Sun, 15 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The ambitious early career-researcher Ruth has left everything behind to fulfill her dream of finally becoming a researcher and takes her first steps into the world of academia.

Content warning

political persecution
depression
exclusion
suicide
swear words

The short story

It was Ruth’s first day at work. She had just moved to the capital and was dazzled by all the solid silver surfaces covering the skyscrapers’ windows. She saw ants at the restaurant next to her place. They were hiding in the dark because it was just too light outside. She tried to hold it back but eventually failed: That big smile returned to her face. “I’m going to be an actual researcher” she thought. She was the first in her family. She would never see them again. She had abandoned her family. Her parents. Her partner. Her daughter. Everyone knew that only those willing to go beyond their limits would become good researchers. Her smile faded.

It was well-known that the superiors at leading universities wouldn’t talk to the staff during the first ten weeks unless they had proven worthy with a set of impressive results. The names of all the prestigious researchers, the titles of their research articles, the WatchCorp awards. Ruth proudly entered the world-leading lab on categorical meta-obedience research in the discipline of hyper-reliable loyalty science. She could not wait to use one of their impressive WatchCorp machines to read the full article texts. The town she came from was forbidden from accessing them since they did not have the required funds to become a WatchCorp premium sponsor. Afelius had told Ruth that the computers would always find the articles you were looking for and how impressed he was by how consistent the results were - consistently corroborating the government’s directives on the improvement of sound science.

At nine, it was time for the weekly lab meeting. Everybody was celebrating. They ate donuts covered in sugar. “What’s going on?” she whispered to a young man who stood next to her (she knew he was a PhD student, too, because he did not sit down). “They promoted Frank to be an independent researcher. He got an acceptance at the Triple A WatchCorp journal.” “Oh, so he is a doctor now? Why can he not keep working here?”. The young man was confused, then laughing silently when he noticed that the new one just didn’t get the system: “As an Indie, he needs to take care of his salary. You know, if they paid him, they wouldn’t have enough funds to pay the journal for publishing the article. It’s not like they are just putting his text on a website. Don’t you know how they need their loyalty-editors to screen the entire content against the sound-science directive?”. The journal’s algorithm had picked up Frank’s research on his third submission. Based on the most recent research-analytics that WatchCorp has been collecting and knowing that Frank’s father had won one of the first ever WatchCorp awards, they predict it will become a top-10% publication and thanks to the award, the WatchCorp algorithm will push it to top-1% - maybe it will even be shortlisted by the government for their next loyalty and obedience law.

After the meeting, Ruth asked the young man: “You are Anakrivis Ionn, and the woman who gave the talk was Alicia Contra, right? It is such a pleasure to finally meet you, I have read so much about your research!” “Uhm no, sorry, they don’t work here anymore.” Ruth was confused - she had been looking forward to meeting them: “What happened?” “You don’t want to know.” “Yes I do.” She followed the young man into the student’s floor. It was underground, had no windows and lucky for them the building’s nuclear reactor underwent maintenance so that the cameras didn’t work. “But, but I was going to ask Ionn to supervise my thesis,” Ruth said. “Ok shut up. But I will kill you if you tell anyone - do you still want to know the truth?”. Ruth said “Well, the truth is what we’re here for, isn’t it?” The young man remained silent for eight seconds and then replied - half to himself. “This will show you your place. This will help you become a good researcher, so listen carefully. I found Ana’s notebook. She had marked a coding error in the professor’s work on the positive effect of the loyalty-laws on citizen well-being and was about to post it on PostRev. I burnt it. I think she maybe has talked about it in the lab meeting with seven of the other members. How the effect was in the wrong direction and misaligned with one of the new well-being policies. Of course, the entire team had to be laid-off. I had called in sick that day because I was burned out from working all weekend, so I can stay.”

Ruth swallowed hard like she understood and went back to the WatchCorp machines. After she passed the six searches limit, she went back home. The shiny white buildings were now tainted red from the setting sun and the sky had a brown glow from the city’s smog. “This cannot be” she said to herself in the mirror. Her light started to flicker. Or was that her migraine? “What the fuck is going on?”. She took off her WatchCorp physio-monitor. It started to beep rapidly. She threw it against the wall and it disintegrated into five pieces. “What have I done?” Somebody rang her bell four times. There were three tall figures dressed in gold NuCosta suits and WatchCorp firearms next to her door. “Ruth Veritas? We have recorded you searching the forbidden term “Discourse de la méthode” in the WatchCorp universal knowledge database. You are hereby arrested for abusing government research equipment for the sake of initiating a conspiracy movement.”

Ruth grabbed the two sharpest of the physio-monitor pieces up from the floor. “I am a researcher. I will let no one shut me up!”

This story was originally written in English and without any help of AI.

