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<\/a>Creative Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/p>\nWho really reads the acknowledgements section of a paper, right? That’s why some wily academics have used it as the perfect place to hide their snarkiness.<\/p>\n
This paper’s <\/a>neuroscientist co-author acknowledges “the U.S. 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\u2014it was during this time that the hypothesis presented herein was initially conjectured.”<\/p>\n This evolutionary biologist<\/a> thanks “the National Science Foundation for regularly rejecting my (honest) grant applications for work on real organisms (cf. Szent-Gyorgyi, 1972), thus forcing me into theoretical work.” Find tons more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0 In 1996, a cultural studies journal called Social Text <\/em>planned an issue on the “Science Wars” in which the sciences and humanities purportedly fight for epistemological dominance. The editors received a submission from NYU physics professor Alan Sokal and were, by all accounts, quite pleased to have a scientist represented in their issue. The article was accepted.<\/p>\n Sokal’s article <\/a>discussed how “quantum gravity” would shake up the notion of scientific knowledge so that “absolute truth” would no longer be its objective. Sadly for the editors of Social Text<\/em>, Sokal was mocking them. He released a follow-up revealing that the article was a parody of what he saw as the foolishly liberal thinking of the humanities, particularly by those who argue that all types of knowledge are socially constructed.<\/p>\n This one crosses over from the status of prank to kerfuffle, though, because the whole thing ended up on the front page<\/a> of The New York Times<\/em>. Sokal’s antagonists were not amused, and accused him of oversimplifying their ideas. The subsequent dialogue often didn’t follow rules of academic decorum, and copycat <\/a>parody articles became commonplace <\/a>(computer-generated gobbledegook articles<\/a> are the latest twist). Many scholars in the humanities are still angry almost 20 years later.<\/p>\n \u00a0 Predatory publishers – those which claim to run peer-reviewed journals but actually just take your money for junk publications – are a menace. Australian computer scientist Dr Peter Vamplew thought so too. He was sick of getting spam from the predatory International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.<\/em> They seemed to desperately want him to submit something, so he did. And his paper was epic<\/a>.<\/p>\n It consisted of the words “Get me off your f****** mailing list” expressed 863 times in the form of text, flow charts, and graphs. The result? Accepted, subject to a $150 publication fee. The acceptance letter aptly stated that a (probably fictitious) reviewer found the paper to be an “excellent” fit for the journal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This article<\/a> is genius.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a>The Sokal Hoax<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a>Swearing as Research<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a>Writing about Writer’s Block<\/strong><\/p>\n