Academia Obscura

by Glen Wright

  • The infamous paper on homosexual necrophilia in ducks (see page 199) includes an image of the disturbing act.

  • ‘Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time’ discusses the unusual behaviour of female short-nosed fruit bats, Cynopterus sphinx, which regularly lick their mate’s penis during copulation.† The paper is accompanied by a video of the act in question, complete with cheesy music.†

  • A later paper, ‘Cunnilingus Apparently Increases Duration of Copulation in the Indian Flying Fox, Pteropus giganteus’,96 continues this line of inquiry, including a similarly voyeuristic video.

  Occasionally there are figures that appear to have been drawn by people like me, whose artistic inclinations never surpassed shaky stickmen and who struggle to write their own name on the whiteboard. A paper investigating the distribution of hookworm eggs in human faeces is especially notable in this regard for its crude diagram of the stool-collection process.97

  Figure 3: The stool collection process

  The title of the paper ‘Remains of Holocene Giant Pandas from Jiangdong Mountain (Yunnan, China) and their Relevance to the Evolution of Quaternary Environments in south-western China’ scarcely prepares the reader for the storyboard depiction of a poor panda falling off a cliff and slowly rotting into bones.98

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

  A little more light-hearted, ‘Pressures Produced when Penguins Pooh’ includes a delightful diagram detailing exactly how far pint-sized chinstrap penguins can shoot their poop.99

  Figure 5: Pressures produced when Penguins pooh

  My favourite figure of all time, however, is ‘The underpant worn by the rat’, so good that it merited inclusion in the introduction. (The author also did the study with dogs, making them wear polyester underpants continuously for 24 months. Sadly, he did not include images or diagrams of the dogs wearing said pants in the paper).*100

  OOPS

  Finding typos in a paper post-publication is dismaying, if inevitable. Even after sinking hours of labour into it there are bound to be some miner errors. This isn’t usually fatal and will generally go unnoticed. References to ‘screwed data’ and a ‘screwed distribution’ have not stopped a 2004 paper in the International Journal of Obesity from garnering over 300 citations.101 Likewise, a group of Japanese researchers concluded: ‘There were no significunt differences in the IAA content of shoots or roots between mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal plants.’102 The paper has racked up 22 citations in spite of the significunt slipup.†

  An unintentionally honest method appears in another paper, where the authors state: ‘ In this study, we have used (insert statistical method here) to compile unique DNA methylation signatures.’103

  A couple of cringeworthy blunders have drawn the attention of the academic community in recent years. The Gabor scandal started when an internal author note was accidentally included in the final published version of an ecology paper.104 The relevant passage reads as follows:

  Although association preferences documented in our study theoretically could be a consequence of either mating or shoaling preferences in the different female groups investigated (should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?), shoaling preferences are unlikely drivers of the documented patterns …

  The corresponding author said that the comment was added following peer review during the revision process and unfortunately slipped through the cracks in subsequent rounds of editing. He told Retraction Watch: ‘ Neither myself nor any of the co-authors have any ill-will towards any other investigators, and I would never condone this sentiment towards another person or their work . . . I apologize for the error.’105 Caitlin Gabor also got in touch with Retraction Watch and told them that she knows some of the authors, and had previously written a paper with one of them.

  A similar mix-up shook the chemistry world in 2014. Due to an error in the editing process, an internal note in the papers supporting information appeared on the journal’s website. In the note, the first author appears to have been asked to fake data:106

  Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis …

  Elemental analyses are readily fabricated and are easy to slip into a paper if the journal does not ask for a copy of the independent laboratory report.*107 In the Emma case, however, the journal ultimately found no evidence of falsified analyses.108

  Not being a chemist, I am reluctant to pass judgement on those caught up in the scandal. However, I do have considerable sympathy for Emma, especially as substandard practices may not be so unusual anyway (see page 118). One of the founding editors of PLOS Medicine, Virginia Barbour, notes that, while the case is unusual in how it came to light, ‘questions on data in papers after publication are very common’.109 I’m not the only one who feels for Emma. After one kind-hearted academic took to their blog to express sympathy and defend Emma, her mother commented on the post:110

  We know that fabricating data would be alien to her. I cannot believe that her good reputation, built up over these years can be destroyed in a week. I know nothing of the academic community, but the hostile and aggressive comments left on the blog sites are unbelievable. I don’t know if Reto Dorta was careless or has done a very bad thing, but I do know that Emma is the innocent party in this affair.

  Rest assured that it is not only researchers who make mistakes. The London School of Economics once sent an email to around 200 students to confirm that they had accepted their place at the university, but due to an administrative error the email was addressed to Kung Fu Panda. This error caused some concern in a school where 25% of students are Asian, but apparently the choice of name merely reflected one staff member’s fondness for the film. Other names in the test database included Piglet, Paddington, Homer, Bob and Tinkerbell.

  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).

  * Publishing in the academic context generally means writing a paper for a peer-reviewed academic journal: you write the manuscript and send it to a journal; they get a couple of your peers to read it and give you feedback before publishing it. (See pages 37 and 51 on scholarly publishing and peer review respectively.)

  * An ‘Easter egg’ is a hidden message, inside joke, or feature (usually in video games and other interactive media). Though not the first example, the term was coined in 1979 to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure. Programmer Warren Robinett knew that his employer didn’t include programmers’ names in game credits (because they were worried that competitors would poach their employees), so he secretly inserted a credit that would only be displayed if the player hovered over a single grey pixel in a particular part of the game. The message was found only after he had left the company. The director of software development, Steve Wright, realised that reprogramming the game would be costly, so he reframed the incident and encouraged future games to include such messages as ‘Easter eggs’ for players to find. The insertion of such Easter eggs have been common ever since (e.g. Go to Google and search ‘do a barrel role’ or ‘askew’).

  † Or worse, a mistake with the potential to sink your career that people notice instantly.

  * The word cliché is onomatopoeiac from French: it was the sound a movable type printing plate made when it was in use. Given that letters were set individually, it made good sense to cast frequently used words and phrases as a single piece of metal. Over time, cliché came to mean such a ready-made phrase, and eventually took on the meaning it has in English today.

  † While we tend to use ‘rising tide’ to refer to a growing number or trend, it first caught
on after John F. Kennedy used the phrase ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ to express the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit everyone, and therefore economic policy should focus on macroeconomic development (though really he was trying to justify a pork barrel project he was inaugurating – the Greers Ferry Dam). Though commonly attributed to JFK, the phrase was originally the slogan for a regional chamber of commerce, the New England Council, and was repurposed by Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

  * Adapted from Goodman’s paper. Goodman based his analysis on searches in PubMed, a database focused on medical fields. Global numbers would likely be much higher.

  * ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ from Romeo and Juliet.

  † Dolly got her name from the fact that the somatic cell from which she was cloned was derived from a mammary gland cell and that the scientists ‘couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s’.

  ‡ Even after discounting papers about emperors or emperor penguins.

  * The sexual organ visible on the plant bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the human male.

  * This is a real paper. I know because I read it. I’d have finished writing this book months earlier had I not been constantly tempted to read all of the strange studies my research turned up.

  * This pithy summary would make a perfect nanopublication (see page 95).

  * The former for levitating a frog using incredibly strong magnets, the latter for the invention of graphene.

  * Despite being listed as the author on 13 papers, I couldn’t find a university profile for Taco, so I am inclined to think this is a long running and well-executed joke. However, Dutch parents do occasionally call their kids Taco. In 1974, at peak Taco, 58 newborns were given the name.

  † A ‘spectacularly dumb idea . . . science is not decided by plebiscite’.

  * They also note: ‘the fourth through 443th authors were not consulted concerning the use of their names in this article. They can thank us at their leisure. After all, they are now co-authors with Stephen Hawking and Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Stephen Chu.’

  † Initially I assumed that the fruit flies themselves made the author list. On further enquiry, I learned that Sarah Elgin, the researcher at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri who led the study, decided to credit all those involved. This included over 900 undergraduate students that she enlisted to help with minor tasks. Elgin herself appears last in the author list.

  * As a Wright, my sympathies lie with Mr V. Zychacek of the Czech Technical University, who is presumably also relegated to the end of most author lists.

  * The paper tried to show that the Big Bang model of creation could explain the abundances of the light elements in the universe. Though the original theory neglected some key processes in the formation of heavy elements, later developments showed that the basic theory was essentially correct.

  † Of one R. C. Herman, who contributed to calculations made in the paper, it was said that he ‘stubbornly refuses to change his name to Delter’.

  ‡ That’s when you know you’ve really made it.

  * If you are not au fait with croquet, you can learn all about it from Joseph Strutt’s 1801 book, titled: The Sports And Pastimes Of The People Of England From The Earliest Period, Including The Rural And Domestic Recreations, May Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions And Pompous Spectacles, Illustrated By Reproductions From Ancient Paintings In Which Are Represented Most Of The Popular Diversions. (I don’t know when we stopped giving books such delightfully excessive titles, but the sooner we get back to that the better.)

  * The proteome is the entire set of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism.

  * Noting that Belafonte was ‘a great singer and a staunch defender of civil rights and democracy’, the authors dedicate their work to him. They also acknowledge that improved understanding of the proteomics of coconut milk would probably not have resulted in any changes to his lyrics.

  † I searched for the photo and found that it was lifted (without attribution) from a list of ‘The Sexiest US Bartenders’.

  * Like this.

  † For example, a footnote on page 371 in volume 1 of his diaries states: ‘For discussion of different kinds of Proportional Representation, see footnotes on p.381.’

  * All mammals above three kilograms in weight empty their bladders over a period of 13–21 seconds.

  † The paper claims to be the ‘first report of spontaneous ejaculation by an aquatic mammal’. I would not have doubted the veracity of this claim, but the authors’ reassurance made me suspicious. After an extensive search I have been unable to find any other reports of spontaneous ejaculation in marine mammals (there are, however, numerous studies reporting spontaneous ejaculation in rats, cats, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, mountain sheep, warthogs, spotted hyenas, horses, and chimpanzees. There is also one report of a man that spontaneously ejaculated upon defecation as a side-effect of the antidepressants he had been prescribed).

