Things you don't say out loud in academia [9 open secrets]

Comments · 2.6K

• AN

  @anarchoraven · 3 years ago

  Philosopher here, all of my papers are a 100% reproducible

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• R3

  @r3lativ · 3 years ago

  10. You typically get a job in academia based on networks, rather than pure merit of your work. Having an advisor who gets invited to give lots of talks to various places increases your chances a lot.

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• ER

  @ericdodson2644 · 3 years ago

  #10:  Never admit that a fairly large proportion of star-academicians can't teach their way out of a paper bag.

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• JA

  @jamesalansmith9238 · 2 years ago

  I probably shouldn&apos;t mention this, but... <br><br>The best one I saw was a senior academic doing the work and then applying for funding after. This meant they knew a) how much it would cost, b) how long it would take and c) what the results would be. From a funding source&apos;s PoV, this academic was a genius: These projects would always come in at cost, slightly under time and the predictions were perfect. Because of the seniority of this person, funding would be given with very few questions. <br><br>Once granted, the funding would actually be used for other research that would itself be &quot;officially&quot; funded by a later application when completed!

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• AS

  @askittenlove13 · 3 years ago

  Arts and humanities here. Here’s another unspoken truth: you really only need one semi interesting idea that you can reframe, paraphrase, rework slightly for the rest of your academic career

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• SK

  @SkorjOlafsen · 3 years ago

  My father and a group of his peers invented a professor to cite on their papers. &nbsp;They&apos;d invent fictional references for the fictional prof, cite him as an extra citation on non-controversial items, and then track how these cites spread throughout papers in the field (communications). &nbsp;Turns out it&apos;s rather common to blindly copy the cites from another paper without even checking that they exist. &nbsp;Saves a lot of time, I guess.

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• SA

  @samsonsoturian6013 · 3 years ago

  When I started the PhD program the first thing I noticed was professors trying to sound smart TO ME. I started subbing a the local high school and I&apos;m somehow this awesome high flying academic... And that&apos;s the day I realized no one in the world has any frickin clue what they&apos;re doing.

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• LO

  @logan7161 · 3 years ago

  My advisor let me in on the &quot;can&apos;t fail students&quot; aspect. He was flustered one day and I asked what was wrong. He said something along the lines of, &quot;I have this student who just won&apos;t do their work, but I can&apos;t fail them because my boss has warned me that I fail too many students. I can&apos;t help it if the student literally will not submit work, yet it is somehow my fault..&quot; &nbsp;I learned a valuable lesson that day. <br><br>And yes, the student passed the class.

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• MI

  @mike200017 · 3 years ago

  I would add to this list:<br>1) The literature review or prior work sections of papers are mostly about stroking the ego and boosting citation counts for the people who are likely to peer-review your paper. They are more likely to accept your paper if they see some of their own being cited and praised. And if you miss a reviewer&apos;s main papers, they will often give you, as part of their review feedback, a list of papers you need to cite if you want your paper accepted.<br>2) Minor conferences (with none or only partial peer-review) are just a way to get your institution to pay for a holiday. They mostly tend to be located in places like the Caribbeans or southern Europe.<br>3) Given that the objective is to publish as many papers as possible, every chunk of research work (whatever it might consist of in your field, like a new algorithm, a new math derivation, a big experiment that was conducted, etc.) will be divided up in as many pieces as possible to milk it for as many individual papers as possible instead of producing a single much more substantial paper. When doing a lit review, you will often have to cobble together several very repetitive papers from the same authors to get a complete picture of what they actually did.<br>4) Maybe not applicable to all fields, but I suspect it applies to most. Nobody understands statistics. There are dozens of statistical tests that can be used to tell if some results are significant (i.e., not due to random chance or some extraneous factors), and each of them are based on very specific assumptions that no one really pays attention to. Most people just try out a bunch of them, arbitrarily, until they get one that says that their results are significant.

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• TE

  @tenebrousjones4897 · 3 years ago

  As a student, I found that the fastest way to get a prof to shut you down is to say &quot;I disagree,&quot; and then provide reasoning.

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• ON

  @OntologyofValue · 3 years ago (edited)

  Great material, Andy! I would add to this list:<br>1. I hired you because you are docile and you will keep on writing papers using a method I developed 20 years ago,<br>2. You are a cheap labor who is only as valuable as his/her publication list,<br>3. The only purpose for us to go to a research conference is to dance, get drunk and forget about our jobs,<br>4. Our methodology has become obsolete but I only have five years left till retirement so let&apos;s keep on going.

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• CL

  @clivemitchell3229 · 3 years ago

  I worked at a university in a non-academic role and was shocked to find that 40% of our medical research grants were skimmed by the university as &quot;admin fees&quot; because the university was primarily a profit-seeking business. I also came to the conclusion that papers were written primarily because papers had to be published (though occasionally a paper would turn up that was actually game-changing) and that journals accepted mediocre papers because they needed papers to publish.

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