Acknowledgements

I.        WHAT’S ALL THIS NONSENSE THEN?

II.       PUBLISH OR PERISH

What’s in a name?

Authors

Co-authoring: Because writing is hard

Abstracts

Foot^notes

A picture paints a thousand words

Oops

Obscure interlude: Academic whimsy

III.     ACADEMIC PUBLISHING

Money for nothing

The rebellion

Recommended journals

Dodgy open access

Peer review

Interview: The semi-professional ranter

Retractions

Interview: The garbage collector of science

The hoaxes with the mostest

Interview: Male, mad and muddle-headed – academics in kids’ books

Obscure interlude: Beards

IV.      WRITING

A passage regarding succinctness and the exigencies of proactively counteracting sesquipedalianism in academic composition

^*An unreasonably long footnote

Writing is diffic

Tripe

Tropes

Mind your language

Some Examples of Wistful Acronyms in Scientific Papers (SEXWASP)

Academic Translator

Obscure interlude: The ‘scientific’ method

V.       TEACHING

Fail everyone

Pass everyone

Par for the course

Read the syllabus

Making the grade

Rate My Professors

Let the Games Begin

Obscure interlude: Food, glorious food

VI.     IMPACT & OUTREACH

Erdős

K-Index

Alternate Science Metrics

Self-citation

In a JIF

Obscure interlude: Spooky science

VII.    TWITTER

Nein

Shit Academics Say

Interview: the academic Twitter superhero

The dark side of academic Twitter

#Hashtags

Overheard on Twitter

Obscure interlude: Love and romance

VIII.  CONFERENCES

Shoddy conferences

Kimposium

Conference etiquette

Bingo!

Obscure interlude: Campus hijinks

IX.     ACADEMIC ANIMALS

Cats

Playing fowl

(Homosexual necrophiliac) Ducks

Rats

Penguins

Obscure interlude: Miscellany

X.  CONCLUSION

Irrelevant bibliography

Peer review report

Annex I: Selected figures

Annex II: Bucket list

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The underpant worn by the rat

Figure 2: Well-prepared cat

Figure 3: The stool collection process

Figure 4: Possible taphonomic scenario resulting in the accumulation of giant panda bones in the lower chamber

Figure 5: Pressures produced when Penguins poo

Figure 6: Cover of the first issue of Philosophical Transactions

Figure 7: Strategically titled journals

Figure 8: Your manuscript on peer review

Figure 9: My reviews

Figure 10: Get me off your fucking mailing list

Figure 11: The Professor’s Lecture

Figure 12: Chickens exposed to natural hair beard on mannequin

Figure 13: The writing process

Figure 14: The Isolator

Figure 15: Academic Halloween costumes

Figure 16: Academic Valentine

Figure 17: Paw prints on medieval manuscript

Figure 18: Playful, experimenter-administered, manual, somatosensory stimulation of Rattus norvegicus

Figure 19: Feynman diagram of bottom quark decay and 2-dimensional formula of 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dien-1-one

TABLE OF TABLES

Table 1: Frequency of clichés used in medical article titles (1971–2010)

Table 2: Miscellaneous papers with silly titles

Table 3: More hyper-specific gaps in the literature

Table 4: Selected p-value workarounds

Table 5: Underwater basket-weaving and other Mickey Mouse classes

Table 6: Cats and dogs with academic qualifications

TABLE OF INSTITUTIONALISED SEXISM♀

Assuming scientists are male

Your mother in a leopard-skin G-string

Hello Dolly

Coconut woman

There were apparently no famous women in the 1600s

Please include a male co-author

Discrimination is child’s play

It sucks to be female on the internet

Rate My Professors’s fashion sense

The Bechdel Test

Female faculty

Papers should be like a woman’s skirt

All male panels

Play it SAFE

Glen Wright is an academic. Sort of. Actually, he started his PhD in 2012 and is yet to finish. In the meantime, he started Academia Obscura, a blog about the lighter side of academic life. Born in the Black Country, Glen now lives in Paris, where he works for a non-governmental organisation trying to save the ocean. Neither is as glamorous as it sounds. Glen finds writing about himself in the third person extremely uncomfortable, but is equally uncomfortable breaking with accepted convention in his first book.

To my late PhD

With special thanks to

Mice Chancellor Palimpsest Parnassus

Dear Reader,

The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type academia5 in the promo code box when you check out.

Thank you for your support,

Dan, Justin and John

Founders, Unbound

I would like to thank the wonderful people who provided love, support, inspiration, and proofreading. Without them, I’d probably never have started writing this book, much less finish it.

