Difference between revisions of "2456: Types of Scientific Paper"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Jump to: navigation, search
(Explanation: Sorry, I will overwrite now and maybe improve with elements posted while I was fine-tuning my own contribution.)
(Explanation)
Line 32: Line 32:
 
|My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it
 
|My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it
 
| This title refers to the occasional rivalries between scientists within a field, which can push them to seek proof that they, and not their colleague, are correct.
 
| This title refers to the occasional rivalries between scientists within a field, which can push them to seek proof that they, and not their colleague, are correct.
|Note the single author listed, and the lack of headers, suggesting an argument more than an explanation of data
+
|Note the lack of headers, suggesting an argument more than an explanation of data
 
|-
 
|-
 
|The immune system is at it again
 
|The immune system is at it again

Revision as of 22:31, 28 April 2021

Types of Scientific Paper
Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."
Title text: Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a RESEARCH DEPARTMENT ON A LUNCHBREAK. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

In this comic, Randall describes categories of scientific papers with somewhat humorous generalized titles.

Breakdown of Papers
Paper Title Explanation Article Description
We put a camera somewhere new This may involve miniaturisation or other improvements of imaging sensors, power supply, transmission or retention of data, environmental hardening and (possibly) recovery afterwards.

Cameras have been inserted into every obvious bodily orifice (including swallowed, to be later excreted), placed in interesting habitats to monitor wildlife, sent into volcanic craters/ocean trenches/high altitudes/nuclear reactors, launched into space and sent past/round/onto several of the solar-system's more interesting bodies.

There's no clue which new place a camera has now been put, but it will probably at the very least excite people in the appropriately narrow field of research.

Hey, I found a trove of old records! They don't turn out to be particularly useful, but still, cool! Rather than starting with the aim of investigating some question, and finding some way of answering it by uncovering evidence, sometimes a writer may have stumbled upon a cache of historic documents that they then feel compelled to justify the resulting 'WikiWalk' they may have found themselves sucked into.
My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it This title refers to the occasional rivalries between scientists within a field, which can push them to seek proof that they, and not their colleague, are correct. Note the lack of headers, suggesting an argument more than an explanation of data
The immune system is at it again The human immune system is notoriously complex, and there are countless papers in medical fields just describing its strangeness
We figured out how to make this exotic material, so email us if you need some Researchers often attempt to create materials despite there not being any demand, predicting that in the future their material will be game-changing without any actual applications. These researchers have created such a material, and are offering to produce it for anyone who needs it
What are fish even doing down there Deep sea marine biology regularly discovers strange lifeforms in unexpected places, and theories explaining deep sea ecosystems are regularly confounded by new data. This paper does not appear to have any headers
This task I had to do anyway turned out to be hard enough for its own paper There is a huge variety in the complexity and importance of subjects studied in scientific papers, and often some supposedly easy task will be sufficiently complicated as to merit its own paper.
Hey, at least we showed that this method can produce results! That's not nothing, right? One of the struggles of the scientific method is that many experiments will not produce the results scientists desired or expected. These results are still (sometimes) important, but are often ignored compared to research with important findings
Check out this weird thing one of us saw while out for a walk This paper may be imagined as an opportunistic publication. A department or team has seen itself low down on the local 'league table' for academic output. A brainstorming session for a way of rectifying this led to desperately seizing upon the first idle comment made (in lieu of any better sounding ideas) that can somehow be shoehorned into their respective subject area.
We are 500 scientists and here's what we've been up to for the last 10 years Some papers summarize the work of big research teams, like those working on the Higgs Boson (list of authors starts at page 17) or LIGO. Since the discoveries which are made are a team effort, probably outlasting many of the individual tenures involved, the papers have many authors listed.

A credit for participation may not mean any particularly great contribution by each individual, but being left out (even for one summer's secondment, seven years before any results could be recorded) would be taken as a slight, and an opportunity missed to be 'citable' in the future.

