by Glen Wright
They are mostly white and male.♀ Across all the books, there are only 26 women and 3 minorities represented. Only one character is both. Professor Wiseman in the recent Curious George books is described as ‘American, likely with Indian ancestry’ (though in the earlier books, Wiseman was a white male).
There is some surprising variety though – Professor Peabody is a vegetable.
Professor Peabody aside, is this a fair depiction?
These depictions have their roots in public perception (and fear) of science, particularly after the Second World War, as well as broader societal trends of anti-intellectualism and structural misogyny. Looking at professors in children’s books holds a mirror up to the academy itself: can we really blame children’s books for not being more diverse if the academy itself is stale, male, and pale?
What kinds of stories are the books telling?
The theme of the stories tends to be ‘academic is out of touch with how the world works, with hilarious consequences’ in the case of professors, or ‘is evil and wants to take over the world, but is thwarted by our plucky hero (never heroine)’ in the case of doctors.
Any favourite characters?
The eccentric Professor Blabbermouth, and Dr Hatchett, who, having failed to find an academic job after her English Literature PhD, now teaches primary school pirates. The Boffin Boy series, written by David Orme for older kids that are struggling with reading, has proven consistently popular with the whole family. It features the stereotypically boring Professor Mudweed, as well as our only evil female, Doctor Daphne.
Your work here is unlikely to ever be finished. What’s next?
Cambridge University Press will publish my book very soon – Male, Mad and Muddleheaded: The Representation of Academics in Children’s Illustrated Books. I should think about tackling non-illustrated texts for older children next.
I can’t wait to read it. Any plans to write your own kids’ book?
I’m thinking about it. I would love to write a kids’ book, but I can’t draw and I’ve never written for kids! I’d need a partner.
Finally, a favourite quote:
‘Professor Blabbermouth was as bright as buttons. There was no doubt about it. She had enough university degrees to paper her toilet walls. Some people said she was a genius. Some people said she was a nutter. It was all a matter of opinion . . . All those brains and nothing to use them on made her do rather . . . eccentric things. Like cycling backwards to the shop in the belief it saved time. Or for a complete week never using the letter ‘e’ whn spaking to popl. She never explained her reasons for this. And nobody thought to ask.’
Figure 11: The Professor’s Lecture70
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).
* The journal ceased publication in 1792, during the French Revolution, and, although it briefly reappeared in 1797 under the updated title Journal des savants, it did not re-commence regular publication until 1816. It continues to be a leading academic journal in the humanities.
* Hooray! No more being burned alive at the stake for suggesting that the Earth moves around the sun! Scientists rejoice!
* Reed Elsevier, Springer Science+Business Media, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage.
† A preprint is simply a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The timely distribution of a preprint allows the authors to get feedback from their colleagues and peers before formal peer review, acceptance and publication. Preprints are now largely distributed online rather than as paper copies, giving rise to huge preprint databases.
* We posit, inter alia, that intentionally blank pages could be a kōan, i.e. a statement used in Zen practice to provoke the ‘great doubt’ and test a student’s progress.
† UKSG originally stood for United Kingdom Serials Group, but as it no longer covers only the UK or serials, the acronym is a touch outdated. The body aims to encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication, and the annual conference is part of this mission, bringing together librarians, publishers, intermediaries, technology vendors, and, occasionally, funny (and slightly angry) Scottish open access advocates.
‡ This action is, of course, in violation of copyright. Nobody has yet sought their removal, presumably because they would look utterly ridiculous doing so. I personally hoped we would receive a takedown notice and that the Streisand effect would propel our silly study into academic stardom.
* You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum, and that’s why academics don’t get invited to dinner parties.
† Show them some love, follow @potatoresearch.
* ‘On one hand, praying before generating a dataset resulted in more significant differences than reciting random text. On the other hand, praying did not perform better than simply doing nothing. Plus, praying had no effect on statistical significance after the data had already been collected (i.e., the Desperation Scenario).’