•    Bart Wasiak, for the bet that led to this book, the support and encouragement during its development, and for going above and beyond with a last-minute edit.

•    Emily Gong^♥ for giving me unfettered access to her apparently bottomless well of love and support, and for putting up with far more of my nonsense than most.

•    Jill Cooper, the biggest individual donor to the crowdfunding effort. Thanks Mom!

•    Haydn Griffith-Jones for being a great friend, even if he never did get around to reading my drafts (see page 100, mate).

•    Johannes Krebs, fellow PhDiva and the best writing buddy one could ask for.

•    Julien Rochette, a fantastic boss and mentor. Merci chef pour m’avoir appris comment faire mousser, jouer du pipeau, et danser la gigoulette.

•    Harriet Harden-Davies, whose fascinating science history lessons, boundless enthusiasm, and love of the ocean and strong dark beer, have unwittingly plunged her into my inner circle.

The following people have talked me down from various stages of deadline-induced panic and impostor syndrome, and done a whole heap of proofing and editing:

•    Josh Bernoff (withoutbullshit.com), author of the excellent Writing Without Bullshit, who helped clean up my rambling and made me realise how much passive voice was being used.

•    Katrin Boniface, for the grammar pointers.

•    Stevyn Colgan, for reassurance, support, and last-minute proofreading.

•    Gemma Derrick, for her insights on impact.

•    Amy Eckert, for her positivity and encouragement.

•    Charlotte Fleming (ireadyourwriting.co.uk), for her helpful and amusing editorial comments.

•    Nathan Hall, for his academic humour and for the crowdfunding boost.

•    Jason McDermott for the amazing RedPen BlackPen comics illustrating the book.

•    Grainne Kirwan, for giving me my first opportunity to give a silly lecture at a real university.

•    Ivan Oransky, for the support and the great work at Retraction Watch.

•    Raul Pacheco-Vega, for his invaluable contribution to the academic community, and for taking the time to send me some kind words at the perfect moment.

•    Jens Persson, Pontus Böckman, and all at the Skåne branch of the Swedish Skeptics Society, for pledging to have me to speak at their monthly meeting.

•    Julia Pierce and the team at Scrivener (literatureandlatte.com), for their incredibly generous contribution to the crowdfunding effort, and for developing the excellent software that I used to organise my scatterbrain into a book.

•    Kat Peake, for her keen eye, writing companionship, and dislike of overenthusiastic italicisation.

•    Graham Steel, for the encouragement and good humour.

Convention obliges me to self-effacingly declare that any errors or omissions are my own. They are not. If you spot any, please alert me immediately so I can work out who is to blame.

People are important, but so are places (especially as lately I seem to spend more time in cafes and libraries than in the office). I therefore wish to acknowledge: the Anticafé in Paris, where I started the weekly Shut Up and Write session, and where the blog and book started to take shape; the coffee shops of Brno, Czech Republic, where I did a substantial chunk of the initial drafting in one intensive week alongside my good friend Johannes; and the coffeeshops of Amsterdam, where Emily kindly paid for me to accompany her on a work trip, during which I hashed out the final draft.

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, the following people thought I wasn’t completely off my trolley and generously contributed a significant amount of money to the crowdfunding effort that made this book possible: Mark Archibald, Chris Ashford, Dawn Bazely, Ondrej Cernotik, Rebecca Dunn, Simon Haslam, Elyse Ireland, Andy Franklyn-Miller, David Graham, Paul Miller, Neville Morley, Jussi Paasio, Debi Roberts, Deborah Roberts, and Bradley Turner.

I am incredibly grateful to you all. May your papers be published, may your students read the syllabus, and may your editors leave your Oxford commas unmolested.

AN ACADEMIC BLESSING

May the tenure track rise up to meet you.

May your deadlines always be extended.

May your teaching load be lightened,

the reviewers fall soft upon your papers,

and until we meet again

(Wednesday at the interminable weekly faculty meeting),

may the Dean hold you

in the palm of His hand.

Contemporary academia could be seen as a hothouse
for functional stupidity.

Alverson and Spicer, 20121

Academia. Stuffy middle-aged men sporting elbow patches. Greying mad scientists, slightly muddle-headed and socially incompetent. Grand buildings with dusty halls and libraries, sinking beneath the weight of arcane books.* Elderly professors skateboarding around campus, cats publishing physics papers in French, and conference presentations consisting entirely of the word ‘chicken’ repeated over and over.

