by Glen Wright
For reasons that are never elucidated, the author makes repeated reference to Möbius strips and some bloke called John. In one singularly dense paragraph the author begins, ‘Knitting John, John knitting. Knitting John Möbius. Möbius knitting John’. This is then followed by a description of how Möbius strips have been used as conveyor belts, recording tapes, and in the design of versatile electronic resistors. The passage concludes with: ‘The wear and tear of my efforts. My stunts, enthusiasm knitting. My brain and doubling and John.’
At best, these papers demonstrate that unnecessarily complex language is generally unhelpful. At worst, they reinforce the preconception that academics live in cloud cuckoo land detached from reality, and prove that there is no bottom limit to the gibberish that some journals are willing to publish.
TROPES
Just as clichés plague paper titles, there are tropes and phrases used so regularly and unflinchingly in papers that they have become more or less compulsory. You must ‘gratefully acknowledge’ all those who helped you realise the work, your paper must ‘fill a gap in the literature’, further research must always be required, and, crucially, your results have to be ‘significant’.
‘I gratefully acknowledge . . . ’
In the acknowledgements section of their books and papers, researchers have thanked everyone from Rocco Siffredi (an Italian porn star) for his ‘constant support’,26 to the thrash metal band Slayer for ‘continued advice and inspiration’,27 to Jon Frum (a cargo cult deity).28 Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac thanked his daughter for helping to collect data, though in reality she was four-month-old baby sleeping by his desk,29 while a couple of Barcelona fans working in the US managed to sneak in their home football chant, ‘Visca el Barça!’30 Three Italian researchers went as far as including a unique section in their paper:31
Unacknowledgements: This work is ostensibly supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research . . . The Ministry however has not paid its dues and it is not known whether it will ever do.
Unsurprisingly, there are a few that focus on funding. Sci-fi historian Adam Roberts wrote:32
Let me record that I am not in the least grateful to the British Arts and Humanities Research Board – A plague on their house. That this book was ever completed owes nothing to them at all.
Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen, who was ‘considered unconventional even by eccentrics’,33 wrote:34
I thank the National Science Foundation for regularly rejecting my (honest) grant applications for work on real organisms, thus forcing me into theoretical work.
An especially acerbic unacknowledgement appears in Brendan Pietsch’s book Dispensational Modernism:35
I blame all of you. Writing this book has been an exercise in sustained suffering. The casual reader may, perhaps, exempt herself from excessive guilt, but for those of you who have played the larger role in prolonging my agonies with your encouragement and support, well . . . you know who you are, and you owe me.
Unacknowledgements sometimes include passive-aggressive barbs aimed at those the authors feel have wronged them:
• ‘We would like to thank Karla Miller for sleeping late one morning, leaving Tim and Steve a bit bored.’ (They also thank one Saad Jbabdi for ‘making the brains look pretty’.)36
• ‘I thank Graham Higman for allowing the dust of Oxford to rest on my unopened manuscript for thirty months.’37
• ‘We gratefully thank Programme National de Physique Stellaire for financial support. We do not gratefully thank T. Appourchaux for his useless and very mean comments.’38 (bold is theirs)
Others explain the curious circumstances surrounding their work:
• ‘Most of the paper was written during my daily commute from Vancouver to Surrey, Canada, and I would like to acknowledge TransLink Metro, Vancouver’s regional transportation authority, for making the task of writing in buses and trains such an enjoyable exercise.’39
• ‘If the book is not a success, I dedicate it to the burglars in Boulder, Colorado, who broke into our house and stole a television, two typewriters, my wife Helen’s engagement ring and several pieces of cheese, somewhere about a third of the way through Chapter 8.’40
• ‘…would also like to thank the US Immigration Service under the Bush administration, whose visa background security check forced her to spend two months (following an international conference) in a third country, free of routine obligations – it was during this time that the hypothesis presented herein was initially conjectured.’41
• ‘Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons’. (The author, Chandler Davis, was serving a prison sentence for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.)*42
There are, of course, those who like to genuinely thank their loved ones:43
This book is dedicated to my brilliant and beautiful wife without whom I would be nothing. She always comforts and consoles, never complains or interferes, asks nothing, and endures all. She also writes my dedications.
Caleb Brown from the Royal Tyrrell Museum helps us end this section on a positive note. His acknowledgements in a Cell paper describing a new dinosaur read:44
C.M.B. would specifically like to highlight the ongoing and unwavering support of Lorna O’Brien. Lorna, will you marry me?
She said yes.
Gap in the literature
Academics often say that their much-needed paper fills a gap in the literature, but it would be more accurate to say that they create a much-needed gap in the literature.*45 This is, in reality, what most papers are doing – carving out a tiny niche to justify their existence.
There is a gap in the literature for everything. There is a gap in the literature for dressing up as a polar bear to try and scare reindeer.46 There is a gap in the literature for modelling avalanches by chucking 300,000 ping-pong balls down a ski jump.47 There is a gap in the literature for looking at bareback sex through the lens of queer legal theory.48 There is a gap in the literature for analysing Fifty Shades of Grey using the writings of obscure ancient Greek philosophers.49 There is most definitely a gap in the literature for you to justify whatever crazy thing it is that you want to research.*
Table 3: More super-specific gaps in the literature
Gap
Conclusion
Analysing the body composition of Spanish football referees50
The average Spanish referee is 32 years old, weighs 72.3 kilograms, and is 1.79 metres tall.
Searching the internet for evidence of time travellers51
No time travellers were discovered.
Working out why people hated Clippy, the Microsoft Word assistant52
Clippy was apparently built to invoke rage: it breaks basic rules of etiquette, unduly disturbs users, and doesn’t even provide a helpful service.
Calculating how much gravity needs to weaken before we can walk on water53
If the moon had water, a person could run on it using small fins.
Using bacteria from baby poo to make fermented sausages54
It’s theoretically possible, but literally nobody is going to buy them.
More research required
A sentence or two declaring that the topic is going to need more research paves the way for the author(s) to do said research themselves in the future. Indeed, academics that are truly on top of their research agenda often have the next paper in the pipeline. There are lots of ways to make this declaration, such as:
• ‘We can only see a short distance ahead but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.’ (Turing on artificial intelligence).55
• ‘Even if it is correct, it is clear from what we have said that much remains to be discovered…’ (Watson & Crick on the structure of DNA).56
• ‘It needs not only new applications, but also improvements, further development, and plenty of fresh energy.’ (Mendeleev on t
he periodic table).57
At the end of Paul Krugman’s paper on interstellar trade, he concludes:
I have not even touched on the fascinating possibilities of interstellar finance, where spot and forward exchange markets will have to be supplemented by conditional present markets. Those of us working in this field are still a small band, but we know that the Force is with us.
The blunt parting shot of a paper written way back in 1900 was:58
This work will be continued and I wish to reserve the field for myself.
Significance
Everybody wants their work to be important, and in academia importance means statistical significance. Enter the p-value. P-values are used to denote the significance of a given result, and p-value of less than 0.05 (i.e. the outcome would happen by chance no more than 5% of the time) has somewhat arbitrarily emerged as the benchmark for significance.
As a result, academics do everything they can to make sure their findings pass this threshold. When a p-value remains stubbornly higher than 0.05, academics are reluctant to tell the truth, and instead have come up with myriad ways to say that they just missed the mark.
Statistician Matthew Hankins has compiled a list of 500 ways that academics have minced their words when describing the significance of their results.* Here are 13† examples of authors keen to honestly reassure you that they only just very narrowly missed out on the traditionally accepted threshold for statistical significance by the most vanishingly small of margins.
Table 4: Selected p-value workarounds
Hypothesis
Quote
p-value
The Peters et al. Delusions Inventory is a better test than the General Health Questionnaire at discriminating patients with a mental disorder with psychotic features from putatively healthy people.
‘A barely detectable, statistically significant difference’59
0.073
Consumption of South American psychoactive beverage Ayahuasca increases systolic blood pressure.
‘A robust trend toward significance’60
0.0503
Difference between the sexes in the skeletal development of the hands and wrists in Finnish children.
‘Barely escapes being statistically significant at the 5% risk level’61
0.1>p>0.05
Migration of Immunoglobulin A*-bearing lymphocytes† into saliva.
‘Bordered on, but was not less than, the accepted level of significance’62
>0.05
Women are more likely than men to oppose immigrants from richer countries and support immigration from poorer countries.
‘Only flirting with conventional levels of significance’63
>0.1
Something to do with shipping routes.
‘Hovers on the brink of significance’64
0.055
Something to do with oxygen consumption by tropical butterflies.
‘Just tottering on the brink of significance at the 0.05 level’65
Not specified
Higher UV absorption in water reduces toxicity of silver to the freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna.‡
‘Narrowly eluded statistical significance’66
0.0789
The creatine phosphate, acid-soluble and total phosphorus contents of the skeletal muscle of a rat drops after one hour in a pressure chamber at a ‘height’ of about 10,000m.
‘Not absolutely significant but very probably so’67
>0.05
Increase in vegetable consumption during pregnancy reduces mercury levels in maternal blood, cord blood, and meconium.§
‘Not very definitely significant from the statistical point of view, it was at the boundary of significance’68
0.08
Community mental health teams in rural communities in England are less well integrated than teams that served urban or mixed populations.
‘On the very fringes of significance’69
0.099
The effect of emotional conflict on attention allocation.