† ‘In the simulation involving a solar progression into red giant stage, oak-hickory forests were reduced to their elemental constituents and redistributed among the cosmos.’
* The papers consist of seemingly scientific language, followed by a load of nonsense based on a comically literal interpretation of the Bible. E.g. On the genus Acrochordus: ‘because of its fully aquatic existence and capability of osmoregulating in hypotonic and hypertonic aquatic environments, it is potentially capable of surviving Flood conditions and are not included on the Ark’.
† E.g. ‘Lowercase for divine dwelling places, including heaven, hell, and paradise.’
‡ Send a stamped-addressed envelope and a blank cheque today to receive an exclusive Academia Obscura tie clip.
* I spotted this superbly honest cover letter on Twitter (author unknown).
* Just kidding, most journals are still using clunky outdated systems with incredibly inefficient workflows.
† Around two thirds of ‘pure’ open access journals listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals don’t charge a publication fee, but so-called ‘hybrid’ offerings from traditional publishers (i.e. subscription journals that contain some open access articles) generally involve higher fees.
‡ This is worth noting because traditional publishers have used the issue of junk journals as a PR tool to argue that they are the only ones capable of providing reliable open access publishing, which is patently not the case.
* If they were going to be so ridiculous, they could’ve at least listed their impact factor as pi.
† Though claimed to be a ‘verified’ impact factor, a quick skim through the list of journals that Universal Impact Factor has supposedly accredited reveals that this company is also a thinly veiled sham operation. Rated journals are based in ‘Bulagria’ and ‘Corea’, while clicking on a journal title for more information will fill your screen with popup ads for penis enlargement pills and other typical internet junk.
* A house on a nondescript suburban lane on the outskirts of Manchester, just down the road from the Manchester Ukrainian Cultural Centre and the Museum of Transport.
* Her paper investigated gender differences in the transition from PhD to postdoc, leading the reviewer to comment that: ‘It might well be that on average men publish in better journals . . . perhaps simply because men, perhaps, on average work more hours per week than women, due to marginally better health and stamina.’
* Gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by massive dense bodies (like black holes and neutron stars) orbiting each other, were predicted by Einstein in 1916, based on his theory of general relativity. In 2016, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) a
nnounced the first clear detection of gravitational waves.
* Minor faults may not necessitate a full retraction and can instead be corrected, though the stories behind small corrections are generally not as interesting. One recent correction in Nature nonetheless caught my eye. It reads: ‘The figure given for the planting of super soya bean in the News Feature “Frugal farming” should have been 67,000 hectares, not 1 million. In addition, the feature failed to make it clear that Jonathan Lynch was joking when he suggested that students should “drop acid”.’
† Pinning down the first ever retraction is a difficult task, not least because early uses of the word ‘retraction’ tended to denote corrections to a paper rather than a full retraction. Science historian Alex Csiszar from Harvard found such an instance dating from 1684, while 5th-century theologian Saint Augustine wrote an entire book of Retractationes (‘revisions’) toward the end of his life to correct everything ‘which most justly displease me in my books’. Retractions only started to approach their current format post-WWII.
* I.e. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States and renowned polymath, author, and scientist.
† His colleagues were not impressed, saying that his ‘perverse conduct . . . produced such shameful discord and dissensions in the Royal Society, as continued for many years after, to the great detriment of science’. The Pantheon was demolished in 1938 to make way for a new branch of Marks and Spencer (which is still there).
* The names were pasted with the superscript letters denoting author affiliation – i.e. Kapelouzouc in the real paper becomes Kapelouzouc in the fraud.
* Across the Atlantic, Google’s HR team ran an in-house study nicknamed ‘Project M&M’, wherein they strategically shifted the complimentary candy to opaque containers and instead emphasised the placement of healthy snacks in glass jars. In the New York office, during a period of seven weeks, the 2,000 staff consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms.
