🍎your Scholarly Digest 30th January, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the informed scholar

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Image: Globe with Mapping Instruments; Courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Henry W. Kent, 1941

Hey Scholar, here's what we have for you this week:

• PhD and Postdoctoral opportunities 🇬🇧 🇸🇪 🇦🇺 🇩🇪;

• Sci-Hub receives millions in meme-coin crypto donations;

• A style guide for English writing;

• The PhD Movie.

and much more.

OPPORTUNITIES

💼Funded PhDs, Postdocs and academic job openings

• PhD, Research, and Faculty Positions @ University of Nottingham, UK: click here

• PhD and Postdoctoral Positions @ Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden: PhD positions click here / Postdocs click here

• Postdoc, Research, and Academic Positions @ The University of Melbourne, Australia: click here

• PhD Positions @ University of Bern, Germany: click here

If the idea of making your PhD application is daunting, here's a detailed guide to help you through the entire process👇

RESOURCES

📊VOSviewer for Developing Research Topics

Bibliometric analysis is a highly sought-after skill among scholars at all stages of their careers. Young researchers can use it for identifying gaps in existing research. More established scholars use it to determine strategic directions for future investigations (think journal scope, special issues). Essentially, bibliometric analysis helps visualize the 'structure of science,' allowing easier familiarization with complex scientific landscapes. VOSviewer is one such tool that facilitates this analysis. To get started with VOSviewer, we've got this short guide for you.

🕴️The Elements of Style

If you want your science to have impact, you need to write with impact. The key rule to achieve this? Develop a clear message by keeping your writing clean and simple. We've found an e-book which does an excellent job at outlining the essential requirements for writing in a straightforward English style. It offers concrete 'rules' of usage and 'principles' of composition.

If you’ve stumbled across a resource that’s been super helpful to you as a scholar, reply to this email and send it to us so we can share it with 3000+ scholars! We don’t believe in gatekeeping around here. 

BRAIN FOOD

📜We Have Never Been Modern

What unites us as scholars? A shared passion for knowledge, research, and scholarship, of course. Yet, online comment sections often become battlegrounds between 'hard' and 'soft' sciences, each clashing over the validity of their knowledge—objective vs. subjective. But what if this divide is built on a flawed assumption? The assumption of a binary separation between human and non-human, nature and culture; something Bruno Latour, among many others, challenges. What if these supposedly separate categories were mere illusions? If so, the 'science wars' would lose their footing, and we could potentially make way for a more integrated approach to knowledge production. This podcast episode is an excellent starting point to get a better grip on this topic than can be done with this 150-word blurb. 

⚖️The Counter Factual Check

Unconventional theories, findings or research can often attract negative reactions not because they are bad ideas, but because they are unorthodox. In this short essay, a simple method for determining whether something is actually bad or just different 0 the counterfactual check- is discussed. The essay is written in the context of public policy but the method could easily be applied to questioning your own assumptions about your research and building stronger arguments. It'll make you think. 

NEWS

🏦Sci-Hub Laughs all the Way to the Bank

Sci-Hub, the website every scholar knows but few admit to using, has received donations of a meme coin—a type of extremely speculative and risky cryptocurrency - valued at over 2 million US dollars. The $SCIHUB meme coin is not officially affiliated with Sci-Hub (it was launched by an anonymous developer); however, it is listed as a way to donate to the project on an official Sci-Hub website. The black open-access project's servers cost “a few thousand dollars a month” to run and in the 14 years the site has been operational, it has been funded entirely by donations from users, mostly in the form of cryptocurrency. The moaning and whining of extremely profitable publishing companies illegal nature of the site means more traditional ways of receiving funds have not been an option.

🚫CDC Research Pulled as US Gov't Enforces Gender Language Ban

The CDC has pulled all papers involving its researchers from external journals for review by the Trump administration. The review requires removing terms like “gender,” “transgender,” “LGBT”, “pregnant person” and “nonbinary” to comply with a directive recognizing only two sexes: male and female. Additionally, CDC scientists who co-authored papers with external researchers must remove their names from already published articles (ouch). Whether a government can restrict what words a scientific journal can use to communicate research is expected to face legal challenges, since publishers, not scientists, own the copyrights to the published work.

KEEPING IT REAL

🎥The PhD Movie

If you've never seen the PhD Movie, then we've just found what you'll be doing this Friday night. Written by Jorge Cham (the guy behind PhD Comics), it's not world class cinema (it's actually a really bad movie, but in a good way?). To give you an idea of what the movies are like (yes, there are 2 of them), check out this 3 minute clip where a PhD student tries to get 4 professors to agree on a date and time to meet. I think you already know how it goes.

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