Ok, good to know. But aside from knowing you’re a researcher, what other info could someone get after seeing you credited as an author? I’d think as long as you practice solid online privacy, the only thing someone could learn is your specific field of study. Do you use a tool like Optery to remove your name from data brokers? Is Lemmy your only social media account? If you said no to either of these, maybe start there to help reduce your online footprint.

In fact anonymous review is an important part of the scientific method, precisely because work shouldn’t be judged by its source

Hey fam, I don’t fully share your perspective, but I respect it. Here are some thoughts:

• as a student: if you want to be a leader in your field, you really should publish, and get your name out there, and talk to people, etc. However, if that’s not important to you, then (usually) you only really need to “publish” your dissertation. This may vary by field and university, and will greatly depend on your advisor. In the US, a younger faculty member will want their students to publish a lot (to increase their own prestige), though a more senior faculty member may not care as much.
• I haven’t heard of people publishing under pseudonymns. But you could do something like: if your name is “John Paul Jones”, and you’re usually known as “John Jones”, then maybe you could publish as “Paulie Jones” and then go back to “John Jones” again after graduation.
• in security they say “define your threat model”; what threat is it you’re defending against? Is there a threat that can take advantage of the fact that you are currently a student at XYZ university? I decided that risk was minimal. Is there a threat that can take advantage of an email that you published in a paper? I decided the risk of phishing attacks was real, so I used an email address that I only accessed on a “non-work” computer. etc.
• once you graduate: a lot of people here are talking about “academics” and it sounds like they basically mean university-based researchers. But universities aren’t the only places where research is done. There are many industry labs that don’t publish, or only publish internal documents. Likewise in the US there are government-funded labs that conduct research that is not circulated; if you’re from .nl there may be the same in Europe.
• similarly, you can use your PhD to get a good non-research job in industry or the government. A lot of times this involves understanding cutting-edge research well enough to apply it or analyze it, and keeping up with the state of the art. (i.e. you have to be able to understand research, though you’re not doing the research yourself.) These usually do not involve publishing.

Anyway good luck with the PhD!

I understand the concerns of privacy, but working in academia means that you give up some of the privacy.

Yes people will have your real name and they will know what college you work at and if some crazy person decides that they want to stalk you on campus because you’re woke or part of the deep state turning the frogs gay with chemicals they’ll be able to easily do that.

You’re gonna have 100s of strangers in your classes during the year. You’re going to tell them exactly when you’re going to be in your office for office hours.

If you are unable to handle that I doubt academia is for you.

Academia is about furthering human knowledge especially a PhD. There are sacrifices involved; your privacy is probably one of them.

A huge part (maybe the most important one) of academic work, is to argue why your ideas are worth listening to and discuss and present them. This is not the same as writing fiction where you can just use a pseudonym, people will be looking you up to see what kind of educational background you have, which university you got the PhD from etc. No place worth having a PhD from is going to let you use a pseudonym, let alone hire you under a different name than your legal name.

I’m sorry, but if using your real name is a deal breaker for you, even with an employer (I.e. the professor example you’re giving), you’re very unlikely to succeed with this.

I’ll say it straight forward, if you are considering an academic career you are just shooting yourself in the leg with this. It is already hard to make it in academia, using a pseudonym and expecting people to believe you or check additional proof it is actually your publication is not going to fly.

If you already know that you won’t stay in academia but go to industry it might not be much easier. People won’t care as much about publications but they still look good on your CV.

Ah, also just doing a PhD might make you end up in some publicly available database where your thesis will end up in. And I strongly doubt any reputable university would give you a PhD under a pseudonym.