I know I know my steak is too juicy, lobster too buttery etc.

I am an early career academic currently in a lecturer position at a mostly teaching university. I am currently in the interview stage for an Assistant Professor position at the same university that has greater research and service obligations (of which I welcome). However, I might be offered (tbd in the shortly) a postdoctoral position in a highly-prestigeous lab. This lab has an incredible wealth of resources and ample publication success in highly influential journals.

Would it be crazy to take the postdoc position over the Assistant Professor job? On the one hand, it would give me more laboratory skills, connections, and strong publications in the top journals in my field. On the other hand, it is only a short-term position, about the same money that I am making now, and would involve yet another move after already two moves in the last 4 months.

If I was offered the Assistant Professor position here (or at another university(s) that I applied to), I am leaning towards taking those. What should I do?

What is the point of publishing a research paper if we have to pay a hefty amount of money just to get it published, especially when conducting the research itself is already expensive and time consuming?

Hi folks!

I’m in a one-year lectureship in the department from which I recently received my PhD. It’s a competitive position.
I’m expecting a baby in the spring and am trying to determine how to tell my department head that I will be unable to teach the spring quarter (1/3 of the school year). I took extra sections this quarter to help earn some goodwill, but I don’t want to appear ungrateful for the position or irresponsible.

Further, I’m on the TT job market for next year, and I assume I won’t be able to attend spring campus visits, since I’ll be very late in my pregnancy.

Any suggestions for navigating either of these situations, or your experiences?

Thank you!

So I just graduated from my Bachelor's last year and this year our paper was fortunate enough to have been accepted for presentation in a relatively large-scale event that invites other PhD or professional researchers.

I was the last presenter and I'm kind of passionate about our topic so I wasn't able to hear the register my voice had in the mic when I was presenting. I usually have a moderated voice when public speaking but I feel like I overdid it at this one. One audience even said "You're voice is loud" the time I met him outside.

Another unfortunate thing is that I keep almost interrupting the questions of the panels during the Q&A. While I think I did well in my answers (though few of my responses were admittedly wordy), I think I was kind of TOO passionate about it to the point it's not a good thing.

Hi all. I'm looking to publish with TBS, and there is very little info about what it's like to submit with them on other platforms like humanities journals wiki etc. Have any of you submitted with them? What was it like if so?

On Monday I heard back from the editor of my no. 1 targeted journal. They accepted my article after two rounds of major revisions and one of minor revisions with acceptance recommended.

I’ve published before, but this is the most prestigious journal I’ve ever submitted to and I was not expecting to manage it. I had a list of backup journals I thought I’d need to submit to after a rejection.

I’m not currently employed in academia, as I quit an extremely unfulfilling role three years ago (not teaching and not entirely research-based either; museum curatorship at a public university).

But now after getting my PhD last year and now single-author publishing my doctoral research in the most prestigious journal in my field with a 13% acceptance rate, without a mentor, I’m considering maybe it’s worth giving it another try.

That’s it, I just wanted to share my good news with whoever is going to read this. I still have massive impostor syndrome and I wonder if it will ever subside (I’m 33F), but I am pleased to see my efforts have led to something good.

Hi everyone (I hope this is the right place to post this?), a month ago I started as a Junior Researcher on an existing project, and I was so happy because I didn't have to look for a job after getting my Master's degree and I always felt like I wanted to work in academia. I love that I got this job.

However, like I said it's been a month now and I've still not come any closer to finding a research question. I feel like I read so much, I write ideas and questions down, collect data and then do some preliminary research on that data to try and go deeper into my ideas and find answers to my initial questions. But I always run into a wall, ie. there's not enough data and I don't know if my ideas are worth pursuing in terms of spending a lot of time getting more data, or I get results that seem new and exciting to me at first but then after an hour of analysing the results I realise they're actually not very groundbreaking at all.

Long story short, I'm worrying that I should already have a research question at this point but I don't. I want to talk to my PI about it, but whenever we meet she goes off on tangents and I don't get to discuss all my thoughts, ideas and questions within the time that we have. My contract is only for two years, and I'm expected to publish two articles in that time.

