During March–April 2021, we used an anonymous Qualtrics survey to ask academic trainees (i.e., graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, hereafter postdocs) currently working at American and Canadian Universities within environmental biology fields about their publication records, career goals, challenges to writing, planning and scheduling writing, writing tracking methods, laboratory group (i.e., peers and advisor) involvement in their writing process, participation in writing accountability groups, demographic information, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their feelings towards writing habits and productivity. We were approved for IRB exemption under 45CFR46.104 and no answers could be linked to individuals or geographic locations, thus the survey did not track any personal identifying information.

This data was collected through a Qualtrics survey. The data was downloaded as an Excel file and some columns were renamed, and some responses were coded for analysis purposes. See the "metadata" tab for detailed descriptions of all columns. Empty cells were filled with "NA". 

Three variables were removed to comply with Dryad’s policies on human subjects data. The variables were "start": time the participant started the survey; "end": the time the participant finished the survey; and “recorded_data”: the date and time the participant submitted the survey in MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm.