Difference between revisions of "Links on problems in academia"

Revision as of 18:15, 22 November 2013

This is just a backup of a bookmark folder, will structure it later.

Academic career

Generic

• Persistance and uncertainity in the academic career (PNAS paper)
• Do you have to be exceptional to be successful in academia?
• Academia: Not for everyone many people who agreed that motivation, perseverance, and tenacity are key to success in science.
• How today's scientific culture affects young scientists Can you also live happily as a scientist simply by doing your job well? It seems not. [...] nowadays the successful scientist has all the attributes of a modern rock star. Without regularly producing number one hits you will quite likely not make it.
• Farewell early 20s, farewell academia? all my discomfort and melancholic temperament could possibly be a result of forcing myself down a path that was not right for me. I then began to wonder, is there not another way to live? A life more full of hap, and less full of drudge?
• Falling Off the Ladder: How Not to Succeed in Academia My loss of belief in my own potential was the first step toward where I am today.
• Don't become a scientist! pursue another career. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations.
• Why science is a lousy career choice plenty of people do study these things. They just don’t work in those fields.
• Women in Science Even a public schoolteacher actually does better than a scientist.
• Escape the Tower Resources, links, and musings about the many problems with the academic system, and how to escape it.
• Why did Gregory Perelman refuse prizes for his work? It is because deep down we realize that our system is broken and corrupted, that there aren't enough jobs to go around, and many people with serious talent are either quitting or changing fields because of how jobs are handed out. Those who mock Perelman for living with his mother, tending her flowerbed, are free to do so. I assure you Perelman doesn't care. He has nothing left to prove.
• Imposter Syndrome: blog carnival
• Researchers unrealistic hopes of academic careers
• Si può immaginare Sisifo felice? (book)
• La centrifuga dei cervelli
• How academia resembles a drug gang

Ph.D.

• Fix the Ph.D. Widening concerns about dismal job prospects are dissuading the brightest candidates from the PhD route.
• Education: The PhD factory in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.
• http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110728/full/nj7357-533a.html
• The Disposable Academic Why doing a Ph.D. is a waste of time
• Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.
• No, you can't be a professor
• Why graduate students ignore warnings about the job market
• How to patch the Ph.D. problem
• Anectodes from the trenches
• Doctoral training centers or bust
• The Ph.D. grind - the first memoir of a Ph.D.
• How not to mentor your students
• An aspiring scientists frustration with modern day academia EPFL grad student leaves days before his Ph.D. Instead, you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is given to good presentation over good content.

Postdocs

• Sandal leaves academia (Austrian article)
• Lessons from a recovering postdoc And it’s never an easy decision for those who do. It’s one that is filled with doubt and questions: Is it just because this experiment isn’t working? Am I a bad scientist? Was my PI simply having a bad day? Am I just not committed enough? Am I cut out for this? What will my family think? What about my grad school mentors? Will this kill my career?
• In which I question my own sell-by date Age discrimination became illegal in the EU in October 2006, but science cleverly gets around this problem by putting restrictions into their fellowship eligibility criteria.
• Imperial measures – but measuring for what? “The answer may well be that Imperial is a very good place to be a high-flying academic, but not a very good one to be an average academic.
• And Another One Throws The Towel And Leaves Science This is all straight hustle, straight business, straight ripping each other off, being mean, supporting ‘friends’ even if they are wrong, pretending to be something better, elitism, exploitation, …
• Give postdocs a career, not empty promises Fresh blood in a lab is useful, but so too are experienced people who can train others more efficiently, who are in touch with the latest techniques and who have first-hand knowledge of the lab's carefully amassed treasure-trove of materials.
• Recovering From Postdoc Mistakes a large lab run by a famous scientist doesn't guarantee direct value for the postdoc, as she found out the hard way
• Sayonara academia, I get a life I don't see meaning in my research anymore.
• Honest Postdoc Ad
• 2001-2002 UK House of Commons - Short term contracts in academia
• Salary Comparisons in EU (2007)

Coming back

• Reentering Academia - A Success Story I knew that I could be a reasonable scientist given the chance. I eventually managed to convince people here in Oxford that I could be taken back on as a postdoc.

