🍎your Scholarly Digest 26th June, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

We’ve been thinking, and importantly, talking to readers of The Scholarly Letter. In previous editions, we’ve said that these Letters are for scholars: not necessarily just academics, but anyone with a passionate desire for knowledge, and a commitment to living in relationship with it.

Until now, our vision of the scholar has focused primarily on those who produce and create knowledge: researchers, scientists, teachers, and students. But we’ve come to realise that we’ve been overlooking those individuals who are equally devoted to inquiry, yet whose contributions come not through production, but through stewardship, curation, and support.

Have you ever thought about the people working in academic publishing: committed to getting research out into the world without compromising its integrity? (Even though academic publishing as an industry has become dominated by profit seeking, it is essential and needs to be reformed, not dismantled). Or the librarians who act as custodians of recorded human intellect, ensuring that knowledge is preserved and accessible? Or the often-overlooked technicians whose expertise brings research to life in ways that even academics can’t? These individuals play an essential role in the culture of knowledge in our society. Their work profoundly shapes the conditions under which knowledge is produced, shared, and preserved and with it, the very structures of knowledge itself.

A few Letters ago, when we wrote The Scholar Manifesto, we introduced the idea of a knowledge ecology. We admitted the concept was still in its infancy and we’re still figuring out what it could fully mean. But in continuing to think (and talk) about it, one thing has become clear. We need to recognise and open up dialogue with a broader community of scholars: those who relate to knowledge not just through creation, but through care, support, and facilitation.

BRAIN FOOD - OPINION

Accuracy or Inspiration: What's the Point of Science Communication?

- Written by The Tatler

Two weeks ago, The Critic was invited to give a presentation at a science communication workshop alongside fellow sci-comm creators @ellieinstem and @richarddyer. The attendees were (apart from yours truly) faculty and PhD students at the university hosting the workshop. Science communication is increasingly seen as vital, with more and more research grants awarded containing funds specifically designated for sci-comm activity, hence the importance of events like this. To my surprise however, one of the most common questions asked of the presenters by the audience was:

What makes YOU qualified to communicate science online?

It’s an interesting question that deserves a little more examination. Especially because when put on the spot, like the speakers were, it’s actually quite a tough one to answer. Should a science communicator have a degree? If yes, is a bachelors sufficient? A Masters? A PhD? 

Should science communication on social media be peer reviewed? One professor even suggested that people who create science content are part of the problem we're having with misinformation. 

Fundamentally, all of the above questions seem to stem from a disagreement on what purpose science communication serves. If we agree that the purpose of science communication is to primarily educate - to share scientific facts accurately - then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect science communicators to have a minimum qualification and for their content to be peer reviewed. Peer reviewing would also liken sci-comm content to an extension of the scientific record, giving it a similar status to a journal article. Seen through this lens, science communication content transports academia and its norms and practices outside the walls of the university to the general public. 

Thankfully, we do all seem to agree on who the target audience of science communication is: a non-scientific audience.

And when we factor this into our discussion of the purpose of sci-comm, then viewing it as primarily educational doesn’t feel quite right. Is it the job of science communicators to continue the formal academic education of the general public as they scroll through their phones? 

When science communication focuses on accuracy, it often leaves little room for two other equally important purposes: accessibility and inspiration. Making complex, scientific concepts accessible to a non-scientific audience while maintaining complete and total accuracy is nearly impossible. There is too much nuance, too many little details, that need to be included to achieve a level of accuracy that would satisfy academic. One of the greatest strengths of science communication is that it is distinct from formal academic communication styles: this difference is the entire reason sci-comm exists. 

This desire to colonize sci-comm and mold it into a more traditional academic style demonstrates the self-absorption so characteristic of academia. It is asking too much of our non-scientific audience; they do not need (nor likely want) a lecture. Of course we cannot do away with accuracy, but is it really the only important feature of successful science communication? 

Science communication, we should not forget, is ultimately an act of service by academia to the broader public who make their work possible. When viewed through this lens, the purpose of science communication is not to extend academia beyond the walls of the university: it is to make the work done within the university matter to people outside of it. 

NEWS ANALYSIS

Recommending Relevant Content in The Modern Journal 

A confession, dear Scholar - this is kind of old news. But we’re betting you haven’t heard of it yet, and we couldn’t find any other news outlets that have covered this. So here we go.

The publishing company Frontiers is shaking up how research is presented on journal websites. In recent years, the large Open Access publisher has become (in)famous for its heavy reliance on themed collections of articles - known as special issues, or ‘Research Topics’ in the Frontiers ecosystem. 