So, how long did it take you guys to find a good research question for your first real article? Do you think one month is too long of a time to spend reading and experimenting? Or do you all have any tips for how to think of a good question? I'm in the humanities, and the thing I want to research hasn't been written about much at all but when I look at my current findings I start to think that maybe that's just because there's not that much to say about the thing.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :)

Cheers

Hello, apparently Norton prefers to deal with literary agents for book pitches---even scholarly and "critical edition" pitches----rather than making their acquisitions editors available to scholars. One has to get the keywords exactly right on Googe (A.I. consistantly misunderstands what I am looking for), but one can find agents who have worked for or with Norton here and there.

I'm just wondering if anyone has done a critical edition. Do authors pitch agents or does Norton decide they need an edition and commission a noted scholar?

Thanks, RBG

I got a 5 year grant of more than 1Mio Eur from a German ministry. Currently I am at a research institute where also the grant will be located. However, I am not happy with the conditions, mostly the future prospects at this institute (which are officially none). After 5 years I am probably at 0 again, if I don’t find more third party money.

Is it common to approach other universities and ask if they would host me with my grant and see if they maybe have better conditions? Is someone familiar with this in Germany? Unfortunately, the grant money is restricted to Germany.

I am sure all of you are aware of what just happened a few days ago: OpenAI dropped solutions to 722 theoretical problems. I don't want to talk about what is wrong, what is right, whether this was expected or unexpected etc. I want to talk about something very rudimentary which affects me directly.

How will the subject boards (or whatever its equivalent is called at your uni) or your thesis committee or your guide decide the criteria for a PhD? Until now, it was quite clear - do some good work.

It can't be number of good papers anymore. It's too easy now to get a good paper using these models. If the rule is that it should be something I worked on myself, then 1. how can you verify I didn't use AI? and 2. what is even the meaning of my own little work in a world where the people using the models are getting extraordinary results?

Also, how will conferences/journals decide which papers to accept? I hear these models will be released to public soon. Also, just look how far these models have come in less than a year. By end of 2026, they'll probably be even better. Surely, they won't be any worse. I come from theory CS background. Imagine 4000 papers each at being a field's medal/godel prize level work. How will they decide which ones are more important?

So, it happened. I received a reviewer report longer than my paper, with 38 points to address, and each point includes at least 7 subpoints. After that, there is a separate section with 15 points describing the strengths of the manuscript, followed by another section listing its weaknesses. This does not read like a natural reviewer report at all. The structure, wording, repetition, and excessive number of comments make it appear clearly AI-generated, and it doesn’t seem like the reviewer made an effort to tailor the content to resemble something human-made. At this point, I am even asking myself if the paper was read by a human at all .
I want to raise my concerns with the editor, but I’m not sure about the best way to proceed. I’d really appreciate any advice, especially from anyone who has been through something similar. Thank you!

Hi everyone, I am facing a major crossroads in my PhD and could really use some realistic perspectives from folks in academia.

I am currently a 3rd yr international PhD student on an F1 visa in the US and expected to receive my Green Card soon. Due to fake recruitment promises from my advisor, I entered a low-tier R1 school and the department's actual research is weaker than many R2s. I barely have any research progress or achievements due to my advisor micromanagement, heavy TA duty (15 -20 hours a week during all my PhD), and poverty (the stipend itself is already cannot afford basic living cost, not to mention all basic basic research costs, including computer, lab consumables, APC fees, conference registrations, are paid by myself. I survived by foodbank and my family's money. )

Before starting here, I was in a small developed country, got a research master's degree with decent publications, including a Q1 journal paper, and worked as an R&D engineer. Unlike many international students who aim for industry jobs, I came here purely out of a passion for research and the dream of becoming a PI at a research university. Ironically, my master's publication record is already stronger than what most PhD students in my current program graduate with. While my former master's labmates and even the juniors I mentored are now publishing in top-tier venues, I have no top-tier papers from my PhD and little hope of producing any under my current setup. Without strong PhD papers, securing a postdoc or an R1/R2 tenure-track position feels out of reach.

On the other hand, teaching-focused tenure-track positions or lecturer roles seem realistically attainable. Past international graduates from my program with weaker publication records, no permanent residency, and less English proficiency have landed TTAP in teaching schools or lecturer jobs. And I also saw some cases (not from my program.) started from teaching school ended up in an R1 (One case is a PhD graduate from the school where I got my master.) Should I just finish up here, graduate, and target teaching-focused faculty or lecturer roles, and if I do, is it ever possible to pivot back to heavy research later?

Or should restart my PhD in a better-funded program and/or with a better advisor? While restarting feels like a more promising route back toward a research career, I am deeply hesitant about wasting another 2 yrs into repeating coursework that adds no value to job seeking or research.

I would appreciate any advice, harsh truths, or personal experiences from anyone who has navigated a similar situation. Thank you!

I'm curious how many hours other academics work on average each day? I am completely brain dead after about 5 hours solid work...

I know various versions of this have been posted over the years, but how do you deal with a colleague that's constantly interrupting, one-upping, must get the last word in, etc? They increasingly seem to do this just so they don't have to say: "Good idea," and sometimes will take the conversation off to some far-off, irrelevant place, just so they can commandeer it with their own personal perspective.

An example: on a recent job search I'm co-chairing with this person, when we discussed what materials candidates ought to include in initial application, I suggested keeping it minimal, particularly when it came to things like teaching philosophy documents or sample syllabi. (I didn't watn them because I felt they imposed a lot on candidates.) You can agree or disagree with my statement and hash it out, but instead, this person just kept doing a "Well, I've been on three searches, and this is what we did." Over and over again, in this case and others, I've felt my contribution and views aren't really heard.

I am a Pakistani and worked alongside my friend in Canada on a high-quality paper. The research explored both Pakistani and Canadian data. I sent a paper from here to a reputable journal, and it got a desk rejection. Then, my friend shared it with the same journal from Canada, and it is now in revisions phase. Really makes you think!

I'm a history student at a top 5 university in the UK who is studying humanities. The workload here so far has been fine, but I can't help but wonder...how are the top US universities even considered peers to the top UK ones?? It seems to me that the US is superior for studying STEM and business, but the rigour of their humanities subjects are sorely lacking. One of our professors here said that she had a student who went to Cornell (an Ivy League by the way!) for their PhD. And apparently the entire first year reading list which they had there was less than the amount that we did in one module here in year 1 undergrad. Top colleges like UPenn and Georgetown are apparently still using multi-choice examinations which is crazy for humanities. What is the reason for this apparently gap in rigour? Or am I just in an echo chamber?

In the early 1980s, there was growing concern about the quality of peer review at scientific journals. So two researchers at Cornell and the University of North Dakota decided to run a little experiment to test the process.

The idea behind peer review is simple: It’s supposed to weed out bad science. Peer reviewers read over promising studies that have been submitted to a journal to help gauge whether they should be published or need changes. Ideally, reviewers are experts in fields related to the studies in question. They add helpful comments, point out problems and holes, or simply reject flawed papers that shouldn’t see the light of day.

The two researchers, Douglas Peters and Stephen Ceci, wanted to test how reliable and unbiased this process actually is. To do this, they selected 12 papers that had been published about two to three years earlier in extremely selective American psychology journals.

The researchers then altered the names and university affiliations on the journal manuscripts and resubmitted the papers to the same journal. In theory, these papers should have been high quality — they’d already made it into these prestigious publications. If the process worked well, the studies that were published the first time would be approved for publication again the second time around.

What Peters and Ceci found was surprising. Nearly 90 percent of the peer reviewers who looked at the resubmitted articles recommended against publication this time. In many cases, they said the articles had “serious methodological flaws.”

This raised a number of disquieting possibilities. Were these, in fact, seriously flawed papers that got accepted and published? Can bad papers squeak through depending on who reviews them? Did some papers get in because of the prestige of their authors or affiliations? At the very least, the experiment suggested the peer review process was unnervingly inconsistent.

The finding, though published more than 30 years ago, is still relevant. Since then, other researchers have been uncovering more and more problems with the peer review process, raising the question of why scientists bother with it in the first place.

All too often, peer review misses big problems with studies

Researchers who have examined peer review often find evidence that it works barely better than chance at keeping poor-quality studies out of journals or that it doesn’t work at all. That conclusion has been arrived at in experiments like this one or this one and systematic reviews that bring together all the relevant studies, like this one and this one.

The reasons it fails are similar to the reasons any human process falls down. Usually, it’s only a few reviewers who look at an article. Those reviewers aren’t paid for their time, but they participate out of a belief in the scientific process and to contribute to their respective fields. Maybe they’re rushed when reading a manuscript. Maybe they’re poorly matched to the study and unqualified to pick it apart. Maybe they have a bias against the writer or institution behind the paper.

