The spooky season in science

by Losia Lagisz

Although real Halloween was a month ago, its spirit still lingers. The holiday blends ancient pagan rituals- once meant to ward off wandering spirits - with modern celebrations of horror, mischief, and all things “spooky.” And Science could use a little of that spirit too. Not the ghosts and goblins (though I fully support creative lab-door decorations), but the practice of openly acknowledging the things that scare us. Honest, personal conversations about anxieties, systemic failures, and uncomfortable truths are long overdue. Sharing these “scientific hauntings” can help ease the emotional load that so many researchers quietly carry - burdens that feed into the mental health crisis in academia and disproportionately push people from marginalized groups out of science.

What you see walking along the corridors here… Photo by M.Lagisz

​This is how an informal hands-on an impromptu social activity turned into an unexpectedly thought-provoking catalyst. A diverse group of researchers - from graduate students to seasoned professors - were handed pens and sheets of paper with innocent-looking ghost outlines. The task: write down the things in science that frighten you.
I repeated this activity during a virtual social event hosted by the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE). Instead of paper, participants filled a shared Zoom whiteboard with their spooky scientific worries.

​So, what did people write?

Here’s an unordered and far-from-exhaustive list:

Reviewer #2,
impact factors,
discrimination,
pseudoreplication,
academic hierarchy,
APCs,
publication bias,
the Gollum effect,
predatory journals,
Type I error,
lack of funding,
lack of academic positions,
high expenses,
meaningless reviewer comments,
“data upon request,”
unequal access to education,
exclusion,
governmental intrusion,
monocultures,
the Matthew effect,
p-hacking,
exploitation of undergrads,
authorship conflicts,
elitism,
cherry-picking results,
scientific colonialism,
pyramid-scheme dynamics,
plastic waste,
isolation,
groupthink,
lack of collaboration,
socioeconomic bias,
replication crisis,
ghost authorship,
weak study validation,
missing data,
publisher monopolies,
small sample sizes,
inequitable funding and facility access,
AI-generated papers,
boys’ clubs,
opaque methods,
devaluation of Indigenous perspectives,
citing Darwin for everything,
partial code,
research waste

… and so on …

​You can see many of these fears in the pictures - one from the in-person exercise with pens and paper, and one from the virtual Zoom whiteboard.

What about you?

Do any of these scientific “ghosts” haunt you as well?

And perhaps the bigger question…

are we still managing to have a wicked good time in science?