† Stapel also included fewer co-authors when reporting fake data, though other elements of the papers (such as the number of references and experiments) did not vary.
* Where I’m from, we call this ‘bollocks’.
* The other paper was rejected, though no reasons were given. When the authors asked if they might see the peer review comments, they got a rambling response from the organisers. Citing studies regarding the prevalence of such practices in journals, they said: ‘If this kind of complexity seems not to be always feasible for journals, it will have less probability of being feasible for a conference. In our case we are very sorry we are not finding it feasible.’ So, ‘no’, then.
* The program is freely available, leaving publishers and conference organisers with no excuse for accepting such papers in the future.
† Bohannon programmed a ‘scientific version of Mad Libs’ to vary the paper he sent to each journal. The papers all described the discovery of a new cancer drug extracted from a species of lichen, following the template: Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z. A database was set up to substitute X, Y, and Z for real molecules, lichens, and cancer cells. The data provided did not support the claimed conclusion and had obvious flaws.
‡ I.e. Fee charging, English language, open access publishers with at least one medical, biological, or chemical journal (in total, 167 from the DOAJ, 121 from Beall’s list, and 16 that appeared in both).
* On a somewhat unrelated note, both Eisen and Bohannon are super-cool scientists and a credit to the academy. Eisen is a renowned computational biologist, a co-founder of PLOS, and has announced his intention to run for the US Senate in 2018 as an Independent science-focused candidate. He also has a keen sense of humour. The biographies of staff on his lab’s homepage include important details such as which hand they use to pipette, the person’s favourite statistical test, and their p-value (Eisen’s is 1.72414e-06). Eisen produced an awesome ‘You Have Died of Peer Review’ t-shirt and his blog includes a recipe for a Vegan Thanksgiving Picnic Pie that looks absolutely incredible. Bohannon is a great science writer and has an impressive track record as a journalist. After embedding in Afghanistan in 2010, he convinced the US military to voluntarily release civilian casualty data, and he received a Reuters environmental journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on the water crisis in Gaza. He also runs the annual ‘Dance Your PhD’ contest, and wrote a paper entitled ‘Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?’ (following which he convinced US talk show host Stephen Colbert to eat cat food live on air).
1 Ware, The STM Report: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Journal Publishing (2015).
2 Jinha, ‘Article 50 Million: An Estimate of the Number of Scholarly Articles in Existence’ (2010) Learned Publishing.
3 Larivière et al., ‘The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era’ (2015) PLOS ONE.
4 McGuigan & Russell, ‘The Business of Academic Publishing’ (2008) Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship.
5 Klein et al., ‘Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-Print Versions’ (2016) arXiv.
6 Smith, ‘Librarians Find Common Ground with Former Foes’ (2015) *Research.
7 Wright et al., ‘This Study Is Intentionally Left Blank’ (2015) Annals of Improbable Research.
8 Taylor, ‘Elsevier Is Taking down Papers from Academia.edu’ (2013) Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week.
9 Plumer, ‘The World’s Most Boring Journal – and Why It’s Good for Science’ (2012) Washington Post.
10 Flegel et al., ‘Review of Disease Transmission Risks from Prawn Products Exported for Human Consumption’ (2009) Aquaculture; Strom et al., ‘The Female Menstrual Cycle Does Not Influence Testosterone Concentrations in Male Partners’ (2012) Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine.
11 Journal of Universal Rejection website.
12 Proceedings of the National Institute of Science website.
13 Department of Math & Theology (Matheology), ‘Can You Pray Your Way towards Statistical Significance? An Experimental Test’ (2015) PNIS-HARD.
14 Footman & Footman, ‘Effects of Climate Change, Agricultural Clearing, and the Sun Becoming a Red Giant on an Old Growth Oak-Hickory Forest in Southeastern Iowa’ (2014) PNIS-SOFD.
