Advice for early-career peer reviewers
The peer-review system, despite its flaws, is a central component of the publication process. However, relatively little guidance is provided for early-career scientists on 2 important aspects of peer review:
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‘Junior ERC grants’ mooted
The Council of the EU looks set to ask the European Research Council to consider setting up a new category of grants to help student researchers establish their careers.
Taking the lead in the lab
Eight scientists share the secrets of being a successful principal investigator
Survey on challenges faced by young scientists
Weâre interested in hearing about the challenges faced by early-career scientists worldwide, especially if you've recently started your own lab, are struggling to maintain a lab, or have left research. We want to hear your stories. Your answers may feature in articles published by Nature's news team.
Should writing for the public count toward tenure?
The American Sociological Association is starting a conversation to include “public communication” -- work often largely ignored -- in the assessment of a scholar’s contributions. Why does it matter?
Choosing the nontenure track
“Isn't this just a glorified postdoc position? Won't taking this offer hurt my chances of landing a tenure-track professor position?”
How Scientific Success in Physics Depends on Network Positions
Utilizing 250,000 papers from ArXiv.org we construct large coauthorship networks to investigate how individual network positions influence scientific success. Surprisingly, inter(sub)disciplinary collaborations decrease the probability of getting a paper published in specialized journals for almost all positions.
The Bratislava Declaration of Young Researchers
The Bratislava Declaration of Young Researchers calls on member states and the European Commission to recognize the special role that young researchers play for science, development, innovation and economic growth in Europe.
Career advice highlights from the EuroScience Open Forum
Speakers covered topics including talking to your supervisor about career plans and navigating the evolving publishing landscape.
Top 10 tips for starting your first academic job
With university staff thinking about the start of the next academic year, Robert MacIntosh and Kevin O'Gorman offer some advice to staff due to arrive on campus this autumn.
Reward the forgotten foot soldiers of science
The story of CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing has tended to focus on a few key players.
So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors
There is such a surplus of Ph.D.s that in the most popular fields, like biomedicine, fewer than one in six reach their goal in academia.
Keep it moving
A postdoc job is good for your career, but don't get stuck in an academic cul-de-sac, says Søren-Peter Olesen.
The measure of success
Rather than focusing on what members of underrepresented groups need to do to “adapt” to academic culture, we should be interrogating the system itself, which expects all of us to work excessively at the expense of our physical and mental health.
You Probably Won't Get Tenure. Get Your Ph.D. Anyway.
The one broadly marketable skill a humanist might acquire in graduate school is the ability to teach.
A winding path to satisfaction
Many feel there is only one path to success and that any deviations will be catastrophic. My own academic path might seem to support this belief. On the surface, it appears quite linear: undergrad, grad student, postdoc, faculty member. But if you look deeper, you will see the series of roadblocks and revised plans that led me to where I am today.
Leveraging Doctoral Requirements to Promote Reproducibility
How can reproducibility be funded and enforced? One solution is to make it a part of the requirements to complete a PhD.
Job-Seeking Ph.D. Holders Look to Life Outside School
As the supply of doctorate holders grows and their academic job prospects dwindle, schools take steps to help graduates find work beyond the academy.
The fool’s gold of Ph.D. employment data
Making proclamations about the scientific enterprise based on sparse employment and career data about junior scientists has become a common endeavor. But this approach is fundamentally flawed.
Lab Wars, a game of scientific sabotage
Two researchers today launch a game that captures this anarchic spirit. Board-game fans Caezar Al-Jassar, a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and Kuly Heer, a clinical psychologist, have designed the card game Lab Wars to represent the scientific rat race, with extra sabotage.
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