In 2012, Rink Hoekstra received two emails on the same day. One was from a journal editor, telling him that a manuscript was being rejected based on the recommendations of two reviewers. The other was from one of those reviewers, complimenting the paper and congratulating him on a job well done. The reviewer, Fiona Fidler, discovered that her review had been altered, and Rink and Fiona teamed out to figure out why. We spoke with Rink in 2018 about what happened, but we held on to the interview in anticipation of the episode being covered by the press. There's now an article out in Science, by journalist Cathleen O'Grady. In our conversation we talk about what happened, and we broaden out to a discussion of publication ethics. Why would an editor want to change a review without asking the reviewer? How does that damage a system that already has so little accountability? And what can authors or reviewers do when they suspect something is up?

Link:

• Delete offensive language? Change recommendations? Some editors say it’s OK to alter peer reviews, by Cathleen O'Grady

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 86. Our interview was recorded on October 26, 2018; the introduction was recorded on October 28, 2020.

Academics are under enormous stress right now, raising the possibility of a rising rate of burnout. Longtime structural trends in higher education have increased pressures for demonstrable productivity. On top of that are a global pandemic, resistance and backlash to calls for racial justice, and unstable politics in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere. In this episode we discuss burnout in academia. We focus on an emerging perspective from the healthcare field that describes burnout as resulting from moral injury. How is this idea relevant to people working in academia? In what ways can we be hurt by being trapped between the ideals and values that brought us into the field and the demands of our working environments? What can we do about it? Plus: A letter about reviewing papers from the global south that do not fit into the usual discourse.

Links:

• Andrew Wilson's Twitter thread about burnout
• Moral Injury and Burnout in Medicine: A Year of Lessons Learned by Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot, Stat
• Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People by Jennifer Moss, Harvard Business Review
• Job Burnout by Christina Maslach, Wilmar Schaufeli, and Michael Leiter, Annual Review of Psychology

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 85. It was recorded on September 16/17 (US/AUS), 2020.

Academics love awards. We give out career awards, mid-career awards, early-career awards. We give out awards for the best paper, the best theory, the best teaching, the best service. But what function do all those awards serve? And are we the better for having them? In this episode we talk about how awards fit into the academic ecosystem. How do recipients benefit from them? How do they help the organizations and research communities that give them out? What kinds of biases are baked into the system, and how can we counteract them? Should we consider radically changing how academic awards work, or even doing away with them? Plus: We answer a letter about why academia and policy research have such different norms around checking their numbers.

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 84. It was recorded on September 2/3 (US/AUS), 2020.