🍎your Scholarly Digest 12th June, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

In thinking about who we – The Scholarly Letter – are and what we do through this project, we recently stumbled upon a term that feels strangely close to home: para-academic.

The prefix para- means beside, beyond, alongside of. So, the para-academic is someone who stands with the academic but is not quite the same, someone who refuses to be captured by the logics of the corporate university. The para-academic works for and with others to 

The Scholarly Letter is still young. And in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes of the advantages of being young: it allows you to build something on your own terms, to resist the old ideals and inherited status quo. That’s where our hope lies – that this project might grow into a space that is beside, alongside, apart from, and beyond the university. A space that can keep asking the questions academia no longer knows how to ask – or no longer dares to.

So we just wanted to take this space, in this week’s Digest, to say: we see The Scholarly Letter as a para-academic organization. One committed not to giving answers, but to asking better questions about what it means to be a scholar, and how we might conduct ourselves in a scholarly manner.

BRAIN FOOD

No Pleasure Without Pain: On Fetishism and Academic Desire

Scholar, we must preface this week's Brain Food by saying that we struggled with how to discuss what follows in a way that would seem "appropriate". The article in question seeks to understand why universities, and the academics and administrators who work in them, are so obsessed with journal ranking lists. The conceptual lens the author employs is that of sexual fetishization. It may seem vulgar at first glance, but there is something accurate, even poetic, about examining academia's obsession with journal ranking lists in this way. Ultimately this article changed the way we see our relationship to the scholarly world - which is what Brain Food is all about. 

Since the 19th century, the term "fetish" has been used to describe any object that is "reverenced without due reason". In other words, any object which is venerated or idolized without a justifiable reason could be described as a "fetish object". This concept of a fetish object has been applied in the social sciences to explain why certain methodologies, concepts or metrics are considered more valuable, despite well developed criticism. For example, the p value threshold of <0.05 can function as a fetish object. While it is technically a probability within a given statistical model, it is often treated as if it has the power to decide whether a finding is true or not: this power is not inherent in p<0.05 but something we scholars collectively agree to give it.  

It is this sense that the term "fetish" is applied by Robert Cluley's article "Sexual fetishism in organizations: The case of journal list fetishism". To him, and indeed to us, it seems contradictory that we should place more importance on the journal a paper appears in than the contents of the journal. Cluley attempts to explain why academics consistently over-value publications that appear in "high ranking journals" at the expense of high quality research. His answer is more complex than pointing to the ability of organisations, in this case universities, being able to produce this fetish in their members - though they certainly can. 

Cluley argues that academics are initially compelled by their superiors to place excessive value on journal ranking lists, channeling their energy and efforts into publishing in the journals on the lists. In this sense, journal rankings become fetish objects granted powers they do not inherently possess.  By submitting to these demands, academics experience pain when their scholarship is forced into the shape required by the targeted journal; however, they also experience pleasure at their papers acceptance and enjoy material benefits such as pay rises or promotions. Even as academics may dislike requirements to publish their work in "top-ranked" journals, they yearn for such a publication. Once a publication in a top journal is achieved, their desire does not diminish, but only grows stronger. The relationship between academics and their fetish objects is not only defined by pain.

To some it might seem a thoroughly unscientific, even absurd, way to examine the dynamics and relationships that govern academic life. However, if our aim is really to challenge this fetishism, and to focus on the quality of work instead of the metrics of a journal, then it is worth taking into consideration. In the words of the author:

NEWS

Bot Traffic Jams Paralyze Journal Repositories

In recent months, journal websites and online repositories have seen a spike in visitors to their websites - and most of them are bots. But why?  

The release of DeepSeek in January - which was trained using a fraction of the resources needed to create ChatGPT - has resulted in explosive demand for training data. As AI becomes cheaper and easier to train, smaller companies and individual developers have been able to launch their own products without relying on large amounts of venture capital funding to get off the ground. To save on costs, smaller AI projects are simply scraping web pages, and putting significant strain on the websites that store the data in the process. To illustrate the scale of what is going on consider this: so far this year, the British Medical Journal has recorded more visits to its website from bots than real users. 

It is difficult not to notice the irony of the situation. Academic publishers require authors to sign away their intellectual property and have profited significantly by licensing that journal content to large, established AI companies (while the academics who produced the work have received no compensation). Now as AI development becomes more feasible for smaller players, publishers are suffering at the hands of the same technology. It’s worth noting, though hardly surprising, that the larger publishing companies are far better equipped to weather the storm than smaller ones (which aren’t typically raking in millions from licensing deals).

RESOURCE

Creative Thinking 101: Analogies and Obituaries 

Creativity is to research, what play is to childhood: essential, transformative, and often underestimated. It is through creativity that we ask novel questions, draw unexpected connections, and generate new insights from data that might otherwise seem inert. 

We’ve previously shared Isaac Asimov’s advice on fostering scientific creativity – originally written for a classified US military project. This week, we’re recommending a more specific pathway to creativity and problem solving: analogy. 

This MIT Press Reader interview with cognitive scientist Keith Holyoak unpacks the science of analogy: how we learn to notice structural similarities between seemingly unrelated things, and why that matters for creative intelligence, insight, and innovation. While the piece isn’t a ‘guide’ to thinking analogically, it offers something arguably more valuable: a way to think about thinking. It helps you understand the role of analogical thinking in creativity, and it might just shift how you approach your research. 

But if you’re looking for an even more specific (but odd) method to boost creativity, this other MIT Press Reader article suggests you start reading obituaries. Read the article, it might give you an idea or two about generating insight by exposing yourself to conceptually distant ideas and filling up your ‘Google of the mind.’ 

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• Postdoctoral and Research Fellowships @ Durham University, UK: click here

• PhD and Postdoctoral Positions @ Utrecht University, Netherlands: click here

• PhD, Postdoctoral and Faculty Positions @ Monash University, Australia: click here

• Postdoctoral and Research Positions @ University of Edinburgh, UK: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

It’s FOK-ing Important to be Curious 

Do you ever read a sentence in a journal article and think “this has got to be a joke?”. Well, we certainly did when reading one of the articles that inspired last week's Brain Food on curiosity, specifically the part of the article discussing a concept called a feeling-of-knowing (FOK). 

To paraphrase, when our feelings-of-knowing (FOKs) are weak, knowledge gaps seem larger and more distant. But when our FOKs are stronger, we feel closer to the answer and more capable of figuring out the missing information. It's interesting information, dear Scholar. May your FOKs be strong and your perceived knowledge gaps small. 

On a side note, is it just us or are these instances where authors could have a little fun and show their human side in scholarly writing becoming rarer? Most of the examples we see these days tend to surface in older articles (this one is from 2006). They don’t make ‘em like they used to anymore.  

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