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Dealing with imposter syndrome in academia.your stories and strategies

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R.V. College of Engineering · Posted
Nanotechnology

I want to start an honest conversation about something I have been thinking about for a while.

As a fourth-year PhD student, I have watched the academic publication ecosystem up close. The pressure to publish in high-impact journals has created perverse incentives:

  • Researchers cherry-pick results to show positive findings
  • Null results are systematically rejected
  • The same idea gets cut into multiple 'minimum publishable units' to inflate output
  • Citation rings inflate impact scores

What do you think? Is this a structural problem that needs policy-level intervention, or are there practical things individual researchers can do?

I am particularly interested in hearing from senior faculty who have seen this evolve over their careers.

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Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

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Om Prakash Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Replying to Om Prakash
Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Sunil Bhattacharya Active 390 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

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Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?