This year has been really, really hard. We are shattered. We both still have our jobs where many colleagues do not. Pandemic weariness is bone-deep. We didn’t even know what to write in this post. It didn’t feel like there was anything helpful to say.

There is one thing, however, that we wanted to do before 2021 drags its sorry carcass out the door and that’s to say:

THANK YOU

Thank you to every person who has sent through a guest post this year. You provided the majority of our posts in 2021 and covered an amazing range of territory. There would not have been the rich archive of posts on Research Whisperer this year without you.

• Jigsawing your salary – the happy and untenured researcher, Abel Polese.
• How early career researchers suffer when senior scholars burn out, Deirdre Watchorn and Dr Esther Heckendorf.
• Designing your remote or hybrid post-doctoral fellowship, Catrine Demers and Andrea MacLeod.
• Creative writing for social research, Helen Kara.
• Treating networking like a research project, Linus Tan.
• Too close: research in a familiar context, Caterina Mazzilli.
• Academic resilience in times of COVID, Marian Mahat.
• Starting a consultancy, Linus Tan.
• The prickly impact statement, Wade Kelly.
• Open Access at no cost? Abel Polese.
• Postdocs at the margins, Shaun Khoo and Belinda Lay.
• Against unpaid research work, Natalie Osborne.
• When change is awful, Anonymous.
• Chronic fatigue and university support for disabilities, Olugbenga [Abraham] Babajide.
• How can you work without funding?, Christa Dang (with Jonathan O’Donnell).
• The challenges of research project leadership: Think ahead, be prepared, Sandra Acker.
• Planning communication access for online conferences, Lauren Gawne and Gabrielle Hodge.

If you read one of the Research Whisperer’s posts this year, thank you. We had over 290,000 views from over 190,000 visitors from all over the world. That’s amazing! We hope that you found something useful in our posts this year.

If you tweeted with us on Twitter, shared a Facebook or LinkedIn post, commented or liked something we wrote, thank you. We needed you this year, and you came through for us in all colours and flavours: as strong, active advocates and folks who told us how much they appreciated our work; as constant readers and sharers; as lurky, encouraging link-clickers who implicitly let us know that what we publish and share is useful; and as engaging colleagues who do fabulous things that inspire, engage, educate, and entertain us.

We love our Research Whisperer community.

Take care, stay well, and see you in 2022.