Academia Obscura Read online

  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)*

  Cliché

  Year of first usage

  #

  State of the art

  1959

  3518

  Gold standard

  1979

  915

  Paradigm shift

  1980

  722


  Cutting edge

  1970

  411

  Outside the box

  1995

  200

  Wind of change

  1960

  184

  Coalface/Goalposts/playing field

  1990

  164

  Quantum leap

  1972

  48

  Rubber hits the road

  1985

  23

  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

  Title

  Content

  ‘Raeding Wrods With Jubmled Lettres: There Is a Cost’36

  Tsteed sutdnets on thier raednig seped for txtes wehre wrods had jubmled lettres. Unsurprisingly, it is harder to read jumbled
words.

  ‘Not guppies, nor goldfish, but tumble dryers, Noriega, Jesse Jackson, panties, car crashes, bird books, and Stevie Wonder’37

  Explores the so-called ‘Guppy effect’, i.e. that some conjunctive concepts are typically associated with the conjunction rather than with either of its constituents (e.g. we tend to think of a guppy as more of a pet fish than either a pet or a fish).

  ‘From Urethra With Shove: Bladder Foreign Bodies. A Case Report and Review’38

  Case report of an 82-year-old man who ended up in hospital after a pencil he was inserting into his urethra broke off inside. Introducing himself to hospital staff, he said he felt ‘funny down there’.

  ‘You Probably Think This Paper’s About You: Narcissists’ Perceptions of Their Personality and Reputation’39

  Examines whether narcissists are aware that other people perceive them negatively (they are).

  ‘Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil’40

  I have no idea, but I’d watch the movie.