Attitudes towards bullying may affect students’ but not supervisors’ future research involvement

Correspondence to Dr Yassar Alamri, Canterbury District Health Board, Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand; yassar.alamri@nzbri.org Recent events have reignited an interest in and debate about workplace/career bullying—both within the medical field (eg, reports of discrimination, bullying and sexual harassment by members of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons1) and outside (eg, accounts of sexual harassment within the Hollywood community2). More specific to research and academia have been the recent events in the UK and Germany, including several investigations into bullying, resignation of high-profile researchers and revocation of significant funding—all occurring within prestigious and eminent laboratories and research centres.3 While overt bullying (eg, shouting and threatening) is easy to spot, it is the more covert forms of bullying (eg, microaggression, undermining someone’s work or opinion, and tasking junior staff with impossible duties under unfeasible deadlines) that are likely to be significantly more problematic. The limited scope of our study limits its statistical power and curtails generalisability of our findings. [...]future larger studies are needed to identify which ‘risk factors’ place a student at a vulnerable position for bullying and what strategies are most effective in combating bullying in research and academia.