🍎your Scholarly Digest 13th March, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

Five years (and two days) ago, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. While lockdowns, masks, and Zoom fatigue defined daily life, something equally disruptive took place in academia: the way we disseminated knowledge changed.

Before the pandemic, research was disseminated at its usual pace: determined by peer review processes. But during the pandemic, researchers increasingly turned to preprints, circumventing traditional publishing bottlenecks to get urgent findings out now. To put it in perspective: in the five years before COVID-19, academic publishing grew at a steady 7% per year. In 2020, that number went up to 12% (source: dimensions.ai).

For all the talk of the ivory tower being detached from reality, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

BRAIN FOOD

Don’t Panic But Research is Really Complex

Metascience, or research on research, is paying closer attention to analytic flexibility, a phenomenon where researchers presented with the same data draw different conclusions. 

First recognized in psychology, analytic flexibility has since been observed in ecology, medicine, and economics & finance. If researchers reach different conclusions from the same data, our first instinct is to suspect a flaw: a lack of rigour in analysis or methodology. The way we currently communicate research shows the final path chosen - not the many possible paths that could have been taken - so this kind of flexibility does not fit into how the scientific method “should” work.

Well don’t panic, science isn’t becoming less rigorous, but it is becoming more complex. Research teams are becoming larger, datasets more comprehensive and analysis workflows more complex, creating more opportunities for researchers to make subtle yet meaningful analytical choices that can shape the conclusions drawn from the same data. Analytic diversity isn’t a flaw—it’s a feature. When multiple approaches to analyzing data are equally defensible, the goal needn’t be to eliminate variation. 

If science once seemed contained within neat boundaries, it may have been an illusion. As research expands, we aren’t necessarily losing rigor, but our increasingly complex science will require more critical thinking and more creativity—which is perhaps why we might initially shy away from it. It will take more work and more time to draw conclusions from data than it takes to produce the data in the first place. It would be a mistake to believe that we should regress back to simpler times when scientists supposedly drew the same conclusions from data—that is, if scientists ever truly did see the same thing in the same data.

Perhaps this isn’t just a quirk of modern science, but a fundamental truth about knowledge itself—one that Montaigne captured centuries ago:

NEWS

Pre-print Power

bioRxiv and medRxiv, two leading preprint servers for biological and medical research, have merged to form a new platform: openRxiv. Together, they host over 120,000 preprints and, until now, have been supported by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Going forward, openRxiv will operate as an independent nonprofit, with governance shifting from CSHL, a private institution, to an international board of researchers. While the CEO of Elsevier may not be losing sleep over the merger, it’s a noteworthy initiative choosing to put community governance and open research first.  

Preprints have been around since the 1960’s but they’ve seen an explosion in popularity in the last decade among researchers as Open Access publishing has become more common (and more expensive in traditional journals). Institutions are also starting to take notice: since 2017, major funders like the Wellcome Trust and the UK’s Medical Research Council have accepted preprints are “a complete scientific manuscript” allowing researchers to cite them in grant applications and list them on their CVs.

RESOURCE

Writing for Impact

If you’re doing academic research, you’ll know impact matters. But high-impact research requires high-impact writing. If you understand good scientific writing but aren’t sure how to make your work resonate - which essentially means ‘resurrecting the excitement of research’ - this easy-to-read Nature article is for you. It outlines key elements for effectively communicating the significance of your work and making it more accessible. 

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. 

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• PhD Positions @ Inria, France: click here

• Research and Academic Positions @ Heriot Watt University, United Kingdom: click here

• PhD Positions @ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: click here 

• PhD, Research, and Academic Positions @ Lut University, Finland: click here 

KEEPING IT REAL

Wildlife Biology in Minecraft

Minecraft, the game that looks like a glorified Lego simulator running on a calculator, has a use besides escapism: it’s a tool for teaching wildlife biology and statistics too. In a relatively short but incredibly creative video, @Organick sets out to answer the question: why do animals in Minecraft spawn where they do? 

He collects data from different areas of a Minecraft map and runs statistical tests in R on the data. The results are that pigs are found in areas with more trees, cows prefer lower tree density, and chickens don’t like areas with a lot of shrubs.

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