Hello PhD

It starts innocently enough with an email.

This mail is with reference of your article published in the Journal of Cell Science, which is of good quality and making a good impact in the research field. In which you provided this email address to contact you. We would be glad if you submit your manuscript to our journal, we do accept and publish Research/Review/Case reports/Mini review/Commentaries, round the year.

Unfortunately, if you fall for the scam and submit your next manuscript to this predatory journal, you’ll lose both your money, AND your research.

This week, we talk with Dr. Antonio Peramo, PhD of scientificwritingcourses.com, about predatory journals and how YOU can identify and avoid them.

What are Predatory Journals?

Quite simply, predatory journals are scams that target researchers. They look and act like scholarly publishers, but end up prioritizing their profits over the advancement of science.

More formally, a consortium of researchers writing for Nature defined it this way:

“Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”Grudniewicz et al. Nature Comments, December 2019

A predatory journal solicits manuscripts from unsuspecting scientists, often dispenses with peer review in favor of speed, and charges exorbitant fees for pushing the article out through an open access website.

The Consequence of Predatory Journals

Aside from their economic impact (estimated at over $75 million in 2014), predatory journals harm researchers in other ways.

Articles published in these journals do not have the same impact as those published in higher-quality journals. Over 60% never get cited in a five year period, meaning the research goes effectively unnoticed.

Perhaps worse, when these un-reviewed and questionable articles do get noticed, the scientists who cite them in their own work contribute to ‘citation contamination.‘

Know the Warning Signs

There are several useful indicators that a journal is not legitimate and should never receive your manuscript. A full list can be found at the Cabell’s Blog, but here are a few to get you started.

A journal is suspect if:

* They make first contact with YOU requesting that you submit a manuscript.* They clearly do not know which scientific field you are working in.* The email contains spelling and grammatical errors you wouldn’t expect in business communications.* The editor isn’t listed on the website, or the editor listed also edits multiple other journals.* There is no mailing address.* The journal title looks similar to a well known journal, or it sounds real by nature of having ‘International Journal of…’ or ‘British Journal of…’ prefixes.

At some point in your graduate training, you’ll want to host an event.

For many students, that will mean inviting a speaker for a special seminar. For others, it might be an outreach event or a departmental retreat.

But no matter the purpose, you’ll probably feel a little lost as you try to nail down all the details during weeks or months of preparation.

We can’t make every scientist a certified event planner, but we’re here with a step-by-step guide for making your seminar or gathering a roaring success!

Event Planning 101

We start by sharing the hilarious and helpful article that inspired this episode: How (not) to plan a scientific event by Adam Ruben for Science Careers.

In it, Ruben relates his recent experience as an invited speaker at a University, only to find out that everything has gone wrong. He uses that story as a jumping-off point for all the ways you could REALLY screw up an event if you wanted to.

The advice is instructive, as long as you do the exact opposite! For example, he writes:

“If it’s a virtual event, provide a Zoom link—but only on paper, so that participants not only have to type an overwhelming string of characters but also have to figure out which ones are capital O’s and I’s versus zeroes and lowercase L’s. It should take participants at least an hour to type the information.”

We pick up his thread on the other side – what exactly SHOULD you be doing if you want to plan an event?

Planning is all about the Who, What, When, Where, and How on Earth am I supposed to get all of this done on time? We’ll start with the Who and What.

Know Your Audience

A successful event starts with understanding your audience – who exactly are you hosting this event for?

It’s the first consideration because it will help you determine so many other things about the event.

For example, if you want to host a seminar for grad students in your department, you might choose a speaker with a relevant career, you’ll pick a venue that will fit your cohort, and you’ll supply pizza. A seminar for the wider community might mean a bigger venue, a speaker who can translate complex topics for a lay audience, and much MORE pizza.

Do your best to define that target audience. Write it down and share it with your collaborators so you’re all on the same page about who this event will serve.

Timing is Everything

Next up, the “When?”

For any event, your goal is to book it at that perfect moment when everyone in the target audience can, and will, attend. That means avoiding conflicts, and aligning with motivations.

Conflicts come in many forms. Check your department calendar to make sure you’re not double-booking your event with the journal club, weekly seminar, or fall retreat. Avoid the major conference dates when people are either attending the meeting or scrambling to create a poster.

And it goes without saying that you’ll want to avoid holidays or even summer months when many people take extended vacations.