If academia is a world apart, the unusual aspects of it that I am about to show you take place in an altogether different dimension. I drifted into this strange place by accident. The first day I sat down in my PhD office, ready for three years† of hard research and writing (not to mention social isolation and financial instability), I hadn’t a clue what I was supposed to be doing. I wasted much of the first week watching cat videos on the internet and playing inane games on my phone.*

I started researching in earnest around week three. Ten or so pages into the search results for ‘marine energy’† I came across a completely irrelevant (for the purposes of my dissertation) paper entitled ‘Energy Saving Through Trail Following in a Marine Snail’.2 Naturally, I was intrigued. I proceeded to read the article in its entirety, learning that the marine intertidal snail (Littorina littorea) can achieve an energy saving of approximately 75% by following the trail previously laid by a fellow snail. I also learned, albeit indirectly, that academics are researching the most random of subjects.

I created a folder entitled ‘Obscure’ alongside all the serious stuff and stashed away the snail paper. I frequently added further fodder to the folder.‡ Not only was it a fun way to procrastinate, but occasionally dipping into the entertaining tit-bits I had collected kept me grounded, reminding me of the (in)significance of my actual research.

It wasn’t until much later that this minor folly turned into something approaching an obsession. One evening in Paris, in conversation with my good friend Bart, I remarked that I would eventually write a book about the bizarre side of academia. He told me that nobody would read it, so we made a wager. The fact that you are reading this attests to the failure of his hypothesis (thank you).

Before that fateful conversation, social media had always brought out my inner Luddite, but I swallowed my pride and created a blog and accompanying Twitter account. Academia Obscura was born (and a significant portion of my free time was lost forever).

Academics were evidently in need of comic relief because the project proved popular in a way that I hadn’t expected. This probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Academic work can at times be unexciting and isolating – we need a collective outlet for our frustrations, and humour has often played this role. As James McConnell (founder of the Worm Runner’s Digest, one of the first academic parody publications) put it:3

Humour in a scientist, a sort of controlled lunacy, serves as a safety valve that ensures that he remain intellectually open.^♀

The relationship between humour and academia is nonetheless fraught. There are, broadly, two camps: those who think that jokes and humour have no place in science and academic inquiry; and those who think that we should all just lighten up a bit.* I am predictably (and staunchly) in the latter category. One academic, of the former disposition, responded to one of my crowdfunding emails: ‘Dear Glen, Strangely enough, I’m not keen to fund a book that rubbishes my job in such a one-sided way.’⁴

It is true that misguided attempts at humour occasionally backfire. The French scientists deliberately naming various genetics processes so as to spell out ‘Ta mère en string panthère’ † come off as humourless at best (and as middle-aged white guys making cringeworthy and immature sexist jokes at worst).^♀5 This book is about the stuff that’s not just puerile, but actually amusing.

Academic humour assumes many forms: hoaxes, spoofs, satirical journals, silly science experiments, etc.‡ I’ve also found, and will share with you, sham ‘scientific’ journals that are so outlandish they seem satirical, inadvertently amusing errors and faux pas, plain bad manners, and excessive eccentricity from those who should know better.

The Ig Nobel Prizes, the awards that celebrate creative research that ‘first makes you laugh, then makes you think’, are undoubtedly one of the most recognisable outlets for academic humour. The Igs, organised by Marc Abrahams under the umbrella of the Annals of Improbable Research, are almost as popular as the real Nobels – around 9,000 nominations are sent in each year. The Annals itself follows in a long line of parody publications, dating back to the late 1950s when a number of such periodicals first began poking fun at the peculiarities of the academy (including The Journal of Irreproducible Results and the Worm Runner’s Digest).

There are also more muted attempts to inject humour into the academic enterprise, like the jokes and jibes that academics slip into their otherwise serious peer-reviewed papers when they think nobody’s looking. Authors citing porn stars and football teams as sources of inspiration, listing Muammar Gaddafi as their co-author, or including this illustration of a rat in pants:*

Figure 1: The underpant worn by the rat

Most of the examples in this book are unique and absurd one-offs that are unlikely to be repeated. But I have been driven to wonder how many isolated instances one needs to observe before concluding that a significant portion of the academic community is, in fact, slightly unhinged.

The internet has allowed these oddities to garner a greater share of eyeballs than previously possible, precipitating a bold new era of academic humour. Jokes once buried deep in papers only to be uncovered by a handful of curious researchers are now liable to be spotted and spread rapidly, while school scandals and dodgy dealings are exposed in a heartbeat. At the same time, ticked-off professors and PhD students can now find a global community with whom they can vent their frustrations and share stories. Social media accounts like Shit Academics Say reach an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, spreading their unique brands of scholarly sarcasm and snark far and wide.

