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“12 Types Of Scientific Paper” Meme Is Making Academic Twitter Feel Seen
Rachael Funnell
Digital Content Producer
Rachael is a writer and digital content producer at IFLScience with a Zoology degree from the University of Southampton, UK, and a nose for novelty animal stories.
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A recent and revealing cartoon from webcomic xkcd recently summarized, pretty succinctly, what some of the journals’ most frequent visitors see. Image credit: xkcd , CC BY-NC 2.5
Reading scientific papers can reveal fascinating, obscure, and far-reaching insights into life on this planet and beyond. However, if you’re someone who reads or writes them a lot, you’ve likely become familiar with certain genres of research – and there's nothing quite like wading through oceans of citations to take away a little of that New Paper shine.
A recent and revealing cartoon from webcomic xkcd recently summarized, pretty succinctly, what some of the journals’ most frequent visitors see when flicking through emerging research. Personal favorites from the original cartoon include “what are fish even doing down there” and “we scanned some undergraduates”.
While, to the uninitiated, the academic value of once again watching a bunch of (probably C. elegans ) worms roll around may be lost, the repetition of these study formats of course doesn't subtract from their value. Fortunately (as these three-word fieldwork horror stories demonstrate), some of science's greatest are also some of its funniest, and edited versions of the original comic soon began to emerge on Twitter.
Scroll with caution, some might strike pretty close to home.
*The entire IFLScience Editorial Team looks shifty*
Sweet, sweet hallucinogens.
Speaking of massive genomes... did you see the genome sequencing of a platypus ? That baby is full of some juicy adaptations.
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2456: Types of Scientific Paper
Explanation [ edit ].
In this comic, Randall describes categories of scientific papers with somewhat humorous generalized titles. This comic may be a jab at mainstream news and their handling of scientific announcements; journalists are eager to report on what could turn out to be a scientific breakthrough even if it's very similar to stories they've already published about similar papers that turned out to be somewhat mundane. It may also relate to how some scientific findings follow certain patterns.
Breakdown of papers [ edit ]
Transcript [ edit ], trivia [ edit ].
- Originally, this comic's title text misspelled "volunteers" as "volunters".
- Another comic, 2012: Thorough Analysis , similarly categorizes or mocks research papers.
Derivatives [ edit ]
The comic inspired many derivatives, changing the paper titles to be more relevant to specific fields.
The hashtag #TypesOfScientificPapers on Twitter includes many of these.
There is a generator .
There is a moodboard compiling hundreds of them .
Some examples include:
I've a feeling we could find actual papers that paraphrase down to those in the comic. Also, lol at the 500 scientists' "citation" section. 162.158.159.104 20:36, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
As we edit this we should probably pay attention to the content / layout of the article images: The number of lines beneath the title and layout of each "paper" he's drawn could be relevant to the joke. For example, the "500 scientists" presumably have a massive authors list, and the one on how "everyone else is doing it wrong" has a single author and a particularly "article-esque" layout.
172.68.132.45 21:04, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Reywas ( talk ) 21:06, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
For the "student volunteers" paper, many experiments involve adding hurdles for the participants to deal with. Like interrupting them, depriving them of sleep, adding distracting information, etc. It's not uncommon that these make them worse at the tasks. So this is just another research paper like that. Barmar ( talk ) 01:24, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Nobody has pointed out that the "Maybe all these categories are wrong" title directly pertains to this very comic... John.Adriaan ( talk ) 02:17, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Should we add another colum to include the corresponding LaTeX template? Some of them seem like that could easily be found.
These are titles of papers, so shouldn't each word be capitalized? For example: "We Put a Camera Somewhere New". I realize that the original is in all caps, but that's because that's the usual format for comics . . . . 172.68.57.179 10:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Why does the explanation say "There are no headers" for the "We put a camera somewhere new" paper? I assume "headers" refers to "section headers", of which I see more in the camera-paper than in e.g. the immune system-paper (or the old records-paper). 141.101.96.28 11:25, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Should this (and any others, which I think likely exist or are about to) go in the main article? https://twitter.com/GreenBankObserv/status/1388148786707406854
"With apologies to Mr. Munroe, may we present: Types of Radio Astronomy Papers"
— JohnHawkinson ( talk ) 18:40, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
The meme is now so popular there is an article in the atlantic about it; maybe that should be included: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/xkcd-science-paper-meme-nails-academic-publishing/618810/
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Scientific Publishing Is a Joke
An XKCD comic—and its many remixes—perfectly captures the absurdity of academic research.