The time is just as important as the date! Pay attention to the department’s normal rhythm for events like yours. If you book the talk at 8AM on Monday morning, you can be sure no one will remember or be awake. Same for 6PM on Friday afternoon.

A PhD Plan sounds like an oxymoron, but charting a path to graduation is one of the most important things you can do as a graduate student.

This week, we talk with Hugh Kearns of Thinkwell about why PhD planning is so challenging for students, and learn about some tools that can keep your research on track.

Uncharted Territory

We start the conversation by trying to understand why planning is so difficult and so rare for PhDs.

“They’ve never done a PhD so they don’t know what’s coming,” Kearns observes. “And your previous education doesn’t prepare for research.”

He continues, “Research by its nature is uncertain. Things go wrong. And then what happens is people think that ‘Because I don’t know, we just won’t plan anything! We’ll see what happens.'”

But just because you’ve never done a PhD before, and no one has pursued your particular branch of research, that doesn’t mean you can’t plan ahead.

In fact, there are already tools and strategies, adapted from project management in the business world, that will help you set some guide rails around your winding path to a PhD.

Getting Your PhD Plan Backward

Traditional ‘forward’ planning works great for a well-worn process, like building a house. Builders know from experience that you can’t build the walls until you’ve poured the foundation, and you can’t paint until the drywall is installed.

Each of those activities has a reasonably predictable timeline, so you can plan the construction of a home week by week until it’s finished.

But a PhD isn’t quite at prescriptive. Sure, you know you need to do a literature review, but how long does that take? And how long will experiments take?

The fact is, they’ll take as much time as you give them. There’s no definitive ‘finish line’ for a literature review the way there is for a construction project. You just need to decide how long you’re willing to give the review, and stop when it’s ‘good enough.’

That’s why Kearns recommends ‘backward planning’ for PhDs. You start with an end date in mind (usually when the funding runs out) and work back from there.

His book, Planning Your PhD: All the tools and advice you need to finish your PhD in three years, lays out the steps in detail, and provides some worksheets you can use to create a multi-year Thesis Plan.

In fact, he offers those worksheets for free on the website!

Drilling into Detail

With your Thesis Plan in place, you can begin the process of adding more and more detail to the events closest in time.

This ‘rolling plan’ recognizes that you don’t know what you might be doing on Tuesday March 25 at 3PM three years from now, but you CAN decide on some goals over the next six months.

And don’t stress out if those goals shift, or you don’t quite manage to meet them. If you revisit your plan on a regular schedule, you can adjust and adapt.

If you never set the goal,

If you went to graduate school before the turn of the millennium, you probable expected to (eventually) land in a tenure-track position at a University. You may have known a few peers who got teaching gigs, or *gasp* went into ‘industry positions’, but the expectation was to follow in your mentor’s footsteps.

Today, lots of students earn a PhD knowing full well they won’t set foot on the tenure-track. They want to be science writers, policy advisors, staff scientists, or entrepreneurs.

And thankfully, graduate training programs are starting to adapt to this new reality. The first order of business when trying to help students achieve their myriad career goals is to start tracking key metrics.

You Manage What You Measure

Patrick Brandt is the Director of Career Development and Outreach in the Office of Graduate Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recently penned an article for Inside Higher Ed titled Ph.D.s Benefit When Universities Track Metrics and Outcomes.

He sat down with us this week to talk about his article, and how data is at the heart of the recent effort to improve graduate training.

The Coalition for Next Generation Life Science is comprised of 39 institutions that have committed to tracking data on demographics and student outcomes. You can visit their data repository to find your school, or one you’d like to attend.

Members of the coalition track all sorts of useful metrics, including application and enrollment rates by gender, race, and background.

They also track how long it takes to graduate and how many students complete the training. Useful information if you’re trying to plan your next 4-6 years!

Finally, they follow up with graduates of the program to determine where they’ve ended up. Are most students on the faculty track? Did they go to industry? Or did they end up in academia, but in an administrative or teaching role?

Point of Comparison

It’s fascinating to scroll through the data from different Universities. You’ll discover that a plurality of UPenn grads end up working in the for-profit sector while at UC SanDiego, more stay in Academia.

The median time-to-degree at Johns Hopkins has held steady around 5.7 years since 2008, but careful students will note that a bioinformatics degree from the University of Michigan may take you just 4.7 years!

Patrick also highlighted the National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group Report which reinforces the need for training programs to prepare students for a wide variety of careers:

“Graduate programs must accommodate a greater ran...

It’s time to open the mailbag once again to answer YOUR questions.

First, we read a couple of emails from listeners who have put Hello PhD advice to work in their training, and they’re already starting to see the benefits.

Nadia writes:

Thank you so much for your podcast. I discovered Hello PhD at the beginning of the pandemic and have listened to every single episode since. I have learned a lot and it has changed my perspective about my program and supervisor tremendously. Since listening to Hello PhD I feel less lonely and feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I have joined multiple student groups and other organizations to work on my soft skills.

Kudos to Nadia! We want everyone to realize: YOU ARE NOT ALONE! Whatever you’re going through, there are others just like you, struggling on parallel paths. Reaching out and telling your story is the only way those fellow travelers can be encouraged by your experience.

SciCom Opportunity

We also received a note from previous guest Dr. Mónica Feliú-Mójer, who chatted with us way back in Episode 92. At the time, she talked about her work in science communication, and particularly her work with iBiology.

Well, that work has produced an opportunity for other scientists to improve their communication skills:

I wanted to share that iBiology has a new and improved courses platform and that you can now sign-up for “Share Your Research”, our free, self-paced course focused on effective communication to help you give a good research talk. I was one of the course directors for SYR. The course focuses on providing scientists with practical research communication advice and as you go through it, the course helps you build a plan to help you craft a good research talk. Feel free to share with trainees and colleagues.

Thanks Mónica! Consider it shared!

What is a Research Statement?

A listener shared this question about their application:

Could you do an episode on writing a research statement?  I just stumbled upon this as a requirement for one of my applications and I don’t know where to start. I am not THAT deep into the subject, but I already included in my cover letter a brief summary of my latest research, why I want to do research and where I want to go with my research in the future and how this project would fit into that (very briefly). I don’t want to repeat what I wrote in my cover letter but I feel it is the same information.

Josh describes the expected elements of a research statement, and we attempt to untangle the types of information you’d want to include there, versus the more personal or motivational profile you might include in a cover letter.

No need to repeat yourself, just carve up the information and put it in its proper place.

How Do I Explain a Bad Semester?

Finally, we answer this email from Frances:

I am a first generation college student currently doing a Post Bac on a Diversity Supplement. I worry that my undergraduate grades will negatively impact my entire application. I know you both have mentioned how one bad grade in isolation won’t hold much weight, however what about a whole semester due to personal issues that could be explained? Would taking graduate level courses and doing well i...

The Peer Review villain, alternatively known as ‘Reviewer 2’ or ‘Reviewer 3’, has gained meme status. This is the person who takes your submitted journal article, drenches it in red ink, shreds it, burns it, and feeds the ashes to feral pigs.

And unfortunately, it has happened to all of us. There always seems to be one reviewer that doesn’t just ask for additional experiments, but finds a way to cut a little deeper.

Maybe it comes in the form of an emotive shaming (“Disappointingly, the authors failed to cite Smith, 2015”) or a veiled accusation (“It seems possible that the outlier data has been scrubbed from this report.”), but however it happens, it can affect something more than your experiments.

Some hostile comments might make you wonder whether you belong in science at all.

But, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it shouldn’t be this way.

This week, we talk with a linguist and a psychologist about carefully crafting your peer reviews.

Peer Review Detox

Dr. Rebekah Baglini and Dr. Christine Parsons realized there was a toxic undercurrent in some reviewers’ writing.

“Rejection is always difficult, but reviews that use emotive or sarcastic language are often the hardest for recipients to deal with, particularly if they are early-career researchers,” the two wrote in their recent article “If you can’t be kind in peer review, be neutral” published in Nature, November 30, 2020.

They argue that scientific reviews should look more like scientific writing: reviews should be neutral, fact-based, and not reflect the personality or emotions of the author.

But the shift to negativity can be subtle, and their article gives many examples:

The fact-based statement “The project proposal didn’t fulfill the stated requirements” can be modified to:

“The project proposal didn’t bother to fulfill the stated requirements.”

or

“The ‘project proposal’ didn’t fulfill the stated requirements.”

Both modifications drip with contempt, but neither adds value or new information. They just tell us how the reviewer was feeling in that moment.

This week, we talk with Drs. Baglini and Parsons as they unpack the importance of neutral peer review, the words to watch for, and some simple things you can do to make your own writing more appropriate and helpful.

And isn’t that the point?

Dr. Parsons concludes, “You don’t go around punching players on your own team. One of the objectives of peer review is to improve scholarship. Not just your own scholarship, but to improve scholarship in your field.”

