Incoming: Evo devo inverts 4!

Model organisms are great, but as interest has turned to model organisms (particularly genetic ones), we’ve seen less and less attention paid to... the rest of the living world.

A new book series tries to remedy this somewhat for one field: Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Invertebrates. I contributed a little to a chapter in volume 4 with Steffen Harzsch and Jakob Kreiger on development in decapod crustaceans. I just looked at the page proofs recently, and it looks lovely.

Volumes 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are listed in the Springer website. I am guessing that there will be a volume 2, and the editor is not pulling some elaborate prank to leave us with non-sequential volumes.

Tuesday Crustie: Bringing the thunder

The big science news that everyone is talking about today is the proposal to return the genus name Brontosaurus (translation: “thunder lizard”) a valid taxonomic moniker again. Well, dinosaurs aren’t the only thunder around...

Check out those claws! That’s clearly what it uses to bring the thunder. Myomenippe hardwickii, which the photographer designates as a “thunder crab.”

Photo by budak on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

How much harm is done by predatory journals?

There is a cottage industry of people who feel the need to show, “There are journals that will publish crap!” And it’s getting tiring.

The Scholarly Kitchen did this to Bentham Journals a few years ago, we had the Bohannon “sting” in Science, the angry “Get me off your fucking mailing list” paper. A recent entry into this pageant is a cocoa puffs paper. A new editorial calls predatory journals “publication pollution.”

To listen to some of these, you could be forgiven for thinking that publishing a paper in one of these journals is practically academic misconduct: a career-ending, unrecoverable event.

I talk to a lot of working scientists, both online and in person. And in all of that time, how many scientists have I heard of who have reported someone who submitted to one of these journals, who were not satisfied with their experience?

Three. One experience is described in two posts (here and here), and a couple of others were tweeted at me when I asked for examples. And two were “my friend” stories, not personal accounts. For the amount of handwringing over predatory publishers, this is a vanishingly small number.

Of course, these numbers are probably under reported, because nobody wants to admit that they published in a junk journal. It’s like admitting you got taken in by an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince. It’s embarrassing to admit when you should have known better.

Let’s say that someone pays and publishes a paper in a predatory journal. Who is harmed, how much are they harmed, and what recourse is there to address the harm?

The author

An author who publishes in such a journal has paid the article processing charge. Okay, that sucks. But presumably the author knew she or he was going to be getting an invoice, and would not have gone that route if she or he was utterly unable to pay.

Assuming that the author has not gone into great financial hardship, let’s say the paper is published online, but without proper peer review. What are the possible outcomes, and what harms might arise?

If the paper is competent, the author could harmed because people will not read the paper because of the journal. But the paper is available for other researchers can use it and cite it if they so choose. People cite non-reviewed stuff all the time (conference abstracts, non journal articles).

If an author realizes that this was a non-peer reviewed venue, what can she or he do about it? The author can try to retract it. If the journal does not, the author can try to publish it elsewhere. Real journal editors might be sympathetic to the plight of authors who made a mistake in the publishing venue.

An author could choose not to list the paper on her or his CV. Other professionals do similar things. Actor Peter MacNicol never listed the movie Dragonslayer on his list of films.

Ultimately, I don’t see severe harm done to an honest author who publishes in the wrong journal. It’s reasonable to ask if that harm couldn’t have been avoided with a little due diligence. Authors should know the principle “Caveat emptor” applies as much to journals as other services.

The public

Another argument is that the harm of publishing in predatory journals is that the public or the unwary will be confused, because the findings could be untrue. Let’s examine a few scenarios of how findings could be false.

The research was not done well. This is no different from research published in other journals. There are many, many cases of research that was poorly done, but published anyway. This is why post-publication peer review is important. This is why replication is important. Scientists perform post-publication peer review all the time. It is our job. This is what we do.

The researchers are malicious. It is possible that someone with an agenda might try to give dubious information some sort of veneer of respectability by publishing it in a predatory journal. But... why? There are many easier ways for people with an agenda to spread lies than publishing in a crummy journal.