And now Research Topics are getting a design overhaul. In an attempt to boost engagement with published articles, Frontiers is turning its Research Topics into “Interactive Magazines”. Using software, the articles that make up a Research Topic are sorted, ordered and displayed according to the number of views or citations the article has received. The article which has been cited the most gets the biggest spot on the page; if two articles have received an equal number of citations, the number of views is used as a tie-breaker. As far as we know, Frontiers is the only publisher so far to be experimenting with this technology and has been since approximately 2023.

It’s an interesting development in how information gets presented. The idea is drawn from content recommendation systems used by news aggregators which try to give users a personalized experience by making “relevant” content more prominent. In a way, this method of ranking content by popularity is not that different from how content is ranked on social media. Supporters might say it helps us deal with information overload. Critics (and Tatlers) might say this extra emphasis on metrics risks privileging already-visible work and suppressing emerging articles or ones with unconventional contents. Conflating citations with relevance in this way seems especially problematic.

There has been no formal announcement of this change that we could find - the story came to our attention through this blog post written by the individual who developed the software.

RESOURCE

Arguing Like a Scholar, Not a Troll

You’ve probably heard of a straw man argument; and if you haven’t, chances are you’ve still witnessed one (or accidentally made one yourself). It’s a rhetorical move where someone distorts an opponent’s argument just enough to make it easier to defeat. And it’s everywhere: in online comments and discussions (almost always present), op-eds, academic discussions, and even peer review.

This week’s resource is a paper titled Straw Men, Iron Men, and Argumentative Virtue. It explains not only the three forms of the straw man - straw, weak, and hollow - but also the lesser-known iron man, where one offers an (overly) charitable reading of an opponent’s argument, sometimes improving it beyond what was actually said.

We think this is essential reading for scholars in any field. Argumentation is at the heart of inquiry, knowledge, and critique. But doing it well requires more than cleverness, it requires argumentative virtue: the intellectual ethics of how we represent and engage with other people’s ideas. As we increasingly operate in a saturated, reactive landscape of takes and counter-takes, it might just be time to revisit what it means to argue well.

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• Postdoctoral and Faculty Positions @ University of Calgary, Canada: Postdocs: click here / Faculty positions: click here

• PhD positions @ Swansea University, UK: PhD positions click here

• Postdoctoral Positions @ University of Alberta, Canada: Postdocs: click here 

• PhD Positions @ Gothenburg University, Sweden: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

A Gentleman’s Agreement

The authority that modern science holds in our society is wholly reliant on its perceived objectivity. Objectivity is an ideal of science. We are confident in trusting scientific evidence or methods and value scientific knowledge because it is free from the influence of dogmatic perspectives, bias or the personal interests of scientists.   

Philosophers of science have spent a lot of brain power debating whether true objectivity in science is possible at all; some have gone further to suggest that, assuming true objectivity can be achieved, it may not be as advantageous as we expect. We wanted to share a story which nicely illustrates how despite what we might believe, science often ends up being shaped by influences that compromise its objectivity. 

In 1672, Isaac Newton demonstrated to members of The Royal Society of London that white light was actually composed of a spectrum of colours. It was an excellent demonstration (and theory) that effectively replaced Aristotle's theory of colour that had been widely accepted for almost 2000 years. As you might expect, it garnered much applause and praise from those in attendance. A few days later, a senior member named Robert Hooke (a polymath known for building his own microscope among other things) brought a formal critique of Newton's theory to the attention of the Royal Society. Upon examining his critique, it was decided to be sufficiently important that Newton be sent a copy immediately - publication of Hooke’s work, however, was to be delayed. Minutes of the meeting at the Royal Society show that publication was explicitly delayed to prevent the appearance of:

‘disrespect, in printing so sudden a refutation of a discourse of [Mr Newton’s], which had met with so much applause at the Society but a few days before’

In the first instance, objectivity is compromised when the publication of a valid critique of novel research is delayed to prevent hurting Isaac Newton’s feelings. If we dig a little deeper, the objectivity of Robert Hooke’s critique itself seems questionable. Hooke was a pioneer in the field of optics and studied light, so while he was a qualified reviewer the tone of his critique has been described as unnecessarily harsh. Newton had not cited any of Hooke’s previous work, which is what historians believe led to the harshness of Hooke’s critique. The relationship between the two scientists continued to worsen and there’s even evidence that Hooke used his seniority within the Royal Society to dissuade Newton from trying to publish more of his work. Things did get better for Newton eventually - he was elected President of The Royal Society the same year that Hooke died. 

This story, which is 350 years old, could easily describe a tense relationship between a senior academic and a young rising star today. In complaining about the lack of citations to his own work, Hooke invokes the spirits of reviewers who to this very day continue to request their own work be cited before recommending an article be accepted.

It’s easy to forget, dear Scholar, that science is done by humans who are not impartial beings always capable of operating by cold hard logic.

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