Well, from 1991, actually, but publicized this year. It’s from the Wired website Cladistic Detritus by Brian Romans, originally posted by Kyle House. As Brian notes, it’s real:
AGU [The American Geophysical Union] tells me via Twitter that this abstract is indeed authentic: 1991 EOS Trans. AGU Vol 72, No 27-53, p456
Although the e-journal is in our library, for some reason this volume is missing (I wanted a cleaner copy), so I’ll take the AGU’s word.
This is obviously something that snuck by the reviewers (if abstracts are even reviewed for this journal), but it’s a good one. I love the last sentence of the abstract.
h/t: Matthew Cobb
Reminds me of this one and its accompanying presentation:
http://t.co/VcDfa2nwiS
http://t.co/z0e8PUcNaD
No buffaloes?
No. Just chicken.
The QA section is just epic.
What does the last sentence say? “No attempt has been made .. ……. this result.”
to understand…
Looks like: “No attempt has been made to understand this result.”
Well – poster presentations…!
Geophysicists! Which leads me to wonder, which scientific discipline is the most & which the least likely to have humour?
LOVE it. Somebody needs to tell Alan Sokal about this.
No matter how much it costs to put on a professional meeting or to publish a scientific journal, I’m glad that, every once in a while, some levity makes its way into the literature!
Someone should pull together all the zingers like this (or short, funny papers, such as Dan Janzen’s single word paper in Biotropica (as I recall) and publish a compendium of “scientific humor.”
Not directly related, but I love this classic on “Salt Passage”:
http://faculty.som.yale.edu/shyamsunder/Research/Some%20Favorite%20Reading/saltpassageresearch.pdf
That had me making a complete fool of myself at work just now. Still tears in my eyes.
I nearly keeled over. Many thanks. I wonder how many of my buds in the social sciences have seen this… am finding out now. (esp. love the refs… but am wondering what the first initial “R” in everybody’s name stands for.)
This looks like an abstract for the annual American Geophysical Meeting, and I don’t think these abstracts are in fact reviewed. Those for the Geological Society of America are reviewed, and rumor has it that about 20% are rejected.
It looks a lot like a poster abstract since it says poster at the top of the page. If so that’s a lot different than a journal abstract.
As noted in post #3, it’s an abstract of a poster presentation. I’m guessing it’s an abstract for the Fall Meeting of the AGU; those aren’t reviewed (I tried looking for it at the EOS website at Wiley, but the download of the PDF is really slow). EOS is also not a standard peer-reviewed journal, but the AGU’s “news letter” kind of publication, although you can contribute scientific findings of wide interest to the geophysical community in it. I don’t know if those are peer-reviewed or not.
Anyway, hilarious abstract.
I have submitted an abstract for an AGU poster before, and I have no evidence that it was read by anyone.
I love it!
And there’s a stack of turtles beneath the hole. Otherwise, the whole shebang would drain away, as Stephen Meyer’s next tome will show.
There are a number of parody science papers out there, along with explicitly fictional stories that constitute parodies. Asimov wrote several, e.g.
Does anyone have the title, author, or journal title for a parody paper (probably 1950s or early 60s) that employed a car hood ornament to parody (I think) the type of paper that would have come from Roy Chapman Andrews—i.e., Gobi desert expedition? It may have been a pseudo ornithology paper? or a pseudo paleontology paper?
Re. Asimov, did you mean ‘The endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline?’ Didn’t find the text online, but it’s a masterwork.
Yes; that is the one that is most explicitly a parody. However, there is at least one other story he wrote that could be seen as a kind of parody of how science is done, while not being explicitly a putative scientific paper.
THX — you made my day 🙂
Almost suffocated laughing. (Wouldn’t that be a great way to go?)
Get this clear transcript and re-drawing if you have difficulty deciphering the original.
btw, I see Torbjörn Larsson has been commenting on this gem over at Clastic Detritus.
Now I feel like “Kilroy was here!”
Reblogged this on From experience to meaning… and commented:
One could be tempted to try to get this past a review committee yourself…
I am dying….thank you! 🙂
This Sokal-ish paper didn’t so much sneak past the reviewers, as the then-editor Doug Futyuma, worked with the author to publish it:
Ellstrand N. 1983. Why are juveniles smaller than their parents? Evolution 37: 1091-1094.
The last line is subtle and funny [JSS = Juvenile Small Size]:
“In particular, another juvenile character is even more widespread than JSS and deserves some thoughtful theoretical attention, the fact that juveniles always seem to be younger than their parents.”
Sorry that’s Doug “Futuyma”
I cited Ellstrand in one of my papers, because questioning the obvious is cool.
Also because there are exceptions.
That is a very cool exception, thanks for sharing it. Who knew!!!?
There is of course this one:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf
Beat me to it by that much. Clearly the best abstract of all time!
Thank you, this made me laugh!
I imagine you’ve seen this one:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf
Here’s a brief explanation of the background:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7036/full/nature03653.html
(My apologies if the links don’t work, I have no idea how to embed html)
OK, so ignore the apology!
Puts me in mind of the hilarious Journal of Irreproducible Results. See http://www.jir.com/history
Looks like something out of _Annals of Improbable Research_ or the earlier _Journal of Irreproducable Results_.
sub
Reminds me of the series of “G-String Theory” papers by Warren Siegel. Yes, these were actually in the published proceedings.
http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/parodies/sgs.html
http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/parodies/sgsft.html
“The G-string is unique in that it combines the properties of all known string theories. It has 26-dimensional modes propagating to the left, 10-dimensional modes propagating to the right, and 2-dimensional modes just sitting around wondering what the hell is going on.”