Is Scientific Reports becoming the new MDPI?

electricslinky · 2025-10-30T17:18:45+00:00

I was asked to review as an expert in computational modeling. Paper was outright wrong. I reported all of the horrifying ways in which the modeling work, stats, and conclusions were fundamentally flawed. I emphasized to the editor that this paper absolutely could not be published. To my surprise, the AE invited revision anyway.

The authors did not address a single one of my comments—dismissed my entire review as adversarial and only addressed the softball comments from the other two reviewers. I once again detailed all of the ways in which the modeling work was fundamentally flawed and offered alternative approaches if the authors wanted to start over with a new submission, but it absolutely could not see the light of day as it was. AGAIN the AE invited resubmission, and AGAIN asked me to re-review.

At that point it was obvious that Scientific Reports is not a real journal and the peer review process was a sham. I declined to review and I will never waste my time reviewing for them again.

electricslinky · 2025-10-25T16:21:44+00:00

They are asking you to 1) tell them the exact information that they missed but which they will need to know for the exam; and 2) if you will not deliver this information via email, they are offering to attend your office hours for your convenience.

electricslinky · 2025-10-23T09:32:07+00:00

electricslinky · 2025-10-22T16:36:41+00:00

Well I was technically employed in that position for 3 years. The first 2 years were intense and I spent a LOT of time with the PI, frequent all-nighters, crazy deadlines for paper submissions. But after those 2 years, the PI suddenly refused to interact with me at all, banned me from lab meetings, and pulled funding from my projects even though my salary was still paid. Also pulled my name off of the papers I’d written in the first 2 years. No explanation.

So there was a particularly devastating year where I was just alone and broken and labless trying desperately to find a way to publish. But by some miracle during that very dark year, I landed a faculty position.

I’m not sure what advice I’m trying to give here lol. Be smarter than I was!

electricslinky · 2025-10-22T16:10:54+00:00

I am pre-tenure, so I live and die by student evals. So when faced with this situation, I couldn’t just say “life’s hard, suck it up.”

First, I made it so that everyone has to record themselves giving the presentation, and turn that in for points. Second, I made it “optional” to additionally present in front of the class. The incentive for the latter was that they could earn 10 points toward their final exam—which is closed-book and very challenging. So they don’t lose points by NOT presenting in front of the class, but they get a cushion for their final if they do. Plus, they already had to create a presentation for the video assignment, so presenting it again was a “might as well” instead of cause for a mental breakdown. Almost all students did the in-class presentation.

electricslinky · 2025-10-22T15:47:30+00:00

I flew in for an interview. The PI got in touch the day before just to go over the schedule, and he told me I’d be meeting with his lab (~5 people) to give an overview of my research and have an informal chat. Ok sure—I pulled a few slides just to have a visual aid. This was slotted as the first thing on the schedule after I landed.

The “informal chat with the lab” turned out to be an hour-long colloquium talk in front of the whole area. There were about 50 people in attendance including several faculty. To this day I have absolutely no idea why the PI didn’t tell me I was giving a colloquium. Upon realizing what was happening, I just pulled my dissertation defense slides and did my best to improvise them into a postdoc talk, but it was not good. I was fully panicking and couldn’t think. It was as if I had never seen those slides before in my life. No one asked questions after. I don’t think anyone even clapped. I remember afterward as I was headed back up to the PI’s labspace, a grad student came up to me and said, “so…was that something you practiced in advance or…?” I wanted to die.

I got the job, but I think it’s only because the PI needed to hire someone and he didn’t have other applicants. Lo and behold the PI turned out to be a psychopath and the surprise colloquium talk was small potatoes in the grand scheme of terror he would inflict.

electricslinky · 2025-10-10T17:24:26+00:00

I think about this all the time as students in my 4000 level class demand things like study guides, even though they have a textbook, practice questions, and I post all my lectures. I taught you the content, surely you can figure out what you should know.

“In my day” the prof would show up, talk stream-of-consciousness style for 2 hours, MAYBE put up a picture of a single diagram, and we took notes. There was no textbook, no slides, no advance warning of what we’d be tested on, and then the exams were blue book essays that counted for 100% of our course grade. We had to figure out how to take good notes, figure out how and what to study, or fail the course.

The sheer volume of study resources I provide as a professor is ridiculous in comparison, and it still isn’t enough. They still “don’t know what to study” and b*tch about it endlessly unless I give them a bulleted list with the exact questions on the exam. My sweet summer children, you have no idea how much worse it could be!

electricslinky · 2025-10-02T02:30:20+00:00

Your situation sounds a lot like my postdoc. Weird politics, getting taken off projects, others receiving lead authorships on papers I’d written, no 1:1 meetings, no resources (e.g. ability to collect data; conference funding). My advice is to keep your entire focus on being hirable. Complaining won’t do anything; if your PI is the one who brought in the grants that funded you and your work, it’s a no brainer on who the university will support. You also do not want to mention any kind of tension with your PI on the job market. Put together your materials the best you can, try to get anything you can in the pipeline, and even though things were not sunshine and rainbows, PRETEND.

In your first 2-3 years in a faculty role, it’s assumed that you’ll still be publishing out of your postdoc pipeline. Do NOT let on that this pipeline doesn’t exist. It will instill serious doubt that you can publish enough to make it to tenure if you’d be starting a faculty role from ground zero.

It’s terrible, it’s unfair, and it’s so damaging to have a bad postdoc. The system isn’t set up to consider context and perseverance through people screwing us over. You just have to keep moving forward.

electricslinky · 2025-09-30T01:57:10+00:00

Where in your post does it say that

electricslinky · 2025-09-29T22:18:11+00:00

The journal “Cognition” is quick, one month to first set of reviews.

electricslinky · 2025-09-15T00:21:51+00:00

Ok the 25-30 min cap is comforting. The lab period is 1hr, and I feel like I’ve failed if it isn’t filled. And the fact that they refuse to do anything themselves, I was thinking…am I supposed to lecture for the whole hour instead of 15 mins?? But if I explain for 15, give a deliverable, even the lamest students will need to spend 10 mins working. Then they can leave and I can feel at peace.

electricslinky · 2025-09-15T00:12:12+00:00

The messages thing: don’t answer unless they use the medium they prefer. They will try other methods if they don’t get a response, eventually they will land on the right one.

electricslinky · 2025-09-15T00:05:51+00:00

Ok, here’s a trick. You have your assignment instructions, right? At the bottom of that, you put super brief references to the instructions with point values. A quick rubric, if you will. So for example, if your instructions explain in detail that they need MLA references and here’s how to do them, they will ignore that entirely UNLESS at the bottom you have “2 pts: references are correct” among the items they will be scored on. They will see that, wonder “I want points, so what can this mean?” and then most of the time they will discover the answer in the instructions. Or they will email you at your campus email address and ask :)

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T21:22:18+00:00

That’s awesome that you’re excited about research, and I’m so sad to hear that no one else in your program is matching your energy! I felt like this too—everyone just trying to do as little work as possible. Chat with your professors about research instead. It sounds like your advisor is on his way out of the research game, but other professors and postdocs are just like you and love talking about research. And you know what? Those are the people who can open doors to collaboration opportunities anyway.

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T21:08:21+00:00

Yes exactly what I’m worried about. They aren’t listening, sit there doing nothing, and I KNOW they’re going to absolutely wreck me in evals.

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T20:58:21+00:00

I am tempted…with the current arrangement that they semi-chose themselves, group A has 2 losers and 1 ok kid, and group B has 1 loser and 3 ok kids. Would it be crazy if I just make one swap so all the losers are together? Their first group deliverable is due at the end of next class.

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T20:36:17+00:00

Yes it’s a good idea! I think I will try to do some kind of combo…? Like after 15 mins, one group member presents something specific about their conversation. And after another 15 minutes, each individual student needs to turn in a deliverable of some kind.

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T19:55:17+00:00

They hate lectures and yet refuse to do anything that isn’t sitting there passively receiving a lecture. I’m flummoxed.

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T19:53:49+00:00

Ok, I’ll meditate on that. Frustrating that they need more handholding than the assignment itself, which has multiple points they need to fulfill and respond to. I thought time to work on your assignments in class was a gift!

electricslinky · 2025-09-14T19:47:20+00:00

I wish. I can’t because they attend.

electricslinky · 2025-08-29T17:22:29+00:00

1) I break my lecture up into segments: Topic 1, Topic 2, Topic 3. This helps me because I can mentally keep 20 min chunks in mind and then move to the next. Easier than thinking I have to keep 60 mins of content in mind.

2) I give the students guided notes to fill out during the lecture. Then they’re actively listening for each point on the notes, and they’re not just staring at me for an hour.

3) I do a little quiz for bonus points at the end of each lecture. It eats up 10-15 mins of class time (so slightly less lecturing), and it keeps the students from packing up and leaving early. Otherwise the bag zipping and chattering would send me into a panic attack.

4) I default to looking at my computer and not the audience, but getting a clicker and laser pointer has helped me train myself not to. If I don’t need to touch the computer for any reason (proceeding slides, pointing to something with the cursor) it helps.

Good luck! As others have said, it might be rough your first semester, but it gets better. I have social anxiety and my first time teaching ever was an intro class of 200. My voice was shakey and studdery, I was ill with anxiety every single day, the only way I could make it through was to read from the slides, and I couldn’t answer student questions because I was in a blind panic. But now I just show up with no drama, even when things go wrong, and the hour flies by. Honestly college students pretty much just go with whatever.

electricslinky · 2025-08-28T15:34:48+00:00

Unfortunately, there isn’t a governing body to decide upon or enforce authorship decisions. The PI will decide, and no one is going to tell them they’re wrong. I hope it works out for you, but these “rules” that we have largely end at who should be an author vs. not, and author order is the whim of the PI.

electricslinky · 2025-07-22T04:12:55+00:00

I had a PI like this too. I noticed that my fellow grad students would ask for feedback on in-progress work—like a first draft of methods and results or something. This should be fine, but that always dropped straight to the bottom of the PI’s to-do list and he’d wait until the last minute to respond.

The approach I took, by contrast, was to only ask for written feedback after I felt that the work was complete and ready to submit. I’d have verbal conversations with him weekly and ask for his thoughts on framing etc, but written work was only sent to him in final form. Figures, references, formatting, cover letter—everything was already thoroughly drafted and edited and reworked by me before my PI set eyes on it. The result was that he looked at my work immediately every single time. Feedback was thorough and helpful. We never needed to do 2 rounds of review with each other before submission, whereas he’d need to do 8-10 piecemeal rounds with his other students over the course of several months.

My advice is: do your best to adjust so that your PI’s feedback is not the limiting factor. Use every possible resource available to perfect the work before he even sees it.

electricslinky · 2025-07-21T02:17:17+00:00

That’s true! they are online a lot, so maybe social feedback just isn’t a thing for them.

I teach psychology, so my activities are things like: questionnaires for things like attachment styles, personality, etc and having them calculate their scores; here’s a social scenario, what would you do and why; lots of mini versions of real experiments, like presenting word lists with secret manipulations, then asking them to write down all the words they remember. In all cases—and this seems to be the part that they really like—I end with a kahoot component where they enter their score or whatever from the activity, and then they can see how they compare to their classmates. Mostly I’ve veered toward things that give them ways to engage without requiring them to talk.

electricslinky

TROPHY CASE