For a full list of expressive words and phrases to avoid, see their article in Nature.

To follow their work, find them on Twitter (@RebekahBaglini and @ce_parsons ), or at the

Nadia wanted to help patients. She had considered going to medical school, but found biomedical research to be an exciting opportunity to develop new knowledge and therapies.

After graduate school, she continued her training as a postdoc. She was on the faculty-track, making plans for her project and her next career advancement.

Then, COVID hit.

She was living and working in New York City as the largest pandemic in a century unfolded around her. She realized she had developed some skills over her years of training – PCR, data management, lab operations – that might make a difference in patient outcomes.

So she pressed pause on her postdoctoral work to start a clinical testing lab that now runs 60,000 COVID tests each week.

Center of a Pandemic

Dr. Nadia Khan is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Dr. Nadia Khan, PhD

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, she realized that her experience preparing RNA samples and performing qPCR would be useful in performing COVID tests.

She reached out to her University, and got started preparing samples at the Mount Sinai COVID lab three days a week. But space was limited, and it wasn’t safe for her to continue working as a volunteer.

But the spark was already glowing: “I liked being able to use my scientific skills in a way that was useful tot he public in a time of need,” she recalls.

Charting a New Course

She teamed up with some contacts at a local biotech startup and forged a COVID testing lab to respond to the pandemic. She now manages nearly 30 employees and makes a sizable impact on COVID-19 in her community.

“I think I’ve always wanted to be a PI and have my own lab and direct a lab group, but now I’m starting to realize that I can be a scientific leader in a different way, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the academia world for me to feel successful,” she says.

Looking back at the path she took through her graduate training, Dr. Khan notes that “we only equate our successes with publications or getting awards, and we’re only really exposed to that. We only know one way to feel successful. Once you realize there are other ways to get that satisfaction, it opens doors for you. How else can I use my scientific skills in a way that makes me feel successful and makes me feel good about what I’m doing for the world?”

Her advice for early-stage scientists?

“Keep an open mind, and remember why you got into science.”

If you’re a graduate student thinking about a career that lies off the tenure track, you’re probably vaguely nervous that your skills at the bench won’t take you very far in the business world.

Career experts always ask you to highlight your ‘transferable skills,’ but what does that actually mean?

Is it true that you’re hiding a set of superpowers beyond just pipetting small amounts of liquid from tube to tube?

This week on the show, we explain the mysterious world of transferable skills, and tell you how to build on those powers while you’re still a student.

It’s All About Context

Definitionally, a transferable skill is just one that you have developed in one setting, but that could be applied in another.

If you’re the lab’s PCR Ace, you can transfer that skill to any other molecular biology lab, clinical diagnostic lab, or even forensics lab. But you’re probably NOT going to use that skill as a bank teller.

When people talk about transferable skills, they’re usually talking about an ability that can be widely applied in many industries. And to see those features of your training, you need to step back and look at your work with a bit of abstraction.

Sure, you won’t be running PCRs in a lot of other careers, but you MAY be called on to do precise measurements, a skill you’ve developed by mixing those reactions.

Moreover, being ‘great’ at PCR means you’re also probably great at the math it takes to determine the concentration of reagents, the ability to manage time so that your gel is poured when the reaction is done. You’re probably stellar at troubleshooting when things don’t turn out the way you expected, and you’re able to synthesize and interpret the data you just genrated.

So while PCR isn’t exactly a transferable skill, you’re demonstrating plenty of broadly useful abilities that hiring managers are looking for.

Your Superpowers

This week, we walk through just a short list of the many skills you’re developing as a graduate student.

You’re becoming an expert in information management – combing through journal articles, generating experimental data, and communicating your findings to a wider audience.

You’re managing projects, and sticking to a budget and timeline. You’re also leading others, organizing with collaborators and mentoring new students.

The fact is, you’re doing many of the things companies search for, but you need to learn how to translate your experiences into stories they’ll understand.

For help with telling that story, check out this Nature Blogs article on the 3 parts to a compelling transferable skill story.

And for a list of 20 skills you’re developing right now, visit this article from Jobs On Toast.

HelloPhD has also talked about transferable skills before, including this interview with career counselor and author Melanie Sinche!

What are your transferable skills? Leave us a comment below!

Happy New Year to all our Hello PhD listeners!

2021 has already been… a lot. But we’re here to help.

This week, we open the mailbag to answer your questions about graduate training and life in the lab.

You Asked for It!

