The dark side of academia

I've just publish a new blog on Southern Fried Science about the dark side of academia , or how to be jerk faculty members. Enjoy !

Be proud to be a Kardashian

A paper has just appeared in Genome Biology (see paper here) that discusses the "Kardashian index". The idea behind the paper is that a scientist should attract a number of followers on twitter related to how cited their scientific papers are.

According to the formula in the paper I should have 302 followers on Twitter, whereas I currently have 1208 as I type this. By dividing the number of followers you actually have by the number you "should" have, you get the K (or Kardashian) index.

The author states that "a high K-index is a warning to the community that researcher X may have
built their public profile on shaky foundations, while a very low K-index suggests that a scientist is being undervalued."

If you have a K index above 5, you are a "Science Kardashian" , i.e., you are akin to the Kardashians for having celebrity "despite having not achieved anything consequential in science".

Incidentally my K-index is 3.998, but I have several friends who have indexes of 5+

The scientist in question smugly says they have a K-index of 1.0 and so they must be doing things right.

To me, this suggests that they are doing things wrong. They are using Twitter for purely self-serving purposes, they're failing at communicating their science, and perhaps their online Twitter personae is boring to boot. Twitter is an effective tool for promoting science (e.g. see our recent paper here on Twitter's usefulness for conservation scientists). If you are a science-oriented Tweeter you may build up a reputation and followers not just because your own personal studies are interesting (I have to boast that I have had a few articles in journals score high altmetric scores because of social media interest), but because:

• what you tweet about is interesting to a wide audience;
• your tweets are timely about real world issues that people care about;
• your tweets make science seem interesting or accessible to the wider Twitter community including non-scientists;

• your tweets are probably not self-serving or self endulgent;
• your tweets may be funny and amusing and not just "in house" jokes - humor sells;
• you may have crafted an online persona that is open and likable - you get often followers if people feel that they can chat to you and you will respond in a cordial manner; 
• your tweets are trusted as a source of good, reputable science or other information.

Quite frankly, instead of being embarrassed about having a high Kardashian index, you should be proud. You are a good communicator and you are succeeding with science outreach; and science outreach is essential in this day and age, especially in the US where science ignorance is on the climb ... especially in Congress. Don't listen to those who try to put you down, carry on with what you are doing and keep getting those followers. In this case, be proud to be a Kardashian !


P.S. For a similar, but slightly different slanted article on why this paper is smug and patronizing have a look at this blog.

Co-authors from hell

Even been on a publishing project or paper when one co-author has never replied to emails,  been completely unreasonable in terms of edits, or who wanted a large slice of the pie in terms of author listing? In particular, have you ever been a student and senior faculty or supervisors have insisted on being a co-author, or even lead author on your paper although they did precious little to help? Did you feel powerless and frustrated?

We've recently published a paper on problems that might arise when publishing, and an idea for an author's agreement, that could hopefully solve many of these conflicts, or at least put you in a stronger position to expel troublesome co-authors from your paper.

The paper itself can be found here

It must have hit a chord with the scientific community as it's already in the top 40 articles (ever) for that journal for social media buzz/shares etc, and it is only in press and not actually properly published in an issue yet.

There is also a blog article on the paper, which you can find here.

For those readers who are scientists, I hope you find the paper useful.

Oh, how times change - an illustration from the underwater noise and cetacean science field

I  was talking to a student the other day about how scientists attitudes to some cetacean conservation issues have changed, that some things that were derided a decade ago, are now accepted as scientific fact and accepted as a problem. This is especially prevalent in the issue of noise and whales and dolphins.

Here’s an interesting example I just found. In a paper I published in 2008  on the possible impacts of navy sonar we said that navy dolphins might not be the best models for responses of naive wild dolphins due to their training,  habituation to noise exposure and their noisy environment (San Diego harbour). Here's an extract:

“Using the behavioral reactions by trained, captive animals to predict the responses of wild animals may therefore be flawed. The motivations of these two groups of animals are also markedly different: wild animals are trying to forage and evade predators in order to survive, while captive animals are merely expecting a reward (fish or praise).” 

…“It is possible that the high levels of background noise in captive facilities lead to hearing impairment ... and even deafness ... either of which could potentially also result from years of exposure to sound during controlled experiments.”*

This was heavily criticized by two navy-funded scientists in a rebuttal paper:

“[they] state that such physiological measurements are debatable as to their relevance to wild animals…  An example of the overreaching zeal of the authors to denigrate ‘captive animal’ research is found on page 1251 of the article when they say “It is possible that the high level of background noise in captive facilities led to hearing impairment"** etc etc etc ...

I just found this in a paper written by one of the authors of that rebuttal noted above that was published last year (5 years later), in which the same research team  measured the responses of US navy dolphins to sonar exposure:

The researchers noted that the responses of the dolphins:

“are likely not directly transferrable to conspecifics in the wild. The dolphins have years of experience under stimulus control, which is a necessary condition for the performance of trained behaviors, and they live within an environment with significant boating activity. These factors likely impact the threshold of responsiveness to sound exposure, potentially in the direction of habituation or increased tolerance to noise.”***

This is exactly the point we were trying to make 5 years previously, but we had been derided by  the same researchers accusing us of being anti-captivity zealots and bad scientists.

Schopenhauer once said that all truth passes through 3 stages: first you are ridiculed, then you are violently opposed, and then it is regarded as self-evident. I think we’ve got to stage 3 !

*Parsons, E.C.M., Dolman, S., Wright, A.J., Rose, N.A. & Burns, W.C.G. 2008. Navy sonar and cetaceans: just how much does the gun need to smoke before we act? Marine Pollution Bulletin 56: 1248-1257.

**Ridgway, S. & Houser, D.S. 2009.Marine mammal auditory research: Mischaracterization of published results. Marine Pollution Bulletin 58: 312-313.

***Houser, D.S., Martin, S.W.  & Finneran, J.J. 2013. Exposure amplitude and repetition affect bottlenose dolphin behavioral responses to simulated mid-frequency sonar signals. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 443: 123–133

Publication rejection bingo

Ever tried to publish a scientific paper? This probably means you've also had a paper rejected, and likely received some strange and unusual reviewer comments to boot. This happens to the best of us, and if you stay in academia, it will happen A LOT. So to take the anger and frustration out of bad and unreasonable reviews, why not have a game of rejection bingo ...!

What would Jeoffrey do ?

I am just loving this in so many ways ....

They have a cave troll ...

I recently had a run in with a troll (employed by SeaWorld) after I tried to correct a comment about killer whale biology/science (and which I specifically had data and analyses on) recently. This led to a battle on Twitter, and for the sake of prosperity I decided to storify it. FYI because of the slew of tweets the troll got from marine biologists, they've stopped using that account, but they are still out there, lurking ...
Here's the storified Twitter fight ...