15 Tennant et al., ‘The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review’ (2016) F1000 Research.
16 Xia et al., ‘Who Publishes in “Predatory” Journals?’ (2014) Journal of the Association for Information and Science and Technology.
17 ‘FTC Charges Academic Journal Publisher OMICS Group Deceived Researchers’ (2016) Federal Trade Commission; McCook, ‘Multiple OMICS Journals Delisted from Major Index over Concerns’ (2017) Retraction Watch.
18 Schuman, ‘Revise and Resubmit!’ (2014) Slate.
19 Thanks to Twitter users Elana Halls (@hestofhere) and Jason Warr (@WarrCriminology) for the last two.
20 Bernstein, ‘Updated: Sexist Peer Review Elicits Furious Twitter Response, PLOS Apology’ (2015) Science; Woolston, ‘Sexist Review Causes Twitter Storm’ (2015) Nature.
21 Chapman & Slade, ‘Rejection of Rejection: A Novel Approach to Overcoming Barriers to Publication’ (2015) British Medical Journal.
22 ‘Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years After Einstein’s Prediction’ (2016) LIGO Lab website.
23 Kennefick, ‘Einstein Versus the Physical Review’ (2005) Physics Today.
24 ‘Correction’ (31 May 2016) Nature.
25 McCook, ‘What Did Retractions Look like in the 17th Century?’ (2016) Retraction Watch.
26 Oransky, ‘The First-Ever English Language Retraction (1756)?’ (2012) Retraction Watch.
27 ‘Müllsammler Der Wissenschaft’ (2016) Schweizer Radio Und Fernsehen.
28 Oransky & Marcus, ‘Why Write a Blog about Retractions?’ (2010) Retraction Watch.
29 Schuman, ‘Revise and Resubmit!’ (2014) Slate.
30 Oransky & Marcus, ‘AIDS Vaccine Fraudster S
entenced to Nearly 5 Years in Prison and to Pay Back $7 Million’ (2015) Retraction Watch.
31 Oransky, ‘Retraction of 19-Year-Old Nature Paper Reveals Hidden Cameras, Lab Break-In, Evidence Tampering – Retraction Watch at Retraction Watch’ (2013).
32 Oransky, ‘South Korean Plant Compound Researcher Faked Email Addresses so He Could Review His Own Studies’ (2012) Retraction Watch.
33 Oransky, ‘Retraction Count Grows to 35 for Scientist Who Faked Emails to Do His Own Peer Review’ (2012) Retraction Watch.
34 Leung & Sharma, ‘Education Minister Resigns over Research Fraud Scandal’ (2014) University World News.
35 ‘You Can’t Make this Stuff Up: Plagiarism Guideline Paper Retracted for . . . Plagiarism’ (2015) Retraction Watch.
36 Shamim, ‘Serious Thoughts about Plagiarism from India’ (2012) Saudi Journal of Anaesthesia.
37 Marcus, ‘Wikipedia Page Reincarnated as Paper: Authors Plagiarized Paper on Reincarnation’ (2016) Retraction Watch; Rao, ‘The Scourge of Rising Plagiarism’ (2016) The Hindu.
38 Nagaraj et al., ‘The Mystery of Reincarnation’ (2013) Indian Journal of Psychiatry.
39 Borrell, ‘A Bullshit Excuse? My Lab Notebook “was Blown into a Manure Pit”’ (2016) Retraction Watch.
40 Butler, ‘Mystery over Obesity “fraud”’ (2013) Nature.
41 LaCour & Green, ‘When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality’ (2014) Science; McNutt, ‘Editorial Retraction’ (2015) Science.
42 ‘The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind’ (2015) This American Life.
43 Broockman et al., ‘Irregularities in LaCour’ (2014).
44 Shavin, ‘Door-to-Door Deception’ (2015) New Republic.
45 Leung & Sharma, ‘Education Minister Resigns over Research Fraud Scandal’ (2014) University World News.