‘Tantalisingly close to significance’70
0.104
‘Did not reach the traditional level of significant, but it resides on the edge of significance’71
0.1
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Despite their love of copy-and-paste tropes, academics can sometimes surprise with evocative language or offbeat style:
• M. N. Huxley compares mathematics to an orchestra: ‘Poisson summation is the tuba: very deep, but ridiculous when used too much.’72
• Fellow mathematician Peter Johnstone cites Milne (1926), i.e. Winnie the Pooh, in describing the proof of a theorem as: ‘A fairly straightforward Woozle-hunt.’*73
• David A. Cox and Steven Zucker created an algorithm called the Cox–Zucker Machine.74
• To excuse his supposedly poor English, Hermann Weyl writes, ‘The gods have imposed upon my writing the yoke of a foreign language that was not sung at my cradle.’75
• A paper on super-massive black holes remixes the epigraph to The Lord of the Rings, replacing both ‘ring’ and ‘Mordor’ with ‘Sérsic’ (a mathematical function that describes how the intensity of a galaxy varies with distance from its centre).76
Three Sérsics for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Galaxies where the Shadows lie,
One Sérsic for strong residuals,
One Sérsic to fiat them,
Three Sérsics to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Sérsic-fits where the Shadows lie.
The Lord of the Sérsics, epigraph
• In 1971 the Journal of Organic Chemistry published a paper written entirely in iambic pentameter* (a format favoured by Shakespeare and therefore more commonly seen in poems and plays than in chemistry papers):77
Tribromobenzene isomerisations
Are well catalysed by potassium
Anilide in liquid ammonia.
It was therefore of interest to see
The effect of this base on mobility.
Results are assembled in Table IV.
With the aim of introducing more lively language into scholarly works, the PhD Challenge was started by zombies* in 2010. The challenge saw fledgling scholars attempting to include a defined phrase, generally odd or obscene, into a peer-reviewed publication.
Gabriel Parent from Carnegie Mellon was the first winner, sneaking the sentence ‘I smoke crack rocks’ into his paper on speech-recognition systems.78 He notes that callers can cause problems when they use language that isn’t in the typically limited vocabulary of automated telephone systems. For example, a caller could yell ‘I smoke crack rocks’ down the phone and the computer system wouldn’t have a clue what it meant. He won a box of ramen noodles and a pack of leather elbow patches for his efforts. (I was unable to confirm whether the tentative prize of an autographed photo of Paul Krugman ever came to fruition.)
The 2011 challenge was to get a paper published with at least one author with the nickname ‘Dirty Old Man’ or ‘Crazy Cat Lady’. NYU postdoc Tom Schaul’s daring exceeded expectations as he managed to co-author with ill-fated dictator Muammar ‘Dirty Old Man’ Gaddafi.79 He won a Calabash professor’s pipe and a copy of Strunk & White’s classic The Elements of Style.
Demonstrating that a bit of humour did no harm to their career prospects, Tom now works at Google DeepMind and Gabriel went on to work at Amazon. Sadly the challenge itself is no longer running. It seemed to fizzle out around the time of the 2012 edition, meaning nobody ever named something as a ‘Cleveland steamer’.*
Fuck in Nature†
Nature is full of bollocks. That is the conclusion of Stuart Cantrill (author of the Chemical Connections blog), who did a quantitative analysis of the use of profanity in the journal.80 The first time bollocks got an air
ing in Nature was in 1998. The journal had published Cornelia Parker’s pictures of belly button fluff (in Martin Kemp’s segment on the linkages between art and science), and in a follow-up piece Kemp quoted a postgrad overheard in the Leicester University tearoom: ‘What’s this bollocks doing in Nature?’81 Kemp’s article in turn prompted a letter that begins, ‘How lovely to see the word “bollocks” appearing, perhaps for the first time, in Nature.’
‘And so,’ Cantrill reflects, ‘this intimately related pair of “bollocks” appeared in Nature within the space of two weeks.’
In addition to all the bollocks, Nature has featured a total of 48 ‘shits’ (including 13 ‘bullshits’, 1 ‘shit-stirrer’ and 1 nano-shit), 26 ‘piss’-derived expressions, and a grand total of ten ‘fucks’ (i.e. approximately one fuck given by Nature every 18 years). The first fuck in Nature predates bollocks by almost 60 years.
A 1937 ‘fuck’ appears in a section listing the titles of presentations, wherein one entry reads: ‘Observations on the parasitism of Sclerotinia libertiana sclerotiorum Fuck associated with other fungi.’ (The italicised name of the plant fungus, named after Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Leopold Fuckel, was sometimes abbreviated in this way.) A second ‘fuck’ in 1985 is similarly innocent: the name of one of the authors of a cited paper is R. A. Fuck. It is only in 1989 that the word is used in its expletive form, and even then it is only in a quote in a book review – ‘Oh fuck, another new phylum.’*