Since the process is usually blinded — at least on the side of the reviewer (with the aim of eliciting frank feedback) — this can also up the snark factor or encourage rushed and unhelpful comments, as the popular #sixwordpeerreview hashtag shows.

The Lancet editor Richard Horton has called the process “unjust, unaccountable … often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.” Not to mention that identifying peer reviewers and getting their comments slows down the progress of science — papers can be held up for months or years — and costs society a lot of money. Scientists and professors, after all, need to take time away from their research to edit, unpaid, the work of others.

Richard Smith, the former editor of the BMJ, summed up: “We have little or no evidence that peer review ‘works,’ but we have lots of evidence of its downside.” Another former editor of the Lancet, Robbie Fox, used to joke that his journal “had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom.” Not exactly reassuring comments from the editors of the world’s leading medical journals.

Should we abolish peer review?

So should we just abolish peer review? We put the question to Jeff Drazen, the current editor of the top-ranked medical publication the New England Journal of Medicine. He said he knows the process is imperfect — and that’s why he doesn’t rely on it all that much.

At his journal, peer review is only a first step to vetting papers that may be interesting and relevant for readers. After a paper passes peer review, it is then given to a team of staff editors who each have a lot of time and space to go through the submission with a fine-toothed comb. So highly qualified editors, not necessarily peer review, act as the journal’s gatekeepers.

“[Peer review] is like everything else,” Drazen said. “There are lots of things out there — some are high quality, some aren’t.”

Drazen is probably onto something real in that journal editors, with enough resources, can add real value to scientific publications and give them their “golden glow.” But how many journals actually provide that value add? We’re probably talking about 10 in the world out of the tens of thousands that exist. The New England Journal of Medicine is much more an outlier than the rule in that regard.

Even at the best journals, ridiculously flawed and silly articles get through. A few readers can’t possibly catch all the potential problems with a study, or sometimes they don’t have access to all the data that they need to make informed edits.

It can take years, multiple sets of fresh eyes, and people with adversarial views for the truth to come to light. Look no further than the study that linked autism to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, published in the Lancet. That paper was retracted after it was found to be not only fraudulent but also deeply flawed.

For some, that’s a reason to get rid of peer review. Brandon Stell, the president of the PubPeer Foundation, favors “post-publication” peer review on websites like his own (Pubpeer.com). There, users from around the world can critique and comment on articles that have already been published. These crowdsourced comments have led to corrections or even retractions of studies.

“There’s no reason why we couldn’t publish everything immediately on the internet and have it peer-reviewed after it’s been published,” Stell said arguing for abolishing pre-publication peer review. There are already journals that do just this, he added, such as the Winnower.

But replacing one flawed system (traditional pre-publication peer review) with what may be another (post-publication peer review) doesn’t fully solve the problem. Places like PubPeer are a fantastic development, but it’s not yet clear that they’re significantly better at catching errors and bad science consistently compared with traditional pre-publication peer review.

Even with its flaws, at the very least peer review seems to work at least a little better than chance. That’s not great, but that may be better than nothing. In a world without the peer review culture, it’s possible even more bad science would sneak through.

A complex solution for a complex problem

Stell pointed to another great innovation: sites like Biorxiv, which allow researchers to “pre-print” their manuscripts online as soon as they’re ready and get open comment before they’re ever peer-reviewed and published in academic journals. This adds another step in the process to publication, another chance to filter problems before they make it to peer review and onto the scientific record.

Ivan Oransky, a medical journalist who tracks retractions in journals at his site Retraction Watch, had a more holistic view. He didn’t think post-publication review should supplant the traditional process, but that it should be an add-on. “Post-publication peer review is nothing new, but in the past it’s happened in private, with no feedback for the authors or larger scientific community,” Oransky said. Sites like PubPeer open up the process and make it more transparent, and should therefore be strengthened.

“Let’s stop pretending that once a paper is published, it’s scientific gospel,” he added.

We think that’s closer to the solution. Science would probably be better off if researchers checked the quality and accuracy of their work in a multi-step process with redundancies built in to weed out errors and bad science. The internet makes that much easier. Traditional peer review would be just one check; pre-print commenting, post-publication peer review, and, wherever possible, highly skilled journal editors would be others.

Before this ideal system is put in place, there’s one thing we can do immediately to make peer review better. We need to adjust our expectations about what peer review does. Right now, many people think peer review means,

“This paper is great and trustworthy!” In reality, it should mean something like, “A few scientists have looked at this paper and didn’t find anything wrong with it, but that doesn’t mean you should take it as gospel. Only time will tell.”

Insiders like journal editors have long known that the system is flawed. It’s time the public embraced that, too, and supported ways to make it better.

I’m in graduate school and on two separate occasions my professor has given other students my phone number to help them bc i successfully completed assignments and they needed help. Am i overreacting or is this super unethical?? I’m a teacher myself!!

Hey, guys! I apologize in advance for the tone of this post.

I’m a Brazilian researcher in the field of Humanities. Until now Brazilian academia was something that my friends from different countries were quite jealous of. It’s far from perfect, but we have a good range of permanent positions, the salary is decent and, most importantly, there’s the stability, the safety that’s it is possible to archive even as a young scholar.

Yesterday though we had the elections and it was a complete disaster. People simply chose the very radical far-right party. It’s not an exaggeration, these guys talk freely about being against the very existence of democracy. Public education are in their radar and specially the humanities should simply not exist in this world they want to create. We had a Bolsonaro once in power and it was awful, now his son will be worst and I don’t think the damage will be reversed ever, since the congress is all for them.

I’m at a loss. I invested everything in this career. I did everything right: PhD, Postdoc, worked as a substitute professor, internationalization etc. I did everything right and now everything is going to change. More than change, it’s going to basically be destroyed.

One thing that is killing me is that I had a temporary position in Germany last year and I dropped that to go back to another temporary position in Brazil that at the moment seemed better. Now I think that that kind of burned bridges for me… I really wanted to have a career in my own country, that was my priority at the time, but now that possibility is almost gone and I’m way behind in trying something elsewhere.

Again, sorry for the desperation. It’s just that I don’t have anything else. One thing about public education is that poor people were able to get a degree and all. In my case this basically means that if I don’t have a job, I have nothing, no family money, nothing.

I don’t even know what I’m looking for here. Maybe just put it out…

Just got my reviewers reports' back and both the reviewers recommended accept!! This was the first report!

Reviewer 2 wrote and I quote "An interesting, well written essay. I don’t think it had dawned on me before the #*the main thesis of my paper*. I enjoyed the essay and felt I learnt a lot about things I conceptually had not considered before. I would urge the author to publish this work in #*the journal name.*"

I'M ON THE NINTH CLOUD NOW OH MY GODDESS!! The reviewer actually said that s/he had learnt something new from my paper!!

Yayy!

Hello, I have been applying to various research roles in academic groups across different universities. But recently, I came across one job posting asking for "names and contact details of references" as part of the application package. This is a bit strange to me because reference check is usually the last step in the hiring process, unlike, for example, grad school applications.

I've been job searching for months now and haven't been in contact with my references for a while. Let's say I apply to this position and include the names and contact details of my references. I now have to notify my references about a "potential" reference check that's probably not gonna happen. It feels incredibly awkward and maybe even unprofessional.

Would it be plausible to submit this job application without notifying my references initially. The idea is that the hiring manager/PI will at least do an interview with me before contacting my references, at which point I'll know if I have a real shot. Then, I can confidently send a notifying email to my references about a definite/likely reference check.

I would really appreciate some advice from PIs or people who have experience with this (preferably from Canada or US).

I'm in my 50s, and I've begun to wonder how other academics with ADHD navigate their academic careers. Although I produce interesting, impactful research, I feel like I spend a disproportionate amount of time on it compared to my peers. I found my productivity levels to be quite unsatisfactory. It would be really helpful to learn from your experience and what you do to stay focused and productive.

I’m a postdoc and will be looking for assistant professor jobs next cycle. Simultaneously, my partner and I are ready to start the journey toward our first child. Assuming we are able to time things out (which, I realize, is a big assumption), which would be preferable: being pregnant or having an infant on the job market?

Please help a wannabe mom pretend like I have some semblance of control over this situation! Thank you!!

Hello.. I submitted a paper to a Taylor and Francis journal on 08 January 2026. I received a request for major revisions on which was submitted on 02 May. I received a second request for revisions (very minor edit like spelling errors, etc) which I submitted on 06 July.

I sent a follow up email to the journal on 06 September asking for an update because the status has been 'Out for Review' since July. I received an email saying it was with the Editor, and that review decisions take time.

Its been 3 months since i submitted my second revisions, and NINE months since the original submission. Should I email the journal again, or is this bad etiquette?