🍎your Scholarly Digest 27th February, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the informed scholar

Image: The Cat's Concert; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

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

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Research Positions 🇬🇧 🇩🇰 🇩🇪 🇺🇸;

• A masterclass in developing and engaging with theories;

• We seem to be running out of ideas in science;

• The worlds most influential cat according to Google Scholar;

and more, but only what’s worth your time.

P.S The Letter is now accepting recommendations for content to include in the next edition. If you've found something that's worth sharing, then hit reply and send it to us.  

OPPORTUNITIES

💼Funded PhDs, Postdocs and academic job openings

• PhD studentships @ Newcastle University, UK: click here (and search “PhD”)

• Research, Postdoc, and Faculty Positions @ Aarhus University, Denmark: click here (PhDs) or click here (Postdoc & Faculty)

• PhDs, Research Positions @ University of Giessen, Germany: click here

• Postdocs @ George Washington University, USA: click here

RESOURCES

📢Presenting Your Research is No Joke

If you find yourself struggling to present your research in an engaging way, this article breaks down three techniques stand-up comedians use to keep their audiences attention, and how researchers can steal them to become a better speaker. Your research took a lot of time and effort; presenting it well is no joke. 

💡What Makes A Good Postdoc Application

Attention aspiring postdocs; before you send out the your applications, take 2 minutes to watch this video. It'll make your applications better, and probably save you (and any potential PI’s you contact) a lot of time.

BRAIN FOOD

🎨Theories are created, not discovered.

We’ve got a delightful morsel of brain food for your neurons to munch on this week: do we discover theory, or do we create it? 

 This is the question Professor Henry Mintzberg sought to address in a book chapter written for a management textbook. The result is not the kind of textbook chapter you would expect but, instead, something that resembles an essay.

In the process of articulating 20 points for scholars attempting to build theories (or engage with theory), Mintzberg informs his reader that doing research insightfully is sometimes better than doing it correctly; gently reminds them not to overlook the wonderful research that can be done without statistics; and explains why it’s better to start with an interesting question rather than a solid hypothesis. Basically, sometimes research is just vibes, have fun and it’s okay to fake it til’ you make it.

 Written in a beautifully, witty, so easy-to-understand way your mum would enjoy it (hi Mum! I know you’re reading this), it’s a hidden gem of work by a scholar who knows their topic and loves to talk about it. What other reason could you need to spend some time with it? 

📉All Out of Ideas 

Ever get the feeling ideas are getting harder to come by? You’re not imagining it. Producing new knowledge requires more researchers, more time, and more money than it used to. From improving life expectancy for cancer patients to increasing crop yields in agriculture, the authors of this paper find that progress remains steady but is becoming increasingly costly (i.e., requiring more funding and manpower). In other words, the time and money we’re investing in research aren’t delivering the same economic growth they once did (according to this paper).

 Of course, not all research is driven by economic impact, and whether we should even be using economic growth as the measuring stick for knowledge production is… open for debate. Still, in a world where researchers must do “more with less” as funding becomes more competitive (and less abundant) and the pressure to publish keeps increasing, one can’t help but notice a parallel between this trend and the broader pressures faced by researchers today. If we can’t sustain exponential knowledge production at this pace, should we consider swapping hyper-productivity—which, as it turns out, isn’t even that productive anymore—for a slower, more deliberate research culture? We might need to reconsider prioritizing funding for “high-impact” work if, as the paper suggests, producing it is becoming unsustainably expensive. After all, history shows us that major breakthroughs are unpredictable and often come from outside the mainstream.

NEWS

📚Catchy, Clear, Cited: 3 part titles and academic articles. 

Academics love a paper with a catchy title and there’s bonus points if its tripartite (consisting of 3 parts). You’ll have definitely come across articles with titles like “Data, Theory, Vibes: A Contemporary Inquiry into Research Fatigue” or “A Cool New Method: Hopes, Challenges and Opportunities” in your research, but these titles aren’t just for making you giggle at 1am when you’re reading papers instead of sleeping: they also get more citations according to this pre-print. 

KEEPING IT REAL

🐱The Cats Out the Bag

A cat named Larry briefly had an h-index of 11, according to his Google Scholar profile, after fake papers listing him as the sole author were uploaded to ResearchGate. Engineering the world's most cited cat only took about an hour: by uploading 12 fake papers “authored” by Larry to ResearchGate and then uploading other faked papers that cited Larry’s work, the only thing left to do was wait for Google Scholar to index the articles (which means scan, store, and make searchable).

Regular users of Google Scholar will know it indexes a lot of stuff as academic papers that it probably shouldn’t, and it’s funny—but also makes a broader point: Google Scholar can be easily fooled. Reducing research impact to metrics is silly because these numbers can be manipulated.

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