Finding a job after academia

• How to Get A Job After You’ve Left Grad School But there are of jobs out there that are just as intellectually stimulating as teaching at the college level.
• Soliciting Advice: Non-Academic Careers for Ph.D.’s I’m hereby soliciting good, specific career advice and/or resources for students who are on the track to get a Ph.D. (or already have one) and are interested in pursuing non-academic jobs.
• Unsolicited Advice: Non-Academic Careers I’m just going to link to some of the most promising-looking resources that were mentioned.
• departure into industry and return for a PhD shows too much of an interest in personal life or money instead of knowledge or research.
• In Silico many of the dysfunctional relationships I had in the academic world were not actually due to my personality flaws, but were largely due to the peculiar culture that tolerates (and in some cases rewards) dysfunctional interpersonal relationships in academia.
• Mea culpa: About studying science to get a job
• US pushes for more scientists but the jobs aren't there

Academia as a workplace

• Bullying of Academics in Higher Education
• Which Grad Students Are the Most Miserable? most of the skills you learn in biology, especially biomedical sciences are only useful in the biomedical sciences
• Research integrity: Sabotage! Postdoc Vipul Bhrigu destroyed the experiments of a colleague in order to get ahead.
• Man Who Set Stage for a Nobel Now Lives a Life Outside Science After a year of unemployment, he started driving the van for Bill Penney Toyota, his job for the last year and a half.
• Work ethic: The 24/7 lab In a lab where the boss calls you at 6 a.m., schedules Friday evening lab meetings that can stretch past 10 p.m., and routinely expects you to work over Christmas, sticking it out until midnight on a holiday weekend is nothing unusual.

Funding

• Taxpayers deserve value for money from research funding - Guardian
• Scientists have sold their souls – and basic research – to business - Guardian
• Got to get a grant - Nature
• Slipping from the top - The Scientist
• petridish.org
• A new era of science funding part 1 - Nature blogs
• A new era of science funding part 3 - Nature blogs
• The scientific marketplace - Nature Materials

Publishing

Fraud and retraction

• Retraction Watch blog
• Scientific fraud like Ponzi finance
• The trouble with retractions
• Scientific journals retract more articles, expose fraud and incompetence
• The reasons for retraction
• Doctored photos retracted article
• Research Misconduct, Retraction, and Cleansing the Medical Literature: Lessons from the Poehlman Case
• 10 retractions and counting
• UConn fraud case
• What retractions tell us about setting the research record straight
• A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform
• Fraud, Failure and FUBAR

Peer review

• Quality and value: How can we research peer review?
• Public Library of Sloppiness?
• Bentham Affair -sloppy OA

Open access

• PLOS One public library of sloppiness?
• The rise and fall of PLOS One IF
• Placing PLOS One in the appropriate evaluative context
• Why I published in PLOS One and probably won't again
• Beyond open access

Impact factor

• Impacting our young (PNAS)

Plagiarism

• Plagiarism
• Repeat of plagiarism
• Fighting plagiarism
• Scientific plagiarism in India (en.wp) and a thread on Nature Network on the WP article.
• Responses to plagiarsim (paywall)
• Dangers of biomedical plagiarism
• Plagiarism in science is often ignored
• How do authors and editors react to plagiarism
• Plagiarism and Responsibility
• Plagiarism in the morphological sciences
• The science of plagiarism
• Scientists explain why they plagiarize
• Plagiarism in China
• PDF of slides on plagiarism
• Paraphrasing and Plagiarism
• Thoughts on academic cheating

Philosophical defenses

• Self plagiarism
• When is self-plagiarism acceptable?
• In defense of plagiarism
• In defense of plagiarism II
• The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism

Inefficiencies

• http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/full/467775a.html?ref=nf
• Unreliable research
• Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility

Italy

• Netturbini con laurea
• Dottorandi e dottorati (??)
• Quali ricercatori nell'università del futuro

Open science

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/22/open-science-shared-research-internet
• Cracking Open the Scientific Process
• Open sesame - The Economist

Image

• What a scientist looks like

Other

• Chinese? You are not welcome.
• Chinese and American science