Why a career-planning tool may not help as much as it’s meant to
Individual development plans or IDPs—multi-part worksheets that help junior researchers asses their skills and map out possible career paths—are often touted as valuable training tools. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, “strongly encourages” IDPs for all graduate students and postdoctoral researchers funded through the agency, and many US institutions have made them mandatory. Read more
Resubmitting your study to a new journal could become easier
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a Baltimore, Maryland-based non-profit that promotes standardization in publishing, has embraced a plan to make it easier for journals to share rejected manuscripts and manuscript reviews without forcing authors to go through another arduous submission process. Read more
Universities struggle to offer crucial mental-health support to PhD students
A report from Vitae, a non-profit science-career advocacy organization in Cambridge, UK, found that while UK universities are seriously considering the mental health of PhD researchers, gaps and shortcomings in the graduate-programme system continue to keep many students from getting help. Read more
Last-author spot tough to nail for scientists who are not white or male
The analysis—which covered 486,644 biomedical articles with two to nine authors published between 1946 and 2009—found that female, black and Hispanic authors were less likely than were white men to hold prestigious last-author spots. And while all scientists tended to land more last-author spots as their careers went on, that trend was slower for women and minorities. “There’s a lack of progression for those groups,” says Bruce Weinberg, a co-author of the study and an economist at Ohio State University in Columbus. Read more
How do you draw the line between volunteer work and unpaid labour?
But questions remain about the plan’s actual intent and its potential impact on US universities’ current and future policies around existing faculty members. Read more
Reshaping the research landscape
The proposal from the advisory body in Washington DC calls for more career counselling at the graduate and postdoctoral levels, better data on career outcomes at those levels, three-year caps on postdocs under principal investigators and new non-tenure track academic research positions, among other changes. To implement all the proposals would require a US$2 billion increase to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s budget, as well as subsequent budget raises to prevent future funding bottlenecks. Read more
Fewer women lead top universities
Just 34 of leading universities named in this year’s annual Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings have female presidents, down 1% from the 36 that were led by women in 2017. Read more
Depression and anxiety are common among graduate students
More than 40% of respondents to the voluntary survey had anxiety scores in the moderate to severe range, and nearly 40% of respondents showed signs of moderate to severe depression. Both rates were more than six times greater than those found in the general public using the same standardized questionnaires. Read more