A huge portion of the page is taken up by the presumably 500 authors' names, above the main horizontal bar.
Some thoughts on how everyone else is bad at research Similar to the "my colleague is wrong" paper, but in this case applied to far greater swathes of the community by the author(s) of this (possibly rambling) tract.
We scanned some undergraduates Some initial research, especially that on a low budget, may recruit students at the same institution as easily available test-subjects. Quite often these are psychological or sociological studies, but can involve more medical (but non-invasive) 'scans', from simple eyeball-tracking to full-body MRI.


Trivia: Originally, this comic's title text misspelt volunteers as volunters. This may be intentional (WE might be the volunteers). This was quickly corrected.

Transcript

Types of Scientific Paper

An array of scientific papers is shown, with only their titles legible. Titles are as follows:

We put a camera somewhere new

Hey, I found a trove of old records! They don't turn out to be particularly useful, but still, cool!

My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it

The immune system is at it again

We figured out how to make this exotic material, so email us if you need some

What are fish even doing down there

This task I had to do anyway turned out to be hard enough for its own paper

Hey, at least we showed that this method can produce results! That's not nothing, right?

Check out this weird thing one of us saw while out for a walk

We are 500 scientists and here's what we've been up to for the last 10 years

Some thoughts on how everyone else is bad at research

We scanned some undergraduates

Title Text: Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunters worse at tasks."


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

I've a feeling we could find actual papers that paraphrase down to those in the comic. Also, lol at the 500 scientists' "citation" section. 162.158.159.104 20:36, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

As we edit this we should probably pay attention to the content / layout of the article images: The number of lines beneath the title and layout of each "paper" he's drawn could be relevant to the joke. For example, the "500 scientists" presumably have a massive authors list, and the one on how "everyone else is doing it wrong" has a single author and a particularly "article-esque" layout.

172.68.132.45 21:04, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

True. Do you think we should add another column describing the pictured paper to the explanation chart?

Reywas (talk) 21:06, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

For the "student volunteers" paper, many experiments involve adding hurdles for the participants to deal with. Like interrupting them, depriving them of sleep, adding distracting information, etc. It's not uncommon that these make them worse at the tasks. So this is just another research paper like that. Barmar (talk) 01:24, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Isn't the 'hurdles' style of paper WAY more common than the proposed psychological experiment? It's describing a simple tasks cognitive function test. They run those all the time to prove the effects of oxygen, caffeine, sleep, sugar, music, trauma, comfortable chairs, the color yellow, etc. I can't recall seeing ANY paper like the suggested psychology experiment to make people unlearn skills, let alone enough for that to be a whole category.

Nobody has pointed out that the "Maybe all these categories are wrong" title directly pertains to this very comic... John.Adriaan (talk) 02:17, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that’s the more likely ‘correct’ interpretation, honestly. Maybe we should add more detail now that it’s mentioned? Tague (talk) 12:56, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
At the least the list of categories is incomplete. The broader question is whether there are concentrations of papers in some areas of feature space (a subjectively plausible conclusion - I could offer some examples from botany such as "we compared the performance of several cultivars of a crop species under specific conditions") or do papers fall into a relatively flat continuum in that space. 141.101.107.78 11:35, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Should we add another colum to include the corresponding LaTeX template? Some of them seem like that could easily be found.

These are titles of papers, so shouldn't each word be capitalized? For example: "We Put a Camera Somewhere New". I realize that the original is in all caps, but that's because that's the usual format for comics . . . . 172.68.57.179 10:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Paper titles are usually not capitalized, contrary to journal names. You can see an example at the Higgs Boson paper cited in the comic description (there are, of course, others.) 141.101.105.134 11:32, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Why does the explanation say "There are no headers" for the "We put a camera somewhere new" paper? I assume "headers" refers to "section headers", of which I see more in the camera-paper than in e.g. the immune system-paper (or the old records-paper). 141.101.96.28 11:25, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Probably referring to the lack of actual legible text for us to comment on the content of the paper. Tague (talk) 12:49, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
I feel that the assumption made in a lot of the table that the text in each Paper is meant to be their literal title, is wrong. It strikes me more as an humorous explanation of "what sort of paper this is" for instance the first paper would indicate that a relevant category of scientific papers are about a camera being put someplace new and the data/photo's gathered from that, rather than an example of "clickbait". The actual papers in that category would presumably have an actual name relating to where the camera was actually put. 14:29, 29 April 2021 (UTC)~
I interpret them as a mix of "over-generalized" headlines and less-than-literal summaries of that general sort of paper's content. Tague (talk) 14:41, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
I read (e.g., for starters) "We put a camera somewhere new" both as very true to the emotional spirit and a paraphrasing of the true archetype membership being referenced - such as something like "Rat-mounted cameras for remote surveying of sewer pipes" (if that's not already been done, which I suspect it has!), etc. I suspect there's a few "one weird thing"-inspired titles out there, influenced by modern 'headline' links (with or without self-awareness), and know there's a whole history of "my colleague is wrong!" papers, even if not in exactly that wording, pushing the author's own biases in a self-important ranting style, or a rambling one that's an unstructured manifesto of 'thoughts' about all prior 'experts' on a pet issue. There's some deconstruction involved, but with easy reconstruction back to reality. 162.158.158.113 19:54, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Derivatives

Should this (and any others, which I think likely exist or are about to) go in the main article? https://twitter.com/GreenBankObserv/status/1388148786707406854

2456-radioastronomy.jpeg

"With apologies to Mr. Munroe, may we present: Types of Radio Astronomy Papers"

JohnHawkinson (talk) 18:40, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

These are good fun, but I don't think we are gonna put it up in image form in the main article. Maybe a section of external links will do. --162.158.165.235 00:56, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
I don't think that links are a very effective way to show these. I feel like they need to be a gallery. Perhaps it should be a separate wiki page that is linked from the main article?
Here are some more:
https://twitter.com/neil_chilson/status/1388216386967715846 Privacy Paper
https://twitter.com/SamLMontano/status/1388268078279049217 Disaster Science Paper
https://twitter.com/jfbastien/status/1388229180211404803 C++ Standards papers
https://twitter.com/waiterich/status/1388207060412682247 Scientific Paper (Food, Land, and Natural Climate Solutions Version)
https://twitter.com/stefan_d_jevtic/status/1388192045920137216 Hematology
https://twitter.com/jeffpeapod/status/1388185831140118529 Papers for Grad Students
https://twitter.com/EdinburghKnee/status/1388069182642794496 Ortho Paper
https://twitter.com/j_remy_green/status/1387960392954138624 Law Paper
https://twitter.com/JavierApfeld/status/1387891336515362819 Aging Paper
https://twitter.com/Gabeincognito/status/1387873643435216897 Infosec Paper
https://twitter.com/acarriebear/status/1387870050581889024 Toxicology
https://twitter.com/yesitsnicholas/status/1387865583908114432 Neuroscience
https://twitter.com/nexel_art/status/1388263392545280009 Archeology
https://twitter.com/skinnyfatPhD/status/1388253551013498882 Metabolism
https://twitter.com/zamanian_/status/1388179675806158848 Parasitology
https://twitter.com/PWGTennant/status/1387734254960975881 Epidemiology and Public Health
https://twitter.com/DrIanKellar/status/1387760304818372620 Health Psychology
https://twitter.com/nappqm/status/1388098251136589824 Pest Science
https://twitter.com/theangelremiel/status/1388134620219297793 Clinical Paper
https://twitter.com/plantspipettes/status/1387825850372997121 Plant science
https://twitter.com/girlandkat/status/1388030240358768642 Planetary Science
https://twitter.com/Nesquixotic/status/1387848121342853122 History
https://twitter.com/AndrewBarnas/status/1388161745684996098 Scientific Paper PAYWALL meta-joke
JohnHawkinson (talk) 13:45, 1 May 2021 (UTC)


The meme is now so popular there is an article in the atlantic about it; maybe that should be included: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/xkcd-science-paper-meme-nails-academic-publishing/618810/

--162.158.89.113 14:28, 7 May 2021 (UTC)