A real scientific advance, like a successful date, needs both preparation and serendipity. As a tired, single medical student, I used to feel lucky when I managed two good dates in a row. But career scientists must continually create this kind of magic. Universities judge their research faculty not so much by the quality of their discoveries as by the number of papers they’ve placed in scholarly journals, and how prestigious those journals happen to be. Scientists joke (and complain) that this relentless pressure to pad their résumés often leads to flawed or unoriginal publications. So when Randall Munroe, the creator of the long-running webcomic XKCD , laid out this problem in a perfect cartoon last week, it captured the attention of scientists—and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices.
The cartoon is, like most XKCD comics, a simple back-and-white line drawing with a nerdy punch line. It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 “Types of Scientific Paper,” presented in a grid. “The immune system is at it again,” one paper’s title reads. “My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it,” declares another. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The cartoon’s childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time.
The concept was intuitive—and infinitely remixable. Within a couple of days, the sociologist Kieran Healy had created a version of the grid for his field; its entries included “This seems very weird and bad but it’s perfectly rational when you’re poor,” and “I take a SOCIOLOGICAL approach, unlike SOME people.” Epidemiologists got on board too—“We don’t really have a clue what we’re doing: but here are some models!” Statisticians , perhaps unsurprisingly, also geeked out: “A new robust variance estimator that nobody needs.” (I don’t get it either.) You couldn’t keep the biologists away from the fun (“New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete”), and—in their usual fashion—the science journalists soon followed (“Readers love animals”). A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as “an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography—self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story.”
Put another way: The joke was on target. “The meme hits the right nerve,” says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research . “Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion.” The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work; indeed, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that this sorry outcome was more or less inevitable, given the incentives at play. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review … and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated . The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can’t keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf.
In medicine, at least, the urgency of COVID-19 only made it easier to publish a lot of articles very quickly. The most prestigious journals— The New England Journal of Medicine , the Journal of the American Medical Association , and The Lancet —have traditionally reserved their limited space for large, expensive clinical trials. During the pandemic, though, they started rapidly accepting reports that described just a handful of patients. More than a few CVs were beefed up along the way. Scientists desperate to stay relevant began to shoehorn COVID-19 into otherwise unrelated research, says Saurabh Jha, an associate radiology professor and a deputy editor of the journal Academic Radiology .
A staggering 200,000 COVID-19 papers have already been published, of which just a tiny proportion will ever be read or put into practice. To be fair, it’s hard to know in advance which data will prove most useful during an unprecedented health crisis. But pandemic publishing has only served to exacerbate some well-established bad habits, Michael Johansen, a family-medicine physician and researcher who has criticized many studies as being of minimal value, told me. “COVID publications appear to be representative of the literature at large: a few really important papers and a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t or shouldn’t be read,” he said. Peer-reviewed results confirming that our vaccines really work, for example, could lead to millions of lives being saved. Data coming out of the United Kingdom’s nationwide RECOVERY trial have provided strong evidence for now-standard treatments such as dexamethasone. But that weird case report? Another modeling study trying to predict the unpredictable? They’re good for a news cycle, maybe, but not for real medical care. And some lousy studies have even undermined the treatment of COVID-19 patients ( hydroxychloroquine has entered the chat).
