As scholars of abusive academic supervision, we suggest that tying institutions’ reputations to their treatment of staff could help to prevent such bullying.

Some funding agencies — the US National Science Foundation, for example — have policies that guard against sexual harassment. These need to be universally adopted and to take account of bullying in all its forms. Grant applicants should be required to include evidence that laboratory members are treated fairly. And targets of abuse must be encouraged to speak out. It should also be compulsory for institutions to release publicly accessible reports on bullying.

If establishments and individual supervisors knew that their reputations would be tarnished by such reports, and if grants were awarded only to scientists and institutions with clean or rectified reputations, leaders would be forced to deal directly with abusers and to drive out persistent offenders — rather than covering up their abuse (M. Mahmoudi Nature 562, 494; 2018).

And ideally, the yardsticks for evaluating academic performance should be reset. In our view, the current system relies too heavily on research-performance ratings. These put pressure on supervisors, who often respond by bullying lab members. More credit could be given to research that benefits humanity, for example.