🍎your Scholarly Digest 15th May, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Online Thumbnail: Monocle and Eye (blue), from Jocular Ocular series (N221) issued by Kinney Bros. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick.

Hi Scholar,

Lately, we’ve been thinking and talking a lot about what kind of publication The Scholarly Letter is, and what we want it to become.

If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ve probably noticed that we maintain a fairly critical stance on the ‘accelerationist’ logics (you know, the desire for ‘faster’, ‘more’) of broader society and, more specifically, of the knowledge economy. Our work is grounded in a desire to rethink how we relate to knowledge, and how we participate in the activities of making knowledge. We try to resist market logics in everything we do. That’s also why we’ve chosen not to sell this space to advertisers, and why we’ll never put our Letters behind a paywall.

This kind of work takes time. Each Letter is a slow craft: one that requires us to read widely, think carefully, and write with intention. To give ourselves the space to do that well, we’ve decided to reduce our publishing rhythm: instead of sending 4 Digests and 2 Essays a month, we’ll now be sending 2 Digests and 2 Essays: 4 Letters total each month. We’ll still send them out on Thursdays, alternating between Digest and Essay each week.

We care deeply about the labour that goes into each Letter. We hope this new cadence gives us the space to produce our best work and equally importantly, gives you the time to sit with it more slowly, to reflect, and to think alongside us.

One more thing: some of you have asked if there’s a place to find and share past Letters. There is: The Scholarly Letter Archive. We’ve even started curating thumbnails for each Letter. It’s a small thing, but we think it adds a certain…. je ne sais quoi to the project: a little visual character to go with the voice.

BRAIN FOOD

Cite Me, Like Me, Follow Me

We like to think that the work of an academic researcher is a private job: something done behind closed doors, away from the noise (and nose) of public life. But this vision is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. As the knowledge economy has become intertwined with the attention economy, the image of the private academic has begun to retreat. 

In an attention economy, ‘attention’ is not just scarce, it’s capital. In a society overwhelmed by information, every actor is competing for visibility. Attention becomes transactional: something to be gained and exchanged for measurable returns. Media, advertising, and social platforms are the obvious examples but academia is no exception.

As Ken Hyland argues in his paper, Academic Publishing and the Attention Economy (which is also this week’s brain food), research articles now compete for readers’ attention in a saturated marketplace. Academic publishing has become a kind of performance: the academic must capture the attention of reviewers, editors, funders, tenure committees, and (most importantly) other researchers. If a paper isn’t read, it won’t be cited. If it’s not cited, the h-index doesn’t rise. And without that, promotions don’t follow.

Hyland identifies four practices that reveal how the economics of attention plays out in academic publishing: 

1. Seizing attention through titles because ‘your title is the highway billboard of your article’

2. Promotional abstracts that ‘hook the reader’ 

3. Hyping the message within the paper through sensational language and ‘manufactured excitement’ - phrases like ‘subtle and interesting’, ‘striking results’ of experiments’

4. Self-mention and self-citation 

Advice on how to write for journals now routinely, and perhaps understandably, urges academics to "hook the reader" with punchy titles, write ‘sexy’ abstracts that seduce the reader, and work on ‘hot’, ‘trendy’ topics. In a system powered by visibility, it has become necessary to play these tricks or risk being left behind, or even worse, falling outside the limelight of attention and disappearing into the shadows. 

The logic of attention seeps into everything. And increasingly, standing out doesn’t just happen on the pages of the journal article: it happens online. The age of the ‘celebrity academic’ is here. Academics are expected to engage in media appearances, social media ‘outreach’, and ‘science communication’ for the public in popular press. It is no longer uncommon for PhD students to list podcast interviews or media citations on their CVs. The academic is perhaps quietly even being measured by their Kardashian-Index: a tongue-in-cheek metric tracking the number of social media followers relative to citation counts.

As Professor Adrian Lenardic and colleagues put it:

It appears that the academic researcher today is no longer just a producer of knowledge, they are a content creator, a self-promoter, a personal brand. Research still matters, but so does reach.

We’re not just writing papers anymore, we’re marketing them. And while this might increase the visibility of research, and perhaps more importantly, the visibility of researchers themselves, it also blurs the lines between credibility, popularity, and attention. The quiet, rigorous work of research now coexists with the noisy demand for attention. Whether that’s good or bad is a different question. But it is, increasingly, part of the job.

NEWS

Perplexing Partnership of Wily* Companies

*wily adjective
/ˈwaɪ.li/
Definition:
Skilled at gaining an advantage, especially by using deceit.

Step by subtle step, AI and academia continue on the path towards becoming ever more intertwined. Wiley, one of the world's largest for-profit publishers, has partnered with Perplexity.ai to make previously published research content available to the generative AI-powered search engine. At first glance this looks like a way to get access to Wiley’s content through Perplexity - but it’s not. Researchers and students will only be able to get answers to their questions based on the content in Wiley’s paywalled journal portfolio if their institution has an existing subscription to Wiley. Right now, only two universities in Texas are taking part in the pilot launch, but more institutions around the world are lining up to give it a try. 

RESOURCE

Chomsky’s Guide to Being Truly Educated

If you’re on the road to becoming a scholar - or already are one (either way, we’re assuming you are since you’re reading The Scholarly Letter), you’ve probably wondered at some point whether you’re “doing it right.” The “it” here is education, learning, research, all the stuff that makes up the scholarly life. 

This week’s resource recommendation is a short video where Noam Chomsky reflects on what it means to be truly educated. It’s a bit of an unusual pick for a resource, we’ll admit, but watching it almost inevitably acts as a kind of radar: a way to check whether how you’re doing your scholarship is really working. It works as an exercise for self-assessment: an opportunity to step back and ask if the way you’re going about your education is aligned with the kind of scholar you want to be.

It’s just over three minutes long. Give it a watch, you might walk away with a few ideas about how to reapproach your education.

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Positions

• Postdoc, Research, and Faculty Positions @ University of Queensland, Australia: click here

• PhD and Postdoctoral Positions @ University of Southern Denmark, Denmark: PhD positions click here / Postdocs click here

• Postdoc, Research, and Academic Positions @ Stockholm University, Sweden: click here

• PhD Positions @ University of Amsterdam, Netherlands: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

A Stiff and Abnormal (even Stupid) Document

Isaac Asimov is one of the most prolific authors of all time having published 500 books over the course of his career. One of the writing projects he enjoyed the least according to his autobiography (which is one of the books The Tatler is reading right now) was his PhD dissertation. 

If you’ve read any of his work, you’ll know Asimov’s style is so simple that some might even say it lacks style at all. With this in mind, it might not surprise you to that he wrote:

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