LAUSR

Imagine this: a research group successfully secures a competitive National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia (NIAA) PhD studentship for a proposal about which the reviewers are highly complimentary. The student appointed comes with a first-class degree from a leading university and completes the thesis within three years, gaining a national academic society prize and meritorious reports from the PhD examiners. The student duly submits the key paper from the research to a leading anaesthesia journal that part-funds the NIAA studentship. . . where the reviewers are excoriating in their critique, concluding that the work is unpublishable, even if revised. Wisely, the student accepts a job offer in the financial sector, abandoning academic anaesthesia. Stories like this have been commonplace in their main elements in almost every academic anaesthetic department over many years. Many academics reading these stories will probably shrug their shoulders and say ‘so what’? The tales are routine, uninteresting and simply reflect the realities of academic life; ‘if you don’t like the heat, stay out of the kitchen’. In contrast, many other readers will find these stories tragic and at the very least, examples of ‘research waste’. Yet, many academics regard ‘research waste’ as essential to maintain standards. Academic anaesthesia is, in their view, rightly a highly brutal, competitive sector where there is rigorous selection and exclusion at every stage, so that all can be reassured that those academics remaining at the top of the profession truly represent the ‘fittest’, brightest and the best. This robust view is very rarely if ever committed to print by those who espouse it at meetings or in private, so it must remain anecdotal. However, it is not a view we share. In population biology, a large species can tolerate the waste of brutal competition, but a small population is simply driven to extinction [1]. In this issue of the journal, El-Boghdadly et al. analyse attempts by the NIAA to reduce waste and encourage research through its disbursement of grants [2]. The purpose of this editorial is to offer further perspectives and to offer suggestions for how to reduce the research waste that, if not minimised, could destroy our academic specialty.