r/academia

I recently lost my husband (a senior academic), suddenly and totally unexpectedly. I am in my mid 40s and on a fixed term fellowship. Alongside this, my husband and I worked together a lot.

It is like a nuclear bomb has gone off in my life and everything has been razed to the ground. The grief is unbearably painful. But alongside it, I am worried about everything - money, precarity, my ability to keep writing and publishing while I feel the worst I have ever felt.

If anyone has walked in my shoes or has any advice I would be so grateful.

i'm a current undergrad student who wants to be a high school english teacher and a writer. i also want to pursue a phd in english. i'm not under any illusions about the job market for those aspirations. i'm fully aware that i don't need a phd for either of those paths and i'm aware of the financial and time costs of doctoral study (i definitely wouldn't do one that's not fully-funded). i know it's not going to get me rich or guarantee me a better job. but i still want one because i want to deepen my knowledge in my field, contribute to it, and i love reading and research.

so, am i naive?? is it dumb? are these bad reasons to pursue a phd? has anyone here pursued a humanities phd without the goal of working in academia? open to all perspectives!

4th year NLP PhD here. I switched research directions last year and ended up with two years of paper notes, lit summaries, experiment logs, and conference notes from the old area just sitting in a ghost folder.

they weren't completely useless, but I just wasn't opening them anymore, which felt like a massive waste of all that reading and hyper-focus.

instead of letting them rot or trying to force them into a full survey paper I didn't have time to write, I tried a different route. I dumped my old transformer notes and summaries into a public library using Linkly AI, basically making the whole folder something people can actually query.

it actually paid off last week. A collaborator asked about some background context in that old area. Instead of sending them a messy 100MB zip file or a list of 20 papers they'd never read, I just shared the library link and told them to run their questions through Claude against it. The answers actually surfaced directly from my old reading insights.

idk if this is a standard workflow for anyone else, but it feels like a solid middle ground for academic hoarders. Anyone else doing something similar with their abandoned literature graveyards?

I’m a wet lab rat. Most of my publications come from bench work, which is time-consuming and usually requires a lot of collaborators. However, during the pandemic I taught myself Python and data analysis, and I fell in love with it. I still do wet lab work, but data analysis has become kind of a hobby. Right now, I have two or three manuscripts that I think are publishable. The problem is that I did everything myself, from developing the hypothesis to running the analyses and writing the manuscript so, I’d be the only author. I’ve seen single-author papers before, but they’re not very common. In fact, I usually raise an eyebrow when I see one. Is it really that unusual?

How many Google Scholar citations do I need before I can get drunk and call myself a bohemian instead of a drunkard?

My friend asked me this because he is thinking about starting a PhD.

For reference, I have 17 citations and an h-index of 2

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I'm a research fellow working on a funded research project. A student was assigned a portion of the project and generated some of the experimental data.

When it came time to publish, I asked the student to prepare the manuscript. They weren't willing to write it. I provided guidance and comments, but there was very little engagement. Eventually, my PI asked me to write the manuscript from scratch.

I ended up writing every section, formatting, and submitting the manuscript to a journal from his thesis.

Now the journal has sent comments that require revisions and author input. The student, who is listed as the first author, is still not responding or taking responsibility for the revisions. Once again, my PI expects me to handle everything while the student remains the first author.

I completely understand mentoring students and helping them improve their writing. What I'm struggling with is this: if someone is unwilling to write the manuscript, doesn't meaningfully participate in revisions, and doesn't respond during the journal review process, should they still be the first author?

How do your labs handle situations like this? Have you encountered similar authorship disputes, and if so, how were they resolved?

I'm just wondering about this. I remember when I was doing my undergrad philosophy and he was just considered a good guy to cite and whose work was admired, be it his linguistics or his foreign policy. In a lot of the online spaces I occupy the prevailing attitude has been that his legacy is forever ruined.

What is the prevailing attitude about him in academia since the Epstein reveals?

I have always been a bit confused about how the university system actually works. Growing up, I just assumed that a lecturer was the person who teaches the classes, and a professor was the one locked away doing research.😅

I am about to start my bachelor's degree, and I find myself thinking a lot about my future. My absolute dream is to become a university teacher. I genuinely love teaching, and I want my entire career to be focused on guiding students. The catch is that I want to completely avoid doing research. While it is possible my mindset might change by the time I reach my master's, right now, I know in my bones that I only want to teach🥲.

The problem is that trying to figure this out online has been incredibly frustrating. The advice out there is totally contradictory. Some people say teaching-only roles simply do not exist in higher education. Others say they do, but warn that it is a trap where the pay is awful, there are zero benefits, and you live with the constant anxiety of having to renew your contract every single semester. I honestly do not care about having a fancy title or crazy benefits, but I do need to know if this is a safe, realistic way to make a living.

Even if I stay in academia my entire life, I have absolutely no desire to climb the ladder and become a professor. I would be perfectly happy just staying a lecturer side.😁

So, what is the actual job title for someone who only teaches at a university? Is this a safe, realistic path, and what is the honest truth about the pay and job security?😅

I'm planning to take my bachelor in an applied science university (in germany) so I also want to know if that would get in the way of what i want.

So, at what point do you acknowledge someone's contribution to a study and at what level?

If someone helps you write a protocol that leads to publishable data generation, they should get a good acknowledgement: authorship, mentioned in talks.

What about if someone shows you the basics of something and you develop a protocol independently?

So straight to the point I'm a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology. I'm kinda in a transition period where I'm trying to get a early career fellowship or into faculty. So to that end I came up with a proposal and submitted it to a few opportunities but nothing sticking as of yet.

Now I did get +90% in the MSCA so I know it's solid. But as it's slow moving trying to get funding I decided to take the preliminary data and turn it into a paper. Now I did this during a 6 month period where I moved back from the U.S and looked for another job. I've just finished the draft and ready to submit. My original plan was to ask my previous PI's and my current PI to review it and then submit with me as the last author and as correspondence with them as co-authors.

My issue is though who could I put as the first author because it's usually reserved for the person who did the work which was me. But I can't put anyone else as a senior author either because it's not their idea or done under their supervision because again it's my sole project that I've developed for my own research programme/proposals.

Now I could submit it myself as sole author but that seems really strange in the stem field and honestly I would prefer someone to look over it anyway because I have a tendency to overlook things.

Would you use this?

As someone in the interminable literature review stage, I am sorely tempted, but then I catch myself being terrified of not being able to justify my references.

I am a 3rd year PhD student and have quite hostile interactions with my PI almost every other day. He has yelled at me separately and also with one other lab mate for petty things and some trial analysis which he agreed upon and forgot almost immediately. On top of these he has not been paying for 10months now as the funding is scarce. I have informed the graduate coord but he wasn't of much help. I was pretty convinced about either leaving and going to a different lab (just one lab that's working on the same field) or leaving with a Master's. But yesterday I spoke to a professor who's in my committee and he convinced me to finish the PhD by collecting relevant data as soon as possible and then trying to work with my co supervisor for the rest of the time in about 18months.

I would love for anyone to give me a fresh perspective and if I should suck it up and continue or leave in peace with a Master's.

*More such incidents have been happening for a year which I've overlooked thinking I need to improve anyway or thinking he's kind in other ways.

I 27 F , my_qualifications are :completed masters degree and is persuing PhD currently. I just published a paper on a journal named " Journal of Entomological Research" . Now upon checking the Scopus...the years currently covered by Scopus is shown as: 2011 to 2025. I downloaded the source title list excel sheet and the journal shows as active but it is not showing in both accepted titles or discontinued titles. I am confused if the journal is still Scopus indexed in 2026 or not?

Update: Thank you for replying and helping me figure it out. I researched through the night and realised that it might just be an indexing lag as the source list excel of previous years had shown indexing lag for this journal. So let me wait and fingers crossed.

How common is it for external hires (at associate or full professor level) to be offered substantially higher salaries than existing same rank faculty who have the same or better records? And how to respond when that happens? Is the only option getting a counter offer at another university?

I'm early-mid career in academic libraries. I've been at my job for several years and am looking for a new challenge at a different academic library. I found several job postings that look great - great areas, universities, and salaries. However, I'm curious about whether employees are required to contribute to social security on top of the university/state retirement plan. I live in a state with no income tax and my institution doesn't require us to contribute to social security. Moving to a state with income tax, state retirement contribution, AND social security contribution could easily negate a salary increase. This information isn't always readily available on university websites. Would it be weird for me to cold-email their university HR department and ask while my application is still pending in their system?

I was always told not to talk about finances until you get a job offer, but the mental labor of customizing application materials and going through 2 interview cycles seems like a lot just to get to the end and realize I can't afford to take the job. Any advice?

I am studying 20 slides for both of my classes as of this time period. I have papers that I need to complete and write without the entire use of AI.

Like, they really want to throw me out of this school. No, we will call the Office of Student Integrity.

I can't have personal advice.

Note: Why do I keep getting dislikes?

Self explanatory but its a researcher out in indonesia or something. More so I came to ask if there are any other tells of AI generated research papers which I can avoid.

I'll open a paper that's blowing up on Twitter, see 800 retweets, and then sit there reading it completely alone. No way to know if the person next to me (metaphorically) is confused at the same section, excited about the same result, or has context I'm missing.

Comments sections are dead or don't exist. Twitter discussion is fragmented and you have to go find it. Discord servers are too broad.

Is this just me or does anyone else feel like reading technical content is weirdly isolating despite the internet existing?