There’s a scientific journal called “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List”.
In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph.
An Australian computer scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in response to spam from the journal. Apparently, he thought the editors might simply open and read it.
Instead, they automatically accepted the paper — with an anonymous reviewer rating it as “excellent” — and requested a fee of $150. While this incident is pretty hilarious, it’s a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, for-profit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate.
It's been such a joy to be involved in the creation of the amazing Zine O'Biology, the first (as far as we know) Star Trek In-Universe Xenobiology Journal.
Over 40 wonderful contributers, both writers and artists, wrote/drew scientific journal articles, letters to the editor and advertisements for in-world products and services.
It's fascinating, insightful and, in many places, hilarious. Definitely worth a read, so check it out! I've included sneak peaks below of some of the artwork I created for both journals and advertisements.
I'm reading an article on how to properly format scientific papers because of course I am and it's giving examples for how to format names and shit and just,,, these are the names someone made up??
Scientific papers are really expensive. No student can afford to have access to them. If you want to do a proper research, it is impossible to pay all the access to all the publishers that are out there. Because for one topic of your interest there are a lot of different publishers to talk about that.
Scihub is a site where you can find everything for free. It is basically piracy.
And oh i love pirates.
Scientific research should be accessible for everyone, for every type of research and for every level of education. It is not a race "i progress more than you", but should be a "we progress a humanity". Also it should be "we found this thing A is like this", "We also found A is like that and we also found B" and everyone can add a little to the research. If we don't have accesso to what other study units of other countries do, how we do progress?
It is true we need a lot of the same design of study to be certain of something, but sometimes there are too many identical studies, just because you don't know it was already there or you didn't know the same topic was being sudied by another country in the same period.
So yes Scihub is a pirate, but in this world, in this scientific world, it is the only one doing things right.
Prompted by the question of "What EXACTLY is the success condition of the Joining, and why is the survival rate so low?" I fell DEEP down the DA research rabbit hole and developed this theory based off in-world lore/evidence and real, natural world comparisons.
But because I'm a disaster when it comes to academia and its practices, the BRILLIANT @sidneysussex swooped in and saved my ass, molding my rough ramblings into this BEAUTIFUL AND PROFESSIONALLY FORMATTED paper 😍
Without further ado, please enjoy possibly the driest Dragon Age publication ever 😅
Toward a unifying theory of the blight and its effects
In this paper, we present a unifying theory of the blight that positions it as a corruption of the ancient isatunoll, or collective hivemind consciousness, of the Titans and their descendants. We propose that this isatunoll, sundered from the Titans and cast into the Fade by the Evanuris and then further altered to incorporate the Taint, constitutes the blight as it is known today. Additionally, we propose that the Joining ritual of the Order of the Grey Wardens serves to inoculate those who survive it against further corruption by the Taint via a sympathetic bond with the archetypal isatunoll. Finally, we provide reasoning to suggest that the Joining can only be survived by those with latent genetic heritage derived from the Titans themselves, whether directly (as with the dwarva) or via the ancient elvhen people who constructed physical bodies from lyrium, the blood of the Titans.
In January 1912, German geophysicist Alfred Wegener proposed an idea the scientific world thought was wack.
After scrutinizing similar-looking fossils of plants and animals on different land masses, he wondered if perhaps the continents had once been joined together before somehow separating into a new configuration.
His work was roundly scorned, and dismissed as "delirious ravings". Now, of course, the idea of continental drift is accepted as established science, with many different lines of evidence all pointing in the direction of Wegener's supercontinent, now known as Pangea.
Paleontologists have just identified another example that would have delighted the geophysicist; almost identical sets of dinosaur footprints have been found in Cameroon in Central Africa and in Brazil in South America, separated by a distance of more than 6,000 kilometers (about 3,700 miles).
These two locations define one of the last places dinosaurs could cross between the land masses freely before the continent of Gondwana – a fragment of Pangea – broke away completely, some 120 million years ago.
In January 1912, German geophysicist Alfred Wegener proposed an idea the scientific world thought was wack.
An analysis of 2,300,000 abstracts from scientific papers shows that scientists are increasingly hyping their findings. The graph below shows the frequency of 35 words indicative of hype from 1980 to 2020.
Curiously, the trend is more pronounced in psychology than in biology or physics.
The graph is from a new paper in Scientometrics by Moritz Edlinger, Finn Buchrieser, and Guilherme Wood, titled “Presence and Consequences of Positive Words in Scientific Abstracts.” Here’s the abstract (an abstract about abstracts):
Abstracts are the showcase of scientific studies, crafted to make an impression on the reader within a limited space and to determine the amount of attention each study receives. Systemic conditions in the sciences may change the expressive norm and incentive scientists to hype abstracts to promote their work and career. Previous studies found that terms such as “unprecedented”, “novel” and “unique” have been used increasingly in recent history, to describe one’s own research findings. The present study investigates the use of valence-loaded scientific jargon in the abstracts of scientific articles. Sentiment analysis with dictionaries specifically attuned to detect valence-loaded scientific jargon was employed to analyze more than 2,300,000 MEDLINE abstracts from the fields of psychology, biology, and physics. Results show that over the last four decades, abstracts have contained an increasing amount of valence-loaded scientific jargon, as previously observed in earlier studies. Moreover, our results reveal that the positive emotional content of abstracts is increasing in a way that cannot be accounted for by the increase in text length, which has also been observed in the same time period. There were small differences between scientific disciplines. A detailed analysis of the distribution of valence-loaded scientific jargon within abstracts reveals a strong concentration towards the end of the text. We discuss these results in light of psychological evidence relating positive emotions with the propensity to overestimate the value of information to inform judgment and the increase in the competition for attention due to a pressure to publish.
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Objective To investigate whether language used in science abstracts can skew towards the use of strikingly positive and negative words over
Abstract
Objective To investigate whether language used in science abstracts can skew towards the use of strikingly positive and negative words over time.
Design Retrospective analysis of all scientific abstracts in PubMed between 1974 and 2014.
Methods The yearly frequencies of positive, negative, and neutral words (25 preselected words in each category), plus 100 randomly selected words were normalised for the total number of abstracts. Subanalyses included pattern quantification of individual words, specificity for selected high impact journals, and comparison between author affiliations within or outside countries with English as the official majority language. Frequency patterns were compared with 4% of all books ever printed and digitised by use of Google Books Ngram Viewer.
Main outcome measures Frequencies of positive and negative words in abstracts compared with frequencies of words with a neutral and random connotation, expressed as relative change since 1980.
Results The absolute frequency of positive words increased from 2.0% (1974-80) to 17.5% (2014), a relative increase of 880% over four decades. All 25 individual positive words contributed to the increase, particularly the words “robust,” “novel,” “innovative,” and “unprecedented,” which increased in relative frequency up to 15 000%. Comparable but less pronounced results were obtained when restricting the analysis to selected journals with high impact factors. Authors affiliated to an institute in a non-English speaking country used significantly more positive words. Negative word frequencies increased from 1.3% (1974-80) to 3.2% (2014), a relative increase of 257%. Over the same time period, no apparent increase was found in neutral or random word use, or in the frequency of positive word use in published books.
Conclusions Our lexicographic analysis indicates that scientific abstracts are currently written with more positive and negative words, and provides an insight into the evolution of scientific writing. Apparently scientists look on the bright side of research results. But whether this perception fits reality should be questioned.