The study

Descartes, R. (1973). Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verite dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique, les meteores, et la geometrie, qui sont des essais de cete methode. [Discourse on the Method of Conducting One’s Reason Properly, and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Plus Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry, which are essays on this method.] Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Available at https://archive.org/details/discoursdelamet00desca

Connection between story and study

In his work, Descartes undertakes what is nowadays known as one of the first descriptions of a “scientific method”. While it is mainly known for the popular quote “I think, therefore I am”, it was chosen for this short story for two different reasons: First, the author discusses the rules of his scientific method. Second, it was originally published in French while usually, such books were in latin and only accessible to scholars and not citizens. The rules of his method are to never accept anything for true which one does not clearly know to be true and avoid prejudice. Further, he suggests dividing a problem into parts and solving the simplest first. Finally, one should make sure that nothing was omitted.

In the dystopian story, researchers are overpowered by external influences that prevent them from doing good science. When the protagonist wants to read about a correct method, people are sent to arrest her. In this story, I try to pick up various developments and states in research, try to imagine how they can look as bad as possible, and combine them all into what I think could be the worst imaginable state of research in the future. I list some of these more or less subtle references here and very briefly describe how they mirror actual patterns in today’s research:

Culture shock: Generally, Ruth’s idealistic image of research versus her seeing the current state reflects the gap between what we would like research to be like and what academia is actually like. Many early career researchers struggle when they learn that the rules of the system that they are now part of are not aligned with how the system should work in their eyes.
Abandoning family: Becoming a researcher means to be flexible with respect to the location one is working at and to be willing to work much more than what you get paid for. Research must be your number one priority and there is little place for more. For example, in Germany, it is not uncommon for PhD students to have over a dozen different contracts over the course of their 3-6 year working time and are usually paid only for 60-75% of their full-time job. During research assessment, it sometimes looks bad if a researcher stayed at the same university “too long”. When you have to move five times between countries or even continents only to look good on future applications, it is difficult to maintain a partnership or take care of family members.
Mental health: Burnout and migraine are mentioned in the text as symptoms of overworking characters. Burnout is even labelled a “common academic experience”^1,2.
Hierarchy: In Germany, there is a strong hierarchy and institutional structures that allow for power abuse (see for example https://www.netzwerk-mawi.de).
Error culture: Research is often not about truth. Researchers hesitate to share data because they are afraid somebody may point out a mistake they made. Researchers prefer to remain anonymous as a reviewer or not review at all because they are afraid of retaliation. Institutions usually do not talk openly about identified errors but solve them without anybody noticing. Journals do not react to errors even if the authors reach out themselves, wanting to correct an article.
Intertwined corporation, academia, and government: WatchCorp is described as a provider of infrastructure for researchers and the government, and tracking physiological data as well as behavioral data from researchers. Governments are already interfering with academic freedom (for example, by systematically cancelling or rejecting grants or planning to shut down entire disciplines). Publishers are already tracking researcher behavior (https://stoptrackingscience.eu) and sell it to governments. This “promotes data misuse and scientific espionage and can lead to personal discrimination against scientists”. For example, in June 2024 in Germany, the education minister has expressed interest in cutting funding of researchers based on their political expressions.
Limited access to knowledge and high costs: A large proportion of research is only available via subscription costs with the second most prominent publication model draining billions of dollars of money - mostly paid by taxpayers³.
Windowless rooms for students: Also inspired by a real life example from one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
Reliance on brands and algorithms: Instead of actually assessing research, they rely on an algorithm and brands. This is already the case: Despite clear evidence that the most widely used metrics are - if anything - negatively related to research quality⁴, researchers are rewarded for high citation numbers and for publishing in Nature-branded journals (e.g., publishing in a prestigious journal can make you get a better grade for your PhD thesis at some universities and in some fields).
Consistent results in search engines: The scientific record is skewed towards findings that confirm the authors’ hypothesis (also called “publication bias”). For example, if even published, failed replications receive little attention.
Countdown: The end is left open because it does not really matter. Research has already died in the story.

So how can you think that this is what research could turn into and still be a researcher? It is simple: We are doing everything from preventing this dystopia - we are trying to create our utopia. And all researchers who want to help us, are welcome to do so.

References

¹ Jaremka, L. M., Ackerman, J. M., Gawronski, B., Rule, N. O., Sweeny, K., Tropp, L. R., … & Vick, S. B. (2020). Common academic experiences no one talks about: Repeated rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 519-543. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619898848

² Dreisoerner, A., Goetz, V., Frohnmayer, D., Tran, U. S., Voracek, M., & Nater, U. M. (2026). Prevalence and severity of mental health problems in early-career researchers: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02505-5

³ Beigel, F., Brockington, D., Crosetto, P., Derrick, G., Fyfe, A., Barreiro, P. G., … & Wilsdon, J. (2025). The drain of scientific publishing. arXiv:2511.04820. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820

⁴ Brembs, B. (2018). Prestigious science journals struggle to reach even average reliability. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 327726. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037

The author

Lukas is a trained psychologist and meta-scientist. He is the managing director of the Münster Center for Open Science, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of the scholarly-led journal Replication Research, co-founder of the world’s largest curated database of replications. His mission is to contribute to the improvement of research culture. More info about Lukas can be found on his website: https://lukasroeseler.github.io/home/.

Technologie | Science and Fiction

Content warning

The short story

The study

Connection between story and study

The author