Why we delete your email the moment your review goes live

There is a question we get asked more than almost any other: how do we know you actually delete our email?

It is a fair question. Platforms say a lot of things about privacy. Most of them are technically true in ways that leave room for interpretation. We want to explain exactly what happens when you submit a review on RateYourPI, not in legal language, but in plain terms, because you deserve to understand the system you are trusting before you use it.

Why this matters more than you might think

RateYourPI was built because of something real. The founder lived through academic abuse during their own research career. The pain of that experience was not just professional. It was personal, lasting, and in many ways, invisible, because there was nowhere safe to speak about it without risking everything.

That experience is why the verification system is designed the way it is. Not as a legal formality. Not as a checkbox. But because we know firsthand what it costs a researcher to speak honestly about a supervisor, and we built the system around protecting that person from the moment they submit a review to the moment it goes live and beyond.

If a PI knows you wrote a negative review about them, they can exercise their power over you in ways that affect your career for years. That is the reality of academic power dynamics. RateYourPI was created specifically to change that equation, to make it possible to speak honestly without that risk.

Two paths, both ending in the same place

When you submit a review on RateYourPI, you have two verification options.

The institutional email path is the fastest. You enter your university or research institution email address. We send you an automated verification link instantly. You click it. Your review goes live. And at that exact moment, your email address disappears completely from our database. Not archived. Not moved to a backup table. Gone.

The manual profile path exists for a specific reason: not every researcher still has an institutional email. Some have left academia, often because of the exact kinds of experiences RateYourPI exists to document. They lost their institutional address when they left, but they still have a voice and a right to share their experience. For these researchers, we accept a personal email alongside a Google Scholar or ResearchGate profile. We review the submission manually to confirm the person was genuinely part of a research lab, then approve it. Once approved, the same thing happens: the email is deleted from our database.

Either path ends in the same place. Your email is gone. Your review is live. There is no record connecting the two.

What "deleted" actually means

We have automated this process. When your review is verified and published, the deletion happens immediately and automatically, not as a manual step that someone on our team has to remember to perform, and not as a scheduled cleanup that runs once a week. The moment your review goes live, the connection between your email and your review is severed and the email itself is removed.

This is not a policy. It is an architecture. We built the system so that it is technically incapable of storing your email alongside your review after verification is complete. If someone were to look in our database for your email, they would not find it, because it is not there.

Why the review itself protects you too

We thought carefully about another concern: even without an email attached, could the content of a review accidentally identify the person who wrote it? A specific incident, a particular detail, a recognizable writing style?

This is why the text box in RateYourPI reviews is optional, not required. The six rating categories, mentorship, work-life balance, publication ethics, funding stability, international student support, and overall experience, are the only mandatory fields. A star rating alone reveals nothing about who submitted it. You can complete a full, meaningful review without writing a single word of free text if you prefer to let the numbers speak for themselves.

For those who do choose to write something, the platform displays a clear reminder that reviews represent personal opinions and experiences, not verified facts, which provides an additional layer of legal protection for the reviewer.

What happens if someone demands to know who wrote a review

This question has a simple answer, and it is only possible because of the architecture described above.

If a PI, a university, or a lawyer contacts RateYourPI demanding to know who wrote a specific review, our honest answer is: we cannot tell you, because we do not know. We do not store anyone's email after verification. We have no record connecting a reviewer's identity to their published review. We are not responsible for the content of user-submitted reviews, and we have no information to provide even if we wanted to.

That answer is not a legal maneuver. It is technically true. We built the system specifically so that this would be the only possible honest answer.

For the researchers who are still hesitant

We understand. The instinct to protect yourself is rational. Academia has not historically been a safe place to speak honestly about power, and the people who have tried have often paid for it.

What we can tell you is that RateYourPI was built by someone who paid that price, who knows what it feels like to have no safe place to tell the truth, and who built this platform specifically so that the next researcher would have one.

Your email is deleted the moment your review goes live. Your identity is never stored alongside your review. And if someone ever comes asking who you are, we will have nothing to tell them, because we designed it that way on purpose.

That is the system. You can trust it because we made it technically impossible to betray it.