Theme | Quote |
---|---|
Biomedicine | |
Sloppy reporting | ‘Take things that are reported as a decrease of 80% in tumour rate. Well, when you attempt to repeat the experiment you get a 60% decrease so obviously their 80% was the most positive result from all the times they tried…’—PhD student |
Insufficient supervision | ‘If you have a PhD student and you completely throw her in at the deep end, surely you increase the chance of irresponsible research’—Full professor |
Inflexible reviewers | ‘So everything that is novel or different, it requires an lot of effort to get that accepted in the, in the journals, due to most likely also rigid reviewers’—Assistant professor |
Natural sciences | |
Review misconduct | ‘I had it once with a journal editor who was being really difficult about a publication of mine. And then he managed to get his own publication [with the same idea] in before mine’—Full professor |
Team spirit missing | ‘Research is no one man show, you have to teach them [PhD students] to also let go, it is not just theirs. The same holds for what I do, it is not just mine, it is a team effort...’—Assistant professor |
Social sciences | |
Sloppy reviewing | ‘You’re on a grant review panel and you’re judging someone whom you have a personal or professional relationship with. You’re an editor of a journal and you don’t recuse yourself for a conflict of interest with the author of a paper’—Associate professor |
Sloppy methods and statistics | ‘What is so horrible about these strategies is, post-hoc storytelling, salami slicing, is how you win the game, this is how you become a professor, this what you should do. Some professors even tell you, like: this is what you should do’—Postdoctoral researcher |
Insufficient supervision | ‘Supervisors exploiting their PhD students. I think that can be sort of extended into any type of harassment; sexual, personal, mental harassment, whatever it is. Also about any type of power relationship that there is and… that he demands co-authorships, that supervisors say… I want to be on this paper, I am on this paper, not as a question but, you know, as a statement...’ —Postdoctoral researcher |
Humanities | |
Uncritical reviewing | ‘What you see is that, there is no review culture, in which the standards of what constitutes good and bad publications are adequately present, to filter out actual hoaxes’—Full professor |
Lack of supervision | ‘I have a PhD student who got sent to me from abroad… I said well, when did you last speak to your supervisor? And he said no, no, no, because you can answer my questions better, the last couple of months I didn’t, because I was saving it up for you… While the actual supervision who will get… the credits is actually not an expert.’ —Assistant professor |