Our first note came from Vibhatha, who found that a Science Writing Checklist we mentioned way back in Episode 21 was missing from the website:

I know this is years later, but I am trying to access the material from the podcast. The following link is not available: http://www.sciencewritingradio.com/hellophd/.Is it possible to get this information? I also tried to check the website, it is also not available. If you can provide an alternative source to grab this information, it would be really helpful for me.

We reached out to our guest from that episode Dr. David Shifrin, and he was able to locate the file. It’s now available in our show notes at 021: The 4 simple tips that will make your writing stand out.

Thanks to Vibhatha and David!

Virtually Satisfied

Our next email was from a listener who responded to our recent episode on virtual interviews: 146. Ace Your Virtual Graduate School Interview w/ Dr. Beth Bowman

We asked for your experiences, and what it was like choosing a grad program without ever having set foot on campus.

Lindsey was an early test-subject, virtually interviewing in Spring 2020. Here’s how that turned out:

Hi Josh and Dan!I just started my Ph.D. this fall in mechanical engineering. I was going through the interview process right as the Covid lockdowns started in the US, so I only got to visit half of the schools that I was accepted to. In the end, I was deciding between a school that I got to visit in person and one that I was not able to visit. I ended up going to the school that I did not visit in person. It was definitely scary to commit to a school and a city that I hadn’t been to. Talking to students on Zoom really helped get a sense of the culture, even though it was a lot less information than I got from visiting in person. I’m very happy with my decision and love my research topic and the wonderful people that I get to work with! 

That’s great news, and thanks to Lindsey for sharing! If you have experience with virtual interviews, feel free to leave a comment below, or email us at [email protected].

Hello? Is Anyone There?

Brian wrote to find out if there is a better way to contact potential PhD advisors. He’s been getting a lot of nothing when he emails his request.

I have a question that I would love to get your take on: what is the optimal way, and time, to email prospective PIs?In my emails to PIs thus far, I have included a bit of my background, expressed my specific interest in their work, asked if they were taking on new students and if so, if they would be able to meet to further discuss their research. My response has been limited, and I would like to increase my impact going forward. As far as timing, do you think there’s an optimal time over the next few weeks to email PIs so that I can form connections in advance of admission decisions?

This one is tricky, because Brian is trying to make contact during the Holi...

It’s no stretch to say that 2020 was a hard year for almost everyone. It was marked by a global pandemic, social upheaval, and loss.

The word ‘unprecedented’ lost all meaning around March, and we navigated uncharted waters for the remainder of the year.

2020 was rough, but now that it’s over, it’s time to look back at what we learned.

What do we want to carry forward, and what aspects are we happy to leave behind?

Like the rest of the world, graduate students, postdocs and other academics couldn’t escape the 2020 maelstrom. In the early months of the pandemic, labs closed and years-long experiments were discarded.

Then, just as suddenly, labs reopened, but under tight restrictions and the ever-looming threat of illness from COVID-19.

Meanwhile, in the US, outrage over the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others forced a reckoning about how our society treats people of color – not just in policing, but in every aspect of our lives.

These themes influenced our conversations here on Hello PhD.

We interviewed students and faculty whose research was put on hold for the pandemic. And we spoke with thought-leaders who helped us envision a more inclusive academia.

This week on the show, we look back on our favorite conversations of 2020, and think more about the lessons we want to carry into 2021. We hope you’ll join us!

Here’s a breakdown of our favorite episodes by topic:

* COVID-19* 130. Coronavirus, and Life Outside the Lab* 131. How to Host a Dissertation Defense On Zoom* 134. Lessons from the Quarantine* 139. Back to School During a Pandemic* 146. Ace Your Virtual Graduate School Interview w/ Dr. Beth Bowman* Diversity and Inclusion* 135. The Science Training Toolbox with Dr. Andres De Los Reyes. Plus, Antiracism for Academia* 136. Rebuilding an Inclusive Academia with Dr. Ashalla Freeman* 142. Advancing Racial Equity in Science w/ Dr. Kenneth Gibbs* Author Interviews* 133. Galileo and the Science Deniers – with Dr. Mario Livio* 135. The Science Training Toolbox with Dr. Andres De Los Reyes. Plus, Antiracism for Academia* 137. Tools for Finding a Research Mentor* 144. Finding a Career that Fits with Marlys Hanson* Mailbag* 126. Listener Mailbag – Ghost PIs, Dress Codes, and Mental Health with Susanna Harris*