I should pause here to acknowledge that I’m a hypocrite. “Some thoughts on how everyone else is bad at research” is listed as one of the facetious article types in the original XKCD comic, yet here I am rehashing the same idea, with an internet-culture angle. Unfortunately, because The Atlantic isn’t included in scientific databases, publishing this piece will do nothing to advance my academic career. “Everyone recognizes it’s a hamster-in-a-wheel situation, and we are all hamsters,” says Anirban Maitra, a physician and scientific director at MD Anderson Cancer Center. (He created a version of the “12 Types” meme for my own beloved field: “A random pathology paper with the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ in the title.”) Maitra has built a successful career by running in the publication wheel—his own bibliography now includes more than 300 publications —but he says he has no idea how to fix the system’s flaws. In fact, none of the scientists I talked with could think of a realistic solution. If science has become a punch line, then we haven’t yet figured out how to get rid of the setup.
While the XKCD comic can be read as critical of the scientific enterprise, part of its viral appeal is that it also conveys the joy that scientists feel in nerding out about their favorite topics. (“Hey, I found a trove of old records! They don’t turn out to be particularly useful, but still, cool!”) Publication metrics have become a sad stand-in for quality in academia, but maybe there’s a lesson in the fact that even a webcomic can arouse so much passion and collaboration across the scientific community. Surely there’s a better way to cultivate knowledge than today’s endless grid of black-and-white papers.
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“12 Types Of Scientific Paper” Meme Is Making Academic Twitter Feel Seen
Reading scientific papers can reveal interesting, vague and far-reaching insights into life on this planet and beyond.
However, if you are someone who reads or writes a lot of them, you may be familiar with certain research – and there is nothing like quoting the sea to take away the shine of this new paper a bit. A recent and unveiling cartoon of the webcomic XCD has recently been published in a short form, looking through the emerging research of a number of journals that frequent viewers see frequently.
Personal choices from the original cartoons include “What the Fish Are Doing Here” and “We’ve Scanned Some Graduates”. Luckily (as this three-word field horror stories show) some of the greats in science are some of its funniest, and soon edited versions of the original comics began to appear on Twitter. Although incessantly, again almost a bunch (probably C. elegans ) may lose the academic value of watching insect rolls, the repetition of the formats of this study does not subtract from their value. Scroll carefully, some may move closer to home.
Like a true scientific advancement, like a successful date, both preparation and foresight are required. As a tired, single medical student, I feel lucky to have managed two good dates in a row but career scientists must create this kind of magic. Universities do not judge their research faculty by the quality of their discoveries as much as they do in scholarly journals and how prestigious they are by.
Scientists have joked (and complained) that this relentless pressure to constantly pad them often leads to flawed or unique publications. So when Randall Munro, creator of the long-running webcomic XCD, wrote the issue in a perfect cartoon, it caught the attention of scientists – and inspired many to create specific versions with their own branches.
Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practice. The cartoon is like most XCD comics, drawing a simple back-white line with a smooth punch line. It depicts a classification of the 12 “Types of Scientific Papers” presented on the grid. A paper caption reads, “Prevention is in it again.”
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Cartoonist's "Types Of Scientific Paper" Are Striking A Chord Across Academic Twitter. A recent and revealing cartoon from webcomic xkcd
A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Types of Scientific Paper. |
I fixed the "Types of Scientific Paper" meme. ... But for many for many papers, if you email an author or two, they'll sent it to you for free.
“Types Of Scientific Paper” Meme Transformed Into One On Ed Research – Create Your Own! Posted by Larry Ferlazzo | May 2, 2021 | research studies | 0 |.
Insanely fast, mobile-friendly meme generator. Make Types of Scientific Paper memes or upload your own images to make custom memes.
Last week, Randall Munroe, author of the famed webcomic xkcd published a comic about "Types of Scientific Paper": It has now served as a
In this comic, Randall describes categories of scientific papers with somewhat humorous generalized titles. Breakdown of papers[edit]. Paper Title, Explanation
It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 “Types of Scientific Paper,” presented in a ... of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes.
Cindy Kohtala version of xkcd Types of Scientific Papers, called Types ... You can make your own using this meme-maker by Guillaume Levrier.
What can I say? I could not resist. Original comic here. Meme generator here.
“12 Types Of Scientific Paper” Meme Is Making Academic Twitter Feel Seen. Reading scientific papers can reveal interesting, vague and far-reaching insights