  ‡ The researchers hypothesise that such explosions could explain skeletal disarticulation seen in the fossil record, but conclude that probably isn’t the case.

  * The researchers found a positive correlation between fellatio duration and copulation duration, with each second of fellatio increasing total sexy time by six seconds.

  † The paper also got one of the authors into trouble. He discussed the paper with a female colleague, who later reported him for sexual harassment. He was sanctioned by his university, though an independent investigation found that he was not guilty of sexual harassment. He claimed the sanction cost him tenure and later pursued the university in the High Court. The judge found that the sanctions had been disproportionate.

  * This is a shame, because a debate has long raged on the internet as to how dogs would wear trousers, i.e. whether they would be four-legged or two-legged.

  † AltMetric (a service that attempts to measure the broader impact of papers) tallies 23 tweets citing the paper – I thought this was pretty decent, until I realised almost all of them are retweets saying, ‘Worst. Typo. Ever.’

  * This was a central issue in the much publicised 2011 case of Bengü Sezen, a former Columbia University chemistry student who conducted an elaborate fraud to get her PhD.

  1 Wilson, The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession (1942). For discussion, see Plume & Weijen, ‘Publish or Perish? The Rise of the Fractional Author’ (2014) Research Trends.

  2 Carskadon, ‘Sleep in Adolescents: The Perfect Storm’ (2011) Pediatric Clinics of North America; Ferre, ‘Alcohol and Caffeine: The Perfect Storm’ (2011) Journal of Caffeine Research.

  3 Conway & Murphy, ‘A Rising Tide Meets a Perfect Storm: New Accountabilities in Teaching and Teacher Education in Ireland’ (2013) Irish Educational Studies; Keane et al., ‘Leading a Sea Change in Naval Ship Design: Toward Collaborative Product Development’ (2007) Journal of Ship Production; Smith, Dawn Bazely & Yan, ‘Missing the Boat on Invasive Alien Species: A Review of Post-Secondary Curricula in Canada’ (2011) Canadian Journal of Higher Education.

  4 Atkin, ‘A Paradigm Shift in the Medical Literature’ (2002) British Medical Journal.

  5 Goodman, ‘Familiarity Breeds: Clichés in Article Titles’ (2012) British Journal of General Practice.

  6 Goodman, ‘From Shakespeare to Star Trek and beyond: A Medline Search for Literary and Other Allusions in Biomedical Titles’ (2005) British Medical Journal.

  7 Wilson et al., ‘Much Ado about the Null Hypothesis’ (1967) Psychological Bulletin.

  8 ‘On This Day, 22 February, 1997: Dolly the Sheep Is Cloned’, BBC.

  9 Rubin, ‘To Test or “NOD-2” test: What Are the Questions? The Balanced Viewpoint’ (2005) Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.

  10 Beijerinck et al., ‘Breast Cancer Screening: All’s Well That Ends Well, or Much Ado about Nothing?’ (1989) American Journal of Roentgenology.


  11 Jones & Miller, ‘The Lateral Ligaments of the Rectum: The Emperor’s New Clothes?’ (2001) Diseases of the Colon and Rectum; Kavanagh, ‘The Emperor’s New Isodose Curves’ (2003) Medical Physics.

  12 Morle, ‘Mentorship – Is It a Case of the Emperors New Clothes or a Rose by Any Other Name?’ (1990) Nurse Education Today.

  13 Gambrill, ‘Evidence-Based Practice: Sea Change or the Emperor’s New Clothes?’ (2003) Journal of Social Work Education.

  14 Giraldo-Perez et al., ‘Winter Is Coming: Hibernation Reverses the Outcome of Sperm Competition in a Fly’ (2016) Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

  15 Schneider, ‘And the Winner is “The Good the Bad and the Outsourced”’ (2010).

  16 Brand-Miller et al., ‘Carbohydrates – the Good, the Bad and the Wholegrain’ (2008) Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition; Vangeison et al., ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Cell Type-Specific Roles of Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1 Alpha in Neurons and Astrocytes’ (2008) The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

  17 Eidsmoe & Edwards, ‘Sex, Lies, and Insurance Coverage? Insurance Carrier Coverage Defenses for Sexually Transmitted Disease Claims’ (1999) Tort & Insurance Law Journal.

  18 Hetterscheid & Ittenbach, ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Amorphophallus, but Were Afraid to Stick Your Nose Into!’ (1996) Aroideana.

  19 Petretti & Prigent, ‘The Protein Kinase Resource: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Protein Kinases but Were Afraid to Ask’ (2005) Biology of the Cell.

  20 Amsen, ‘Of Mice and Men – a Poem’ (2015) Easternblot.net.

  21 Berger, ‘Of Mice and Men: An Introduction to Mouseology Or, Anal Eroticism and Disney’ (1991) Journal of Homosexuality; Jones et al., ‘Of Mice and Men: The Evolving Phenotype of Aromatase Deficiency’ (2006) Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism.