Life in academia

I’m trying to understand academics, so if a journal publishes your research, you pay them $1,000. Then they make more money by selling your research, but instead of giving you back some money, you get prestige points & if you get enough prestige points, you get to keep your job?

— Dr Glaucomflecken

Det skär sig i mina öron varje gång när kollegorna säger att de ska skriva/läsa ett “papper”, jag kan inte förstå varför det är så svårt att säga “artikel”.

Lite pinsamt

Vid första anblicken så skäms man ju lite granna, ska hon inte få komma på en konferens för att hon är ogift. Undrar hur stor chansen är att en kille skulle få avslag med samma motivering?

How NOT to design a journal site

Lately I’ve been searching the web sites of various scientific journals for interesting papers … and it’s a mixed experience. Some have very good search capabilities that quickly give you the results - including title, abstract, bibliographic info (please remember to include BibTeX!!), links to full papers, etc. Others are less enjoyable, requiring you to manually scan the titles/abstracts to find the interesting stuff … not fun but workable.

Others make things a little bit more complicated. First of all make the page design really busy so that it takes quite some time to find out if it is possible to search the publication or not. Then, and here comes the best part, list the results with a link to the full paper, and a two line summary that shows your search words in context.

What’s wrong with that? Well, if you click that link you will discover that you need to have a subscription to be able to download the full article … that’s OK, I can just take a quick look at the title and abstract and … but wait there is no reference from which article this summary came, none whatsoever!!!!

So here I’m sitting with a potentially interesting paper but I have no possibility to figure out the title of the paper, what it’s about or who the author is!!! It’s so stupid that I really can’t believe it.

To figure out if this article was interesting, it wasn’t, I had to search the HTML source file for each volume-numer (one page for each) for a link that matched the link from my search results … not what I call a user friendly site.

Avoid being an asshole

I’ve just been reading a research paper and I agree on much of what was being said in it. But it took me several times before I managed to read it … why? Simply because the authors style of writing made him come across as an asshole that was just complaining on others in a very condescending way. It was really difficult trying to avoid getting upset and finish the paper.

Lesson learned: if you want to send people a message, avoid sounding like an asshole !!!