What we keep
Your review text, your answers to the questionnaire, and the account you signed in with. Your email address lives in a private account record, separate from your reviews, and is never shown on a public page.
What moderators see
Ordinary moderators cannot retrieve your email. They see the review and private account references, and check it for tone and identifying details before it can be published. If they return it, they tell you why so you can change it.
Protection through publication
- Reviews, ratings and counts stay hidden until at least three reviews have been published. The supervisor’s directory profile remains available.
- Public reviews show only the year they were written, never an exact date.
- Reviews appear in a fixed shuffled order, not by date, so the newest one cannot be picked out.
- There is no overall score and no ranking of supervisors.
- Questionnaire summaries also require at least three published reviews per version group.
Staying in control
You can edit a review after it is published. The new version is checked by a moderator again, and the earlier version stays up until the new one is approved. You can also withdraw a review from My reviews while it is waiting for moderation or published; it disappears from public pages straight away.
Deleting your account retains its last published reviews without the authorship link. Withdraw first if you want them hidden. Unpublished submissions and pending edits are removed; signing up again does not restore review control. Read the privacy policy for the deletion and retention details.
If someone asks who wrote a review
Moderators cannot look up who wrote a review. Linking an account to its email is limited to owners, needs an MFA session and a stated reason, and every lookup is recorded. Infrastructure operators retain technical database access.
What you can do
These protections reduce identifying detail, but they cannot guarantee anonymity in a small lab. A distinctive experience may still be recognisable.
Avoid names, exact dates, project titles and details that point to a single person. Focus on patterns in supervision and what a future student should ask.