email, call, and tweet before March 8th for maximum impact."
"Scientific-misconduct accusations are leading to retractions [...] But there’s no telling how widespread errors are in research: As it is, they’re largely brought to light by unpaid volunteers.
A program launching this month is hoping to shake up that incentive structure [...It] will pay reviewers to root out mistakes in influential papers,"
@erinnacland@academicchatter "Errors" in research is a broad category, with no single definition. This seems more like a vigilante justice approach to an epistemic problem that started with poor training, was boosted by problems with how IF affects the reputation of single articles, and then reinforced by institutional administrations looking to hire "stars". I say this as someone who's main research is concerned by re-evaluating theory (in ecology).
Ex-president Dr. Gay "certainly copied from other people. But [...] the conservative activist who brought the accusations to light [...] openly did so as part of a larger conservative battle against elite colleges. Under those circumstances, for the left to join the calls for Gay to step down could feel like playing into the hands of the right. On the other hand — well, she does seem to have plagiarized [...] So how do you handle that?"
@erinnacland@academicchatter It depends on the nature and extent of the plagiarism, but if it is severe and dishonest then we need to be consistent and behave properly, irrespective of culture wars. She should resign.
Former Stanford president retracts Nature paper as another gets expression of concern
"The two Nature papers – which have together been cited more than 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – were among five the university investigation examined on which Tessier-Lavigne was the principal author. The other three have been retracted – two from Science and one from Cell."
New study warns "that protracted PhDs and lengthy postdoctoral stints are holding back even the best scientists from 'achieving independence and tenure'."
Author argues that "universities should have more flexible rules that allow them to promote people quicker if they prove to be 'really outstanding in their early steps' [...and that] funding should shift to younger scientists,"
@erinnacland@academicchatter@ingorohlfing How does such a laudable goal contribute to the university's paramount goal: Institutional aggrandizement? I can't see that it does. Seems the university's goal is best served by maintaining PhD wannabes as a powerless and dependent money stream.
Harvard's President was found to have plagiarized in multiple instances across several papers. In one case, a full paragraph.
Harvard's response today?
An independent review found "a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct [...] in this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay”
I wonder how'd they treat an undergrad who did the same?
"Wiley to stop using “Hindawi” name amid $18 million revenue decline"
"In March, Clarivate removed 19 Hindawi journals from its Web of Science index for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Wiley later shut down four Hindawi journals it had identified as 'heavily compromised by paper mills.'"
"[Retraction Watch has] logged more than 3,400 retractions from Hindawi journals [...] In April, an executive said the publisher would retract 1,200 more"
"There is pressure to publish as scientists [...] There are labs that are run by big egos who might say to a young researcher, “Why did your experiment fail? I will hire someone else who will make it work [...] The graduate students and the postdocs might be the ones photoshopping, but who is responsible for the atmosphere and the integrity of the lab? That’s the professor" - @ElisabethBik
@failedLyndonLaRouchite@erinnacland@ElisabethBik@academicchatter As it says ... tenure is created for academic freedom. I count the freedom to explore high-stakes blue skies research without the threat of personal costs an important part of academic freedom as it pertains to science.
The "top" postdocs in Canadian are awarded 40,000 CAD/year by the government. It costs 45% of that salary to rent a 1-bedroom in Toronto.
The government announced yesterday that it's not increasing our funding.
"For over two decades, these critical contributors to research and innovation have received no funding increase from the federal government and now face significant financial challenges." - #SupportOurScience
I hear you. It takes ~80% of an assistant professor's salary in Cambridge, UK, to rent a 4-bedroom house in town. The situation for postdocs is of course even worse. Untenable.
Postdoctoral fellows are "expected to sacrifice evenings and weekends, and to neglect [their] social life and holidays, all for a career that offers no guarantees. The short-term nature of postdoc contracts prevents [...] settling down and starting a family,"
A Nature survey found that postdocs in their 30s are "more negative about job prospects, job security and work–life balance," and have more mental health challenges.
As a mid-30s postdoc working through the evening on my second vacation day while the family sleeps, this resonates with me a lot.
Hopefully it will get better as the todo-debt overhang wears off over the course of the vacation. I came here for the beach and sea, not the wifi and teamviewer!
"Science is self-correcting": an argument sometimes used to dismiss concerns about research fraud and misconduct.
"We are swamped with scientific publications, but it is increasingly hard to distinguish the signal from the noise. In my view, it is getting to the point where in many fields it is impossible to build a cumulative science, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it's getting worse and worse." - @deevybee
@erinnacland@deevybee@academicchatter
"You may wonder whether it matters if a proportion of the published literature is nonsense: surely any credible scientist will just ignore such material?"
I would venture that it is a matter of "mass". 1 paper on its own is easy to discard, but a large, interconnected pile? No.
Similar with citations:
Manipulate enough citations on your paper, and it will become more visible, leading to an increase in genuine (that is: non-author-induced) citations.
"MDPI’s largest journal [...] was delisted from the Web of Science in March 2023. What came next was both expected and staggering. The journal shrunk by 88% in comparison to its peak."
"IJERPH’s decline is a stark reminder that in the absence of an Impact Factor, other journal traits matter little."
@erinnacland@academicchatter I have anecdotal experience with the reverse (as I tend to specialise in restoring journals at their lowest). I spent 2–3 years improving a journal and we consistently struggled to receive submissions. Once it got into Scopus, submissions shot up immediately, despite there being nothing functionally different about it. Since I left, I assume they've increased acceptance numbers to match the submissions.
I was an assistant editor for that journal for a while and it was a bizarre experience. I wasn't asked to identify peer reviews or make bench decisions on new submissions at all. I was asked to review peer reviewers comments when there were disagreements occasionally and shown tables and figures out of context and asked whether they should go in as supplementals or in line.
It was VERY weird.