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Is it better to do a postdoc or go directly to a faculty position after PhD?

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Starting 0 pts 0 followers
Indian Institute of Science · Posted
Structural Engineering

My question

I have been collecting data for my thesis research and realized I may have an ethical issue. I surveyed 450 college students about their academic stress and mental health. The survey was anonymous, but I am now questioning whether I need IRB approval retroactively.

The situation:

  • The survey was done purely as pilot research before my formal thesis proposal
  • I used Google Forms and data was stored on my university Google Drive
  • No personally identifying information was collected
  • This is at an Indian university (not a US institution)

What are the ethics review requirements for student survey research in Indian universities? Is anonymous pilot data typically exempt?

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15 Replies

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Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

The short answer: it depends heavily on the journal and field, but here is a general framework.

If your null result is well-powered and the hypothesis was reasonable: Absolutely publish it. Null results in well-designed studies are as valuable as positive results. Journals like PLOS ONE explicitly welcome them.

If your study is underpowered: Be transparent about it. Report effect sizes and confidence intervals, not just p-values. A small, underpowered study with honest reporting is still a contribution.

What kills papers is when limitations are obvious but the authors have not addressed them.

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Replying to Kiran Yadav
Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

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Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Replying to Chirag Mehta
Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for the honest take. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.not the sanitized version.

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Replying to Chirag Mehta
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

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Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Varsha Pillai Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Varsha Pillai Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

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Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 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 Sanjay Kumar
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

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Indira Balan · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Rajesh Kumar · Accepted answer

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

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Replying to Rajesh Kumar
Rekha Shetty Starting 40 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.