We invite you to participate in The Seminal Study (also known as “The Seminal Book Question“). The Seminal Study is simple. It asks this one question: Should libraries and bookstores be required to clearly label every seminal book, with a large, easily-readable label that says “SEMINAL”? Please note that: (1) there are many seminal books, […]
Tom Gill sent this to us, with the suggestion “Why can’t more scientific papers have evocative, poetic titles like this? I mean, it sounds more like a song than a technical article.” The study is: “The Strength of the Evening Wind,” A. Lapworth, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, vol. 183, 2022, pp. 215–225.
No one has yet (as of this writing) disputed that this is the most important psychology research study published this year: “I’ll Read That!: What Title Elements Attract Readers to an Article?” Robert M. Hallock and Tara N. Bennett, Teaching of Psychology, epub 2020.The authors are at Purdue University. Here’s some detail from the study—from […]
The first peer-reviewed academic study to investigate and document the internet’s cat-video-proliferation-phenomenon might well [we think] be : ● Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos by Radha O’Meara, in the M/C Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 2, 2014. Since then, the prevalence of scholarly investigations which reference internet cat videos […]
If you are a researcher studying, say, concrete bridge structures, or microprocessors, then you probably wouldn’t have to be overly concerned about potential criticism from peers regarding the possibility that you might eat your research subjects. But this is not the case for all academic fields. Take for example, ‘Animal Studies’. A 2018 paper published […]
Should students devote time to studying ‘useless’ subjects? The debate has been running for (at least) 127 years. The arguments often boil down to questions such as: ‘Maybe something that seems useless now, could be useful in the future?’ or ‘Who’s in a position to say what’s useless anyway?’ For an early example, see the […]
Monty Python has not, repeat not, been ignored by academia. Here are links to but a few of the scholarly studies which look at, examine, discuss, evaluate, appraise, assess, analyse and otherwise probe the Monty Python oeuvre, and its wider, and narrower, implications, entailments, illations, connotations, inferences, and ramifications. ● Monty Python and the Mathnavi: […]
Now, at last, there is a published scholarly study of the study of cat videos. The study is: “Emotion regulation, procrastination, and watching cat videos online: Who watches Internet cats, why, and to what effect?” Jessica Gall Myrick, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 52, November 2015, pp. 168–176. The author, a professor at Indiana University, explains: “research has […]
Lesson: When translating your study title into another language, check for cannibalism. Here’s an example: “Nutritional Characteristics of Lithuanian Olympic basketball team-players,” Rimantas Stukas [pictured here], Marius Baranauskas, Proceedings of the International Conference on Non-Communicable Diseases Management, Klaipėda, 2012, p. 25.
Our Typo Evaluation Committee informs us that this is likely to be a typo: On the effect of agricultural chemicals upon fish – I. Changes of chemical components in serum and liver of crap exposed to organophosphate compounds. Sakaguchi, H Bull. Jap. Soc. Sci. Fish. Vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 555-560. 1972.