Like all good academic works, I shall start out with the caveat that the scope of this book is limited. The flow of academic antics is constant, and the seam of strange runs surprisingly deep. It is simply not possible to cover every quirky bit of nonsense. I am constrained by space and time (space-time?) to present only the finest selection of academic obscurities.

I probably should be writing something ‘useful’ or finishing my PhD, but I have had such fun with Academia Obscura that I feel it would be a shame not to share it.

My ulterior motive is that I will never again struggle to respond to the question, ‘What do you actually do?’, or even worse, ‘Have you nearly finished your thesis?’ Instead, I will just present the questioner with a copy of this book and hope that they are sufficiently baffled to never bother me again.

If you are yourself an academic, I hope that you will do the same and that this book inspires you to take academia a little less seriously. If you are not an academic, I don’t pretend that this book will even begin to explain what academics do, but I hope it will make the mass of impenetrable papers and lofty conferences seem more accessible, bring a smile to your face, and inspire you to take us a little less seriously too.

Notes

For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).

*  Despite urban legends to this effect circulating amongst students since at least the late 1970s, there is no evidence that this has ever really happened.

†  Five years and counting.

*  I wish that were a joke.

†  My PhD research looks at the legal and regulatory aspects of wave and tidal energy technologies, sometimes collectively referred to as ‘marine energy’.

‡  Always avoid alliteration, alternatives are available.

*  I felt bad, so I replied to apologise for the uninvited intrusion into his inbox and politely explain that I did not want to rubbish academia. He wrote back: ‘I apologise for condemning without reading it first. Always a mistake! All the best’. (But he still didn’t pledge for the book.)

†  Loosely translated as ‘F**k your mother in a leopard-skin G-string’.

‡  ‘Etc’ is the abbreviation academics use when they can’t think of further examples but want to give the impression that they have plenty left up their sleeve.

*  See page 200 for more details.

1      Alvesson and Spicer, ‘A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations’ (2012) Journal of Management Studies.

2      Davies & Blackwell, ‘Energy Saving through Trail Following in a Marine Snail’ (2007) Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

3      McConnell, Science, Sex, and Sacred Cows: Spoofs on Science from the Worm Runner’s Digest (1971).

4      See, e.g. Schwartz, ‘“Sonic Hedgehog” Sounded Funny, at First’ (2006) New York Times; Heard, ‘On Whimsy, Jokes, and Beauty: Can Scientific Writing Be Enjoyed?’ (2014) Ideas in Ecology and Evolution; Riesch, ‘Why Did the Proton Cross the Road? Humour and Science Communication’ (2014) Public Understanding of Science.

5      Connor, ‘French Scientist Admits to Making up Saucy Acronyms for Genetics Research Papers as Part of a Dare’ (2014) Independent.

‘Publish or perish’ is at once the academic’s motto, curse, and raison d’être. The well-worn adage is etched into the brains of grad students and professors alike. It is hard to pin down the exact provenance of the phrase, though it seems that it has been in use since at least the early 1940s when Logan Wilson wrote:1

The prevailing pragmatism forced upon the academic group is that one must write something and get it into print. Situational imperatives dictate a ‘publish or perish’ credo within the ranks.

Universities and funders are now placing increasing emphasis on alternative means for disseminating research, and have expanded the focus on publishing papers* to a range of other ‘P’s’ – presentations, project proposals, postdocs, PhD supervision. Nonetheless, publications remain the hard currency of academia.

So ingrained is publish or perish in the academic psyche, we often continue to publish even after perishing. Alfred Werner, the first inorganic chemist to win the Nobel Prize, published a paper in 2011, notwithstanding his death in 1919. His fellow Nobel laureate in chemistry, Robert Woodward, was so prolific during his life that the pace of his scientific discoveries outstripped his ability to publish, such that much of his work was published only after his death. One physics paper (mentioned later for its incredibly long list of authors) is notable for the fact that twenty-one of the co-authors were no longer alive at the time of publication.

Should you have the misfortune to spend any length of time reading academic papers, you will notice common elements: title, abstract, acknowledgements, methods, discussion, conclusions, footnotes, etc. Spend as long as I have looking at academic papers, and you will notice that each element is an opportunity for academic humour: a snide comment, an Easter egg,* or a massive mistake that is only uncovered years after publication.†

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Because the title of a paper is the first thing the reader sees, it’s important that it gives them a clear sense of what to expect. However, academics tend to do the opposite, using unfamiliar words and expressions, (mixed) metaphors, or questions. It often feels like authors have carefully chosen their titles to be as obfuscating as possible.

