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The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying
[Image: see text] Academic bullying occurs when senior scientists direct abusive behavior such as verbal insults, public shaming, isolation, and threatening toward vulnerable junior colleagues such as postdocs, graduate students and lab members. We believe that one root cause of bullying behavior is...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Tabriz University of Medical Sciences
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6977587/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31988851 http://dx.doi.org/10.15171/bi.2019.30 |
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author | Mahmoudi, Morteza Ameli, Saya Moss, Sherry |
author_facet | Mahmoudi, Morteza Ameli, Saya Moss, Sherry |
author_sort | Mahmoudi, Morteza |
collection | PubMed |
description | [Image: see text] Academic bullying occurs when senior scientists direct abusive behavior such as verbal insults, public shaming, isolation, and threatening toward vulnerable junior colleagues such as postdocs, graduate students and lab members. We believe that one root cause of bullying behavior is the pressure felt by scientists to compete for rankings designed to measure their scientific worth. These ratings, such as the h-index, have several unintended consequences, one of which we believe is academic bullying. Under pressure to achieve higher and higher rankings, in exchange for positive evaluations, grants and recognition, senior scientists exert undue pressure on their junior staff in the form of bullying. Lab members have little or no recourse due to the lack of fair institutional protocols for investigating bullying, dependence on grant or institutional funding, fear of losing time and empirical work by changing labs, and vulnerability to visa cancellation threats among international students. We call for institutions to reconsider their dependence on these over-simplified surrogates for real scientific progress and to provide fair and just protocols that will protect targets of academic bullying from emotional and financial distress. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6977587 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Tabriz University of Medical Sciences |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-69775872020-01-27 The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying Mahmoudi, Morteza Ameli, Saya Moss, Sherry Bioimpacts Perspective [Image: see text] Academic bullying occurs when senior scientists direct abusive behavior such as verbal insults, public shaming, isolation, and threatening toward vulnerable junior colleagues such as postdocs, graduate students and lab members. We believe that one root cause of bullying behavior is the pressure felt by scientists to compete for rankings designed to measure their scientific worth. These ratings, such as the h-index, have several unintended consequences, one of which we believe is academic bullying. Under pressure to achieve higher and higher rankings, in exchange for positive evaluations, grants and recognition, senior scientists exert undue pressure on their junior staff in the form of bullying. Lab members have little or no recourse due to the lack of fair institutional protocols for investigating bullying, dependence on grant or institutional funding, fear of losing time and empirical work by changing labs, and vulnerability to visa cancellation threats among international students. We call for institutions to reconsider their dependence on these over-simplified surrogates for real scientific progress and to provide fair and just protocols that will protect targets of academic bullying from emotional and financial distress. Tabriz University of Medical Sciences 2020 2019-09-25 /pmc/articles/PMC6977587/ /pubmed/31988851 http://dx.doi.org/10.15171/bi.2019.30 Text en © 2020 The Author(s) This work is published by BioImpacts as an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Perspective Mahmoudi, Morteza Ameli, Saya Moss, Sherry The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
title | The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
title_full | The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
title_fullStr | The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
title_full_unstemmed | The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
title_short | The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
title_sort | urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying |
topic | Perspective |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6977587/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31988851 http://dx.doi.org/10.15171/bi.2019.30 |
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