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Share your experience with international research collaborations (93)

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Active 480 pts 0 followers
University of Mysore · Posted
Environmental Science Astronomy & Astrophysics

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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14 Replies

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Dinesh Kulkarni Distinguished 730 pts · Accepted answer

As a senior faculty member (25 years in the system), I want to offer a different perspective. Yes, the pressures are real. But I have also seen the other side: students who produce excellent work, publish honestly, and build reputations over time. The system is imperfect but not entirely broken.

What has actually helped my students: choosing venues carefully (a few strong papers rather than many weak ones), developing genuine collaborations rather than transactional coauthorships.

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Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

Respectfully, I think this framing misses the systemic dimension. Individual researchers cannot solve a collective action problem. If you submit to open-access journals and your colleague submits to Nature, your colleague gets the promotion. Until evaluation criteria change at the institutional level.which requires policy intervention.individual choices have minimal impact.

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Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 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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Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Chetan Jain Growing 100 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Aditya Sharma Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

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Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 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?

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Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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test tester Growing 165 pts · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

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Replying to test tester
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Replying to test tester
Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

Marking this as the accepted answer. Incredibly helpful and specific. Really appreciate you taking the time.

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Replying to test tester
Priya Nair · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

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Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?