The titles that irk me most are those that awkwardly use tired clichés in an attempt to enliven the subject matter and entice the reader.* I have seen countless papers claiming that one thing is dead, so long live another thing, while topics that have been described as a ‘perfect storm’ range from ‘alcohol and caffeine’ to ‘sleep in adolescents’.2 As a researcher on ocean issues, I’ve seen a lot of ‘rising tides’ and ‘shifting sands’.† I’ll concede that ‘Leading a Sea Change in Naval Ship Design’ and ‘Missing the Boat on Invasive Species’ are apt uses of maritime metaphors, but ‘A Rising Tide Meets a Perfect Storm: New Accountabilities in Teaching and Teacher Education in Ireland’ is a bridge too far.3

One of the earliest studies of such titles was written by Philip Atkin for the 2002 Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.4 The issue is dedicated to spoofs and parodies, which explains Atkin’s apparent enthusiasm for clichés: ‘Papers with catchy titles work best. Titles need to contain phrases that are in popular use and suggest innovation and exploration.’ The paper analyses the use of ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘pushing the envelope’, both popular clichés at the time. He found 201 papers during the period 1976–2001 that contain the former, and 37 the latter. ‘Paradigm shift’ was initially unpopular, but that shifted in the mid-1980s. A period of exponential growth followed, but the phrase suffered a steep decline as the noughties approached. Likewise, academics were pushing few envelopes early on, but then in the 1990s we started to give them a real beating.

With presumably sarcastic exuberance, Atkin urges academics to use new and exciting words and phrases in paper titles: ‘We must not confine our meditations but should begin to think outside of the box.’

Ten years later, Neville Goodman revisited Atkin’s work and found that ‘paradigm shift’ had rebounded, while mercifully few envelopes were being pushed.5 Atkin’s nod to thinking outside the box was prescient: the phrase first appeared in 1995 and 124 papers used it in the period 2006–10.

Table 1: Frequency of clichés used in medical article titles (1971–2010)* 

To be or not to be?

Clichés are only the tip of the iceberg. Goodman conducted another study of titles, ‘From Shakespeare to Star Trek and beyond: A Medline Search for Literary and Other Allusions in Biomedical Titles’.6 He found over 1,400 Shakespearean allusions, a full third of which are to ‘What’s in a name’,* and another third to Hamlet.

‘Much ado about nothing’ appears 171 times, the first in 1967 as ‘Much ado about the null hypothesis’,7 while the ‘be’ in ‘to be or not to be’ has been substituted for a range of other things. ‘To Clone or Not to Clone’ appeared in 1997, one year after the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep.†^♀8 ‘To Test or Not To Test’ is used over 3,500 times, including some gems like ‘To test or NOD-2 test: what are the questions?’9 Peak Shakespeare was reached in ‘Breast Cancer Screening: All’s Well that Ends Well, or Much Ado About Nothing?’10

Beside the Bard, Goodman found 244 allusions to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes.‡ According to academia, the emperor has a motley wardrobe containing everything from isodose curves to ‘the lateral ligaments of the rectum’.11 One paper references both Andersen and Shakespeare (‘Mentorship – Is It a Case of the Emperor’s New Clothes or a Rose by Any Other Name?’),12 while ‘Evidence-Based Practice: Sea Change or the Emperor’s New Clothes?’ simultaneously pushes my ocean cliché button and ticks the Andersen box.13

Goodman argues that such paper titles are a learned behaviour and that we are likely to see new allusions creep into titles over time. Sadly, he seems to be correct. Authors are already playing around with ‘Winter is coming’ (a quote from Game of Thrones), though even here there is the occasional chuckle-worthy effort – e.g. ‘Winter is Coming: Hibernation Reverses the Outcome of Sperm Competition in a Fly’.14

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Swiss science journalist Reto Schneider has been documenting the use of films as paper titles.15 The 1968 spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the clear frontrunner, with around 2,700 publications substituting the ‘ugly’ with everything from ‘the whole grain’ to the ‘Cell Type-Specific Roles of Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1 in Neurons and Astrocytes’.16 Remixes of Sex, Lies and Videotape are also frequent, though considerably less salacious in the academic incarnation ‘Sex, Lies and Insurance Coverage’ (which discusses legal liability for the negligent transmission of sexually transmitted diseases).17

The majority of film allusions are contrived. ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Amorphophallus, but were Afraid to Stick your Nose Into!’18 will make sense to a botanist,* but I don’t see why you’d be afraid to ask questions regarding protein kinases.19 Likewise the exclamatory tone of the title ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Article! A Critical Assessment of the Commission’s Notice on Article 81 (3) of the EC Treaty’ no doubt belies the arcane contents within.

Of Mice and Men

Nobody has yet taken on the considerable task of documenting references to classic novels in paper titles, though there are likely thousands. Biochemist Eva Ansen weaved 41 paper titles alluding to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men into a poem, producing some riveting rhyming couplets:20

Of mice and men: the evolving phenotype of aromatase deficiency.
Of mice and men: an introduction to mouseology or, anal eroticism and Disney.*21

Certain classics lend themselves to lazy exploitation: A Tale of Two Cities can become a tale of two pretty-much-anythings, from organisations to auto plants;22 a Catch-22 might present itself to anything from special education reform to ‘amphibian conservation and wetland management in the upper Midwest’.23

Plug the title of any classic into your academic search engine of choice for literally hours [minutes] of fun.

Like a Rolling Stone

As part of a long-running bet, five Swedish scientists have been sneaking Bob Dylan lyrics into paper titles. This is how a paper on intestinal gases acquired the title ‘Nitric oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind’.24 Elsewhere, the Rolling Stones have been immortalised (‘“I can’t get no satisfaction”: The impact of personality and emotion on postpurchase processes’),25 as have ABBA (‘Money, money, money: not so funny in the research world’)26 and Nirvana (‘Smells Like Clean Spirit’).27 A paper providing a history of rock in the 1990s has the apposite subtitle, ‘A stairway to heaven or a highway to hell?’28 Though Goodman found no ‘Fat-Bottomed Girls’ at the time of his 2005 study, just a year later a paper on the mating habits of spiders was published entitled ‘Female morphology, web design, and the potential for multiple mating in Nephila clavipes: do fat‐bottomed girls make the spider world go round?’29

Shit Happens

Vaguely intellectual Shakespeare allusions aside, occasionally authors simply have an urge to indulge their immature inclinations. I imagine that the respective authors of ‘An In-Depth Analysis of a Piece of Shit’ and ‘Shit Happens (to be Useful)!’ giggling to themselves as they pressed the submit button.30 Likewise, the authors of a study proving that a ‘hyperbolic 3-manifold containing large embedded balls has large Heegaard genus’ say at the end of the paper’s introduction: ‘A proper subset of the authors wished to subtitle this paper “Big balls imply big genus”, which is indeed the best way to memorize the result.’*

One View of the Cathedral

Paper titles sometimes make more sense in the context of an ongoing discussion among authors. In ‘Write when hot – submit when not’ the authors argue that academics would be best advised to submit papers during the winter (as journals tend to receive fewer submissions during this period).31 The response of James Hartley (author of the seminal Academic Writing and Publishing) is entitled ‘Write when you can and submit when you are ready!’ (which is, in my humble opinion, the better advice).32

A shining example of both an ongoing conversation and an overwrought allusion has been with me since my undergraduate years. During a course on Law and Economics, we studied a 1972 paper entitled ‘Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral’.33 The subtitle references a series of paintings by Monet of the same cathedral (in Rouen, France) in a variety of lighting and weather conditions, the implication being that the paper offered only one of several perspectives.

The paper has garnered around 2,700 citations, and many other authors have built on the cathedral metaphor.34 I don’t doubt that Monet would have been capable of painting a ‘clear view’ or a ‘downwind view’ of the cathedral. He could possibly have painted a ‘better view’ (though I wouldn’t be the one to critique his artistic abilities), or he might’ve missed a particularly enticing perspective. In another time he might have taken an ‘experimental view’ of the cathedral, painted it in a ‘different light’, or focused on its shadow. But I am sure that even Monet would have struggled to paint an ‘ex ante view’, much less a ‘feminist critique’ of the cathedral.

The lead author of the original paper, Guido Calabresi, praised the ‘Simple Virtues of the Cathedral’ some 25 years later, but in ‘Another View of the Quagmire’35 Daniel Farber inadvertently summarises the titling saga: ‘it is better to get a clear view of the swamp rather than to fool ourselves into believing that there is a cathedral buried somewhere beneath the muck’.

Table 2: Miscellaneous papers with silly titles

AUTHORS

Some academics are blessed with superb surnames with which to adorn their papers. I am repeatedly confronted by people joking that I am ‘Mr (W)Right’, and, while I sincerely look forward to appending ‘Dr’ to my own moniker, I shall forever envy Dr Badger (Dr Boring, less so). There is a plant scientist called Dr Flowers,41 and two uncanny coincidences come from the world of food science: Ron Buttery has studied the chemical composition of the flavour of popcorn, and Kevin Cheeseman wrote a paper on the fungi used in cheesemaking.42

Some amusing author names are entirely accidental. An unfortunate digitisation error caused Antonio Delgado Peris to be rendered as ‘A. Delgado Penis’ in online databases (delgado means ‘thin’ in Spanish),43 while the spine of the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, edited by Michael Breed and Janice Moore, reads:

EDITORS
BREED
MOORE

Academics have also intentionally subverted author lists with surprising regularity. In 1987, physicist William G. Hoover added a fictitious colleague, Stronzo Bestiale, to the author list on a paper (Italian for ‘total asshole’),44 while Andre Geim (the only scientist to have won both an Ig Nobel and a real Nobel)* listed his hamster, Tisha (‘H.A.M.S. ter Tisha’), as his co- author on a paper.45 When Physical Review Letters started allowing authors to transliterate their names into Mandarin, they probably didn’t expect that Caltech’s Victor Brar would be known as 韦小宝 (Wei Xiaobao)46 – Wei is the antihero in the Chinese novel The Deer and the Cauldron, a prodigal son of a prostitute and a demi-emperor with eight wives.

Try as they might, I doubt any academic, human or otherwise, will ever top one Dutch scientist (and winner of the 2011 Name of the Year Award): Taco Monster.*47

CO-AUTHORING: BECAUSE WRITING IS HARD

Choosing your co-authors is not dissimilar to choosing a life partner (except you can always change your partner, but once your name is on a paper, there’s no taking it back). Generally, academics team up with colleagues or others from their field, but the literature also evidences some unexpected collaborations.

David Manuwal, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington, managed to get his wife, daughter and son involved in a paper.48 David’s wife had a background in forest ecology, so she sampled plants, his daughter had learned how to identify birds and helped to conduct bird surveys, and his son assisted in marking out the study sites. David’s dedicated team carried out their studies in the snowy depths of Washington State in April at temperatures of about −10°C. David claimed it was ‘hard work, but enjoyable’ (it is not known whether his family share this sentiment).49

Four unrelated authors with the surname Goodman collaborated to produce a joke paper entitled ‘A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors’.50 Similarly, 284 authors sharing the name ‘Steve’ contributed to a paper entitled, ‘The Morphology of Steve’.51 The paper was a by-product of the National Center for Science Education’s ‘Project Steve’, a comic riposte to creationist groups that had been assembling lists of ‘scientists who doubt Darwinism’ to cast doubt on the theory of natural selection.†

The Center assembled a list of scientists called Steve and made T-shirts proclaiming: ‘Over 200 scientists named Steve agree: Teach Evolution!’ The 284 Steves featured in the paper had all bought the T-shirt, and in doing so had unwittingly given over data regarding their geographic location, sex (the study includes Steve cognates such as ‘Stephanie’), and shirt size. The four lead authors (only one of which is called Steve) say: ‘We discovered that we had lots of data. No scientist can resist the opportunity to analyze data, regardless of where that data came from or why it was gathered.’*

While 300 authors may seem unmanageable, even for a spoof study, the number of individuals supposedly contributing to academic papers is increasing exponentially. In 1963, Derek de Solla-Price predicted that by 1980 the single-author paper would become extinct. We are now well into the noughties and single-author articles persist, but we have witnessed unfettered growth in author numbers and the emergence of the era of ‘hyperauthorship’.52

I have personally co-written papers with 15 co-authors, and anywhere between two and ten authors seems to be commonplace. Some papers have taken such collaboration much further, e.g.:

•    A paper on fruit fly genomics boasting over 1,000 authors.†53

•    A 2016 paper in Autophagy with close to 2,500 authors, including 38 Wangs.54

•    The 2012 paper announcing the observation of the Higgs Boson at CERN with 2,924 authors (the standard practice when citing such a paper is to cite the ATLAS Collaboration as the author – unlucky for Mr G. Aad of Aix-Marseille Université, who would otherwise have been first in the list).*

•    A subsequent 2015 paper from CERN involving two of its research teams for the first time resulted in 5,154 authors (the first nine pages contain substantive discussion of the findings; the following 24 are dedicated to listing the authors and their affiliations).55

While journals tend not to print such abnormally long author lists in the hard copies, Physical Review Letters gave the 5,154 authors of the 2015 CERN paper the pleasure of seeing their names in print. Aside from the serious questions about what ‘authorship’ even means in such contexts, this is a colossal waste of paper (and/or disk space). Robert Garisto, an editor at the journal, said that the biggest problem with preparing the manuscript for publication was merging the author lists, as each of the teams had their own slightly different styles.56

Another challenge is remembering the names of all the contributors. In one Nature paper, a research group overlooked no fewer than five authors.57 They also mispelled some names and mixed up their funding sources. Getting published in Nature can be a career-defining moment, so I can imagine the disappointment of the forgotten five upon finding that their efforts were not credited. This error was picked up reasonably quickly, whereas it took two years for anybody to notice a couple of missing co-authors on a paper in Ecology Letters.58 A lead author that overlooks collaborators can perhaps be forgiven, but one has to question the extent of the contribution of a co-author who fails to notice their own absence from an author list.

The Alphabet Paper

In 1948, Ralph Alpher, then a physics PhD student, and his supervisor George Gamow, wrote a paper entitled ‘The Origin of Chemical Elements’ (the paper made a weighty contribution to our understanding of the early universe).* The paper was due for publication on 1 April, which may have been what spurred Gamow to add the name of his friend, physicist Hans Bethe, to the author list. The late addition meant that the author list read Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, a play on the Greek letters alpha, beta, and gamma.†

The paper came to be known as the ‘Alphabet paper’ and Gamow later explained:59 ‘It seemed unfair to the Greek alphabet to have the article signed by Alpher and Gamow only, and so the name of Dr Hans A. Bethe (in absentia) was inserted in preparing the manuscript for print. Dr Bethe, who received a copy of the manuscript, did not object, and, as a matter of fact, was quite helpful in subsequent discussions.’

Alpher himself was unhappy with the joke, reasoning that the inclusion of another eminent physicist would overshadow his own contribution and that he wouldn’t receive due recognition for his discovery.

He was right. There was a flurry of interest in Alpher’s findings, and he found himself defending his thesis in a room packed with 300 spectators. Among them were reporters, who latched on to his comment that primordial nucleosynthesis of hydrogen and helium had taken only 300 seconds and ran headlines like ‘World Began In 5 Minutes’.60 Academics showed interest in Alpher’s work, he got fan mail, and religious fundamentalists even prayed for his soul.‡61

However, the spotlight soon faded and, as he feared, his role in the discovery was ultimately overshadowed by his illustrious co-authors, as fellow physicists wrongly assumed they were responsible for the substance of the paper. Even today, Alpher’s role is usually overlooked, and he has been dubbed the ‘forgotten father of the Big Bang’.62

Croquet, anyone?

It doesn’t matter whether you have two or two hundred co-authors: as soon as you move beyond one, the question of the order in which the names appear rears its ugly head. I used to assume that common sense would suffice, but, for all their intelligence, eggheads often don’t have this in abundance.

Authorship credit tends to be doled out based on the amount of work put in, the contribution made to the final paper, or according to who came up with the core ideas. In one 1989 paper, it is pragmatism and honesty that prevail, as the authors admit that: ‘Order of authorship was determined by proximity to tenure decisions.’63 This is not unheard of: in one survey of 127 papers, four determined author order by proximity to tenure decisions.64

Materials scientist (and Twitter funny man) Sylvain Deville has meticulously documented a host of unorthodox methods for determining author order.65 Randomisation is common, with authors being listed alphabetically, arbitrarily, or, as one paper states, ‘in a fairly arbitrary manner’.66 At least 15 papers state that the order was decided by coin toss. Some of them even specify the type of coin: a two-pence coin in one case, and a weighted coin in another. In one paper, a computer-simulated coin was used, while another specifies that the coin flip took place ‘in an expensive restaurant’.67 Bearing the telltale signs of a sore loser, one paper tells us that author order was determined ‘by a flip of what [Dr X] claimed was a fair coin’.68

Some authors choose what Deville calls the Galaxy Quest method (‘Never give up, never surrender!’), whereby author order is determined by the effort expended on final revisions. (This makes total sense to me as I find this unfortunate necessity to be the most tedious part of the writing process.)

In their paper, Hassell & May state: ‘The order of authorship was determined from a twenty-five-game croquet series held at Imperial College Field Station during summer 1973.’*69 Not described in the paper are the somewhat underhand methods used to ensure their victory in such tournaments:70

Croquet was played every lunchtime during May’s summer visits on a pitch customised by a large population of rabbits. Visitors were invited to play though inevitably lost due to the huge home-team advantage knowledge of the pitch’s precise topography afforded. Visitors also frequently declared themselves disadvantaged by the alleged tactic of being asked complex ecological questions mid-stroke. This was a different game from the traditional English vicarage-lawn contest!

Some of the especially esoteric methods are difficult to decode:

•    Randomly with the S-plus sample function.71

•    By random fluctuation in the euro/dollar exchange rate.72

•    Alpha-posed that people compare the sizes of betically.73

•    By relative exactitude of Bayesian priors.74

Others have used less sophisticated methods: a tennis match; rock, paper, scissors; or even ‘a scramble competition for peat-flavoured spirit’.75

ABSTRACTS

Abstracts – the one-paragraph summaries provided 7677