Academia Obscura

by Glen Wright

  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 f
ather 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 at the start of academic papers – are not particularly fertile ground for academic humour. There are, however, some stunning examples of brevity and clarity. The inquisitive title of a 2011 paper ‘Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?’ is immediately answered by the indifferent abstract: ‘Probably not’,76 while the title of the paper ‘Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators’ is contradicted by its abstract: ‘There are none.’77

  The shortest possible abstract was achieved in 1974 by a paper entitled, ‘Is the sequence of earthquakes in Southern California, with aftershocks removed, Poissonian?’78 The abstract simply reads: ‘Yes.’ Two years later, a second team tried to attain the glory of a one-word abstract with ‘Nobody’ in response to the title, ‘Who Needs More Than Four Quarks?’79 Unfortunately, it appears that the editors made them add a more conventional abstract just before publication. The second one-word abstract finally came in 1992, in ‘Does the One-dimensionalising Model Show Intermittency?’. The abstract reads: ‘No.’80

  Graphic abstracts

  A few journals now allow authors to add graphical abstracts to their papers. In a joke that rather missed the mark, a research group mapping the proteomes of various substances posted graphical abstracts that smack of sexism.♀*

  The first that caught the attention of the scientific community was in a paper mapping the proteome of coconut milk, entitled ‘Harry Belafonte and the Secret Proteome of Coconut Milk’ (Belafonte sang a song in 1957 called Coconut Woman).*81 The authors included as their graphical abstract a photo of a topless woman holding a pair of coconuts in front of her breasts.† A similar paper on the proteome of honey includes a picture of two women in black dresses holding a bass guitar.82

  Rajini Rao, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a polite email to author Pier Righetti (who also happened to be on the journal’s editorial board) requesting that the offending images be removed. Righetti responded: ‘I wonder if you have been trained in the Vatican. As you claim to be a professor of Physiology, let me alert you that this image is physiology at its best!’83

  When an author is reluctant to acknowledge wrongdoing, one might expect the editor to take responsibility. Instead, the journal’s editor, Juan Calvete, followed up with a textbook non-apology. Concerning himself primarily with his distaste for the unwelcome publicity the scandal had brought him, Calvete was quick to point out that he personally didn’t consider the image sexist, and that the authors and editors didn’t intend them to be either.

  Calvete lamented that the scandal was detracting from his precious lab time, but nonetheless found time to write extensive comments on blog posts covering the incident.84 In one such comment, he asked whether nude paintings hanging in the Musée d’Orsay are not also sexist. Reading the rest of Calvete’s troll-like comments makes it hard to believe that he is the editor of a serious scientific publication and not an angry teenage keyboard warrior.

  As this book shows, there is no shortage of subtle and smart ways to inject a bit of humour into an otherwise fun-free zone. This is not one of them.

  FOOTNOTES

  There are two distinct types of footnotes. There is the explanatory or if-you-didn’t-understand-what-I-said-in-the-text-this-may-help-you type. And there is the probative or if-you’re-from-Missouri-just-take-a-look-at-all-this type.

  Fred Rodell 85

  We are fast approaching peak footnotes. In his history of this overused and much maligned writing convention, Anthony Grafton laments, ‘ Most students of footnotes, in recent times, have come to bury, not to praise them …’86 We can glean three important nuggets of information from this quote: 1. Academia is sufficiently saturated that it is possible to be a student of footnotes; 2. We are fed up with footnotes; and 3. Shakespeare’s influence is as strong at the foot of the page as in the titles at the top.

  Footnotes are the bane of academic writing. Often they are strewn so liberally across the page that they effectively create a shadow paper, necessitating countless hours of time and effort to format and edit according to whichever style guide the journal happens to demand. For readers, they can be an irritating distraction, making the pages feel longer and pulling tired eyes away from their thread.*

  An article in the Telegraph crowned Paddy Ashdown the ‘King of the Footnote Bores’, noting that his ‘boring footnotes occasionally refer to other footnotes, which turn out to be even more boring’.†87 One academic joked, ‘I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.’88 They obviously don’t realise that this is already the norm in legal scholarship (especially US law reviews, where the unwritten rule in that footnotes should take up double the amount of page as the substantive text).89

  For all their failings, footnotes can be beautiful, as any reader of Terry Pratchett or David Foster Wallace can attest. Occasionally, academic footnotes pass muster too. The first chapter of Bock et al.’s statistics textbook
is entitled, ‘Stats Starts Here’, a footnote to which reads:

  This chapter might have been called ‘Introduction,’ but nobody reads the introduction, and we wanted you to read this. We feel safe admitting this here, in the footnote, because nobody reads footnotes either.

  In a mathematics paper, Lara Pudwell recounts an ‘elegant proof’ to a mathematical problem put forward by one T. J. Kaczynski (i.e. the Unabomber). A footnote to his name reads: ‘Better known for other work.’90

  A PICTURE PAINTS A THOUSAND WORDS

  The drab graphs and figures that grace the pages of academic papers rarely add much excitement, though there are some whimsical exceptions, such as this figure from a physics textbook:91

  Figure 2: Well-prepared cat

  Many of the amusing figures in academic papers are disgusting or disturbing, presumably included by the researchers for their shock value rather than for reasons of scientific rigour:

  • A paper looking at how long it takes mammals to pee features a close-up of an elephant penis in full flow.*92

  • A similar investigation of ‘dripping urination by small animals’ includes a photo of the lesser dog-faced fruit bat making use of the technique.93

  • A paper on ‘spontaneous ejaculation in a wild Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphin’ includes a video still of the crucial moment.†94 (The spontaneous ejaculation lasted just under half a second, while an aftershock a few seconds later lasted 0.73s, after which the dolphin ‘gently swam away’.)

  • ‘Float, Explode or Sink: Postmortem Fate of Lung-breathing Marine Vertebrates’, an investigation of whale carcass explosions, includes a still from a video of a beached whale bursting.‡95 The photo, which features a man running towards the camera with the explosion in the background, is reminiscent of a scene from an action movie.