* Bullying is much more common in experimental fields. From what I've seen, bullies are enriched in the population of >50 years old professor (male or female) who attracts tons of funding and publishes several articles per month. Publishing so often is, in general, a red flag.

* When joining a group, try to talk to graduate students and postdocs. People stopped joining our group because they knew it was led by a bully. In general, most students will be extremely honest about bad working conditions.

* Before joining, try to test drive the group in some way. For example, with a small rotation project. Usually, being an insider even during a short period will reveal all nasty stuff. We had many rotation project students and none of them stayed.

* A good heuristic is to join small groups where the leader, young or old, has skin in the game. Usually, younger PIs in small groups have more skin in the game and they tend to be nicer.

* Another good heuristic is to join groups where people regularly progress to other positions in academia.

Things I have experienced first hand, either myself or graduate students:

* A male PI that hires attractive graduate students and gives them easy tasks to land Nature, Science or Cell co-authorships and at the same time tries to land sexual favors from them.

* A female PI that only hires female graduate students and is incredibly aggressive towards male students from other groups, trying to undermine their research.

* A junior faculty member who progressively asked some students to do more and more unreasonable tasks in a particular project so that they eventually refused. Got them removed them from the project clearly in order to get a better position for himself in the publication and to include some of his friends. All this close to submission.

* A group of junior faculty members who plotted to change first authors days before submission, without communicating with the downgraded authors. Needless to say, they upgraded themselves to first authors, without having contributed anything.

* Written threats to misrepresent research results.

I'm in a more senor position now and I still prefer alphabetic order. Having more power than coauthors has somewhat softened my stance though, as my preferences shouldn't be forced upon underlings.

But it is still baffling that anyone (let alone scientists) puts any stock in author order.

I'm currently supervising 2 PhD students whose last name is alphabetically later than mine. I explained my reasons for my preference to them; that's how far I'll go. With one, we've had multiple collaborations outside the institution. In those cases, alphabetical order was typically arrived upon with all authors. In other cases it depends - we've had quite equal contribution papers which ended up alphabetically. We're now working on one that he conceived and executed. I'm basically the co-writing sparring partner, where I strongly prefer him to be first author.

The other student feels it's important for his career to be first author, so he is. I certainly hope he's wrong (for my career so far it didn't matter), but I'm not taking that chance.

In my field, 1st author did most of the work, typically the responsible grad student, then authors 2 to n-1 supporting characters, maybe contributed some data, some script, wrote a paragraph. Last author is PI.

Sometimes you’ll have a 2nd author who ended up contributing like the 1st as the paper progresses, that’s really the only ambiguous situation, but you can switch that around for a conference or follow-up.

- It is a pretty scary situation to have someone above you with absolute power over your entire career track which you may be a decade in to pursuing.

- It's extra scary that the system's incentive structure of can create feedback loops that reward abusive behavior and grow its prevalence. PIs have a certain realm of absolute power -> they can choose to use it to irresponsibly ride others to increase that realm. And there's little downside and possible recourse for the abused. Higher ups see: More awards! More publications! (Wait, where'd those students go...)

That said there are lots of good PIs out there doing awesome stuff and treating their teams well. Definitely worth finding ways to get the real scoop on the PI. Former lab members, for example, or anyone outside of the "just don't upset the leader" incentive structure.

Makes you appreciate how valuable it is for incentive systems to be tethered to financial reality and for the supply of job-slots to be rapidly responsive to success at creating value. Non-profits and certain pockets of politics are missing some piece of this sort of reality results tether/job-slot responsiveness as well.

Of course, I'm aware that changing countries is out of the question for many people, but for those who are willing, applying in places where they aren't important can be a way out.

But there are also very many extremely caring, dedicated people in academia, who love mentoring and building up their students and postdocs.

One major challenge, especially in STEM, is that the main way to tell the abusive apart from the supportive is through watercooler/gossip networks -- but so many young college graduates in STEM fields find gossiping distasteful, or don't see the nature of the mentor/mentee relationship as being super critical, or feel awkward asking lab members what they think when they visit, or don't feel like they have the social capital to spend asking, or just plain worry that the question itself will speak poorly of them -- and as a result they often don't find out what they're in for until they're in it and it's too late to extricate.

Committing to work for someone for 5 years is a huge deal, and you should be pretty sure you'll have a good working relationship before you start!

Simple, more relatable example: the professor whose class gets very bimodal reviews--amazing, learn a lot, or unfair, too hard, etc.

So these things are subjective and I worry in this climate doing things reputationally isn't the right approach. I prefer subordinates be empowered to push back against PIs and switch, at least have a level of freedom more similar to a regular job market where if someone is too awful, at least they won't be able to keep students and post-docs. I don't know how to accomplish this though, it's a very hard problem.

I’ll add though that if your gossip network is only giving you “overbearing/not” signal that’s petty weak tea. In my experience recent phd students of an advisor are typically happy to give an honest off-the-record take, that includes how driven you need to be, what to bring to meetings for them to be productive, etc etc. Each student will bring their own perspective and experiences, and may not be well connected to others’ (eg, a male student might not know that years ago his advisor’s last female student suffered harassment).

But ask a few of them and you’ll have a lot more data than you started with.

Also critical is to ask whoever is writing you a letter to begin with — especially if senior, they will often have useful perspective on potential advisors.

I’ve had PIs threatening me as PostDoc to void my contract and have me deported for wanting to take some vacation accrued over several years, or (different gig) for wanting to go to a job interview. And that was me as a married 30ish white male. Can’t imagine what it can be like for the 22 year young woman away from home for the first time.

It's typically very easy to find former PhD students and postdocs that have worked with a given PI. Sometimes they are even listed in the PI's website, but if they aren't, they can be found by looking for the PI's papers and checking the coauthors, or in the case of PhD students by looking for PhD theses.

Find their email address and politely contact them, asking about their experience with that PI. Most people should be happy to respond, and that kind of information is invaluable.

Had to change supervisor… who do you complain to..would you be believed?!

Also, I know many students that performed work for 2-4 years, and the supervisor kept saying it's not good enough. Red flag is when your program is 3 year PhD, or 1 year master, but most people leave around 6-7 years, and 2-4 years respectively. Where is that problem? Ask the average time people take to do their PhD's. If they can't get you finished, while you enter with straight A's top 10% of your class. What is going on here?

source?

One of three in a short period

That said, you're countering a researched article, and the experiences of the vast majority of people in this thread, with...your anecdatum.

Does it seem that absurd to suggest that, wherever you put an abusive person in a position of power with much at stake, abuse happens regardless of setting?

That said...

> That said, you're countering a researched article, and the experiences of the vast majority of people in this thread, with...your anecdatum.

The article claims the following:

> For example, a recent large survey-based Swedish study (with 38 918 participants) on academic bullying revealed that 1 in 15 people have experienced academic bullying over the past years

I'd be shocked if the number of workers experiencing workplace bullying in industry is much less than "1 in 15"...