The Research Whisperer

I’ve been thinking about Australian’s recent Open Access (OA) deal now that the dust has settled on the recent showdown with Elsevier. After all, we’d been spending some $500 million to $1 billion per year on journal subscriptions (an eye‑watering 5–10% of our national research spend), so it feels sensible to negotiate as a national […]

In my last post, ‘Transferring your funding‘, I talked in general about the things to consider for your grants when you move universities. This post covers the questions that I ask when someone says “I’m coming to your university and I need to transfer my grant”. As I said last time, it is worth remembering […]

When you move to a new university, what happens to your grants or fellowship? You might be moving because you have a new job and a promotion. You might be moving because things are bad where you are right now and you need to get out. You might be moving because someone you care about is moving and you want to go along. Whatever the reason, it is a really busy time, often full of emotion. In this …

This article was originally posted on the LSE Impact blog on 30 January 2026, and can still be found there. We have republished it because this is an important issue. It has been written by Helen Kara, who has thought deeply about this issue for some time. We have republished it here under the under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Many English-speaking coun…

In economics and planning, there is a thing called the sunk cost fallacy. It comes about when people continue with something that isn’t working because they have put so much effort into it that they don’t want to abandon it. Rather than cutting their losses, they continue because, in part, they can’t let go of the time and effort that they have already invested. Their experience of the past limit…

Although universities remain keen to tackle inappropriate uses of generative AI (GenAI) by students, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to talk much more openly about academics’ (mis)use of these technologies. Many Research Whisperer readers might have begun to hear stories of GenAI being used to write academic papers and research proposals, to analyse research data, to write peer rev…

2026 is shaping up to be an interesting year. It feels like every year since 2020 has been an ‘interesting year’ for different reasons. Could we have some plain old boring years, please? Quiet years where no big things happen globally so that the small things in our lives regain their appropriate importance. Is that too much to ask for? The small things are important. Working with people we enjoy…

Earlier this year, I realised that there was no Wikipedia page for ‘research culture’. I was surprised by the omission, but I probably shouldn’t have been. English Wikipedia’s coverage is huge, but it isn’t perfect. So, I set out to write a page that would provide some bare bones for people to build on. On 6 October 2025, during the Community in Writing symposium, I made it live. You can see it h…

At times, I feel exhausted and irritable. I might get angry at a petty request to sign another PDF or because I have to send another reminder. I end up trapped between past times when I had the patience and time to take care of everything and my current need to minimise frustration and take care of my mental health, A colleague recently said that I must have the patience of a saint to put up with…

Here at the Research Whisperer, we love librarians. They are smart, dedicated people who want to help you with your research. They are often keen on making the world a better place, too. They don’t get enough recognition for all that they do. They are also, in our experience, unfailingly polite. So, it came as a bit of a shock to discover that the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CA…

Most research development models assume that time, energy, and executive functioning are equally distributed across scholars. They aren’t. Especially not for early career researchers in teaching-heavy roles, and certainly not for neurodivergent academics trying to survive in systems not designed for their minds. We need a better way to support scholarly growth—one that respects rhythm, autonomy, …

Tseen is typing this as the first day of the ‘Community in Writing’ symposium happens! The Research Whisperers are very excited and having fun in a room where everyone is invested in creating a better academic environment for all. It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring. And we’re only a couple of hours in! This post, by our wonderful colleague from Writing Partners / Shut Up & Write! Aaron Bolzle, joins…

I’ve been a relatively slow-adopter of the genAI movement in academia. For a while now I’ve been under the (misguided?) perception that if I used genAI in any way to conduct my research, I would somehow be cheating or proving to myself that all-too-common intrusive thought that maybe, just maybe, I’m not as good at […]

Many of us compartmentalise different types of writing. Creative writing is for novelists, poets, playwrights, and so on. Research writing is done by people who are not creative writers. It consists of monographs, journal articles, book chapters, reports, and so on. Then there are a bunch of research tasks we don’t really think of as […]

Gaining research funds is always tough, but some people are having it tougher than usual at the moment. In late 2024, the New Zealand government cut all Humanities and Social Science funding from the Marsden Fund, their main research funding program. Since coming to office in the United States, Donald Trump has cut funding in […]

Part-time postgraduate study can be an isolating experience, with students often having to balance their research with careers, family, or care commitments. Factoring remote working into this mix can leave postgraduate researchers (PGRs) without an established community to work within. This post shares insights from a writing retreat we developed as part-time PGRs, for part-time […]

2024 was a notable year for the Research Whisperers, in good ways for a change! As a result, we are looking forward to 2025. Jonathan completed and passed his PhD so that’s Dr O’Donnell to you now. We both started new roles at the same university. While we’ve worked together on Research Whisperer for over […]

A well-known motivational truism proclaims that the most dangerous time is when you’ve reached a goal. This maxim may explain why many doctoral candidates experience post-dissertation doldrums. You’ve been pushing so hard for so long. You’ve been preoccupied with the intensity and innumerable details of the work itself. After graduation, you no longer have to […]

Most researchers are honest and their work is a worthwhile addition to the scholarly record. However, a significant percentage of researchers are engaged in questionable practices or producing work lacking integrity. For example, Bik and colleagues have estimated ~2% of the biomedical literature is affected by image manipulation problems. Adam Day, who runs the Papermill […]

Peer review, like many things, sounds great in theory. When you submit a paper for publication, qualified experts objectively review your paper, comment on its suitability for publication and give you feedback that you can use to improve it. However, in reality, the problems with peer review go far beyond getting a reviewer who just […]