Professional climate denier Marc Morano has never published a scientific article. Neither has dubious diet critic the Food Babe. They don’t need to, when they’ve found so many media platforms that give them a so much bigger audience. It’s not clear how an article in a junk journal is supposed to be a more effective way of spreading untrue information than a blog, or an infomercial, appearing on a cable news network sympathetic to certain ideas and ideologies, or any of the other hundreds of ways people can spread lies.

This raises the question of how the general public finds out about research of any sort, including the dodgy stuff. Most members of the general public are not scouring academic journals. For there to be significant spread of the false research findings, it would either have to be spread through the general media or social media

General media. Science journalists who have any baseline competence should understand scientific publishing enough to realize that not every research article in every scientific journal is true. Publishing in a little known journal should raise an immediate red flag and warrant investigation before filing a story. If any journalist doesn’t do that, you have “churnalism,” and in my mind, that’s a separate – and much bigger – problem than a junk journal.

Social media. So far, I know of no cases where an article from an alleged “predatory” journal has gone viral. But let’s say it does. One of the powers of social media is that if something does go viral, it gets a lot of attention, including relevant experts can talk about it. They are probably going to comment, and be asked to comment, and can explain why such and such a paper is problematic. One of the wonderful things about the dress was that it gave lots of experts a chance to explain what we know about visual system.

Other scientists

I am not sure I see much potential harm for other scientists if a paper is published in a crappy journal. Because the entire point of a journal being called “predatory” is a way of saying that it has no standing in the scientific community. So if a journal is already being ignored by a scientific community, how is it going supposed to affect that community?

Evaluating articles is what we working professional are supposed to be doing. Like, all the time. I suppose that there is a minor harm in that people might have an opportunity cost in time spent debunking papers in junk journals. But more likely, papers in bogus journals are going to suffer the same fate as a lot of other articles: they’ll just be ignored.

Another argument might be that the general scientific community is harmed because there is reduced public trust in science. As I outlined above, I can’t see that happening.

The major reasons that scientists get their panties in a bunch about predatory journals is not because junk “predatory” have done much demonstrable harm to anyone, other than authors who are out their processing fees. I see lots hand waving about the “purity and integrity of the scientific record,” which is never how it’s been. The scientific literature has always been messy. We always have verify, replicate, and often correct published results.

Stephen Curry wrote:

“The danger of this model is that upfront fees provide short term incentives for journals to accept papers from anyone who has the money to pay, regardless of their scientific value or accuracy.” Is there any evidence that this is a serious risk? As the author himself notes, no journal will build a reputation for quality by publishing any old rubbish. This is a bit of a straw man argument.

Some people have claimed that these predatory journals exploit scientists in developing countries. It reminds me a little of someone on Twitter who recounted asking at a historical tour, “Were slaves kept here?” The guide answered, “Yes, they had good houses and were well cared for.” The problem wasn’t whether they had decent housing, the problem was they were slaves.

The problems for researchers in developing countries are not predatory journals. The problems that such researchers have is bad infrastructure, lack of support, and poor mentoring that prevents them from putting together papers that could be published in mainstream scientific journals. That they may be working under incentives that do not reward them for discriminating between journals. I also am waiting to hear from the waves of dissatisfied scientists from developing countries who feel they got ripped off.

I also noticed this when I tried to read a new entry in the “OMG predatory journals” collection:

It’s not quite an open access irony award winner... but it’s close. You want to complain about scientific publishing? Let’s talk about the regular, routine obstruction to reading the scientific literature that occurs even a professional working scientist at an expanding university with ever increasing research expectations. That affects routinely me, in a way predatory journals never have.

Open access is a new business model. Who benefits from constantly crying wolf on “predatory” journals? Established journals from established publishers, whose business model includes, in part, in asking over US$30 to read an editorial.

We should be worried about parasites as well as predators in the scientific publishing ecosystem.

Additional, 8 April 2015: There is a little bit of data indicating that these junk journals are not being read here. Hat tip to Lenny Teytelman.

Related posts

Science Online 2013: Open access or vanity press appetizer
Open access or vanity press, the Science sting edition

External links

Why A Fake Article Titled "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?" Was Accepted By 17 Medical Journals
Comment on “Open Access must be open at both ends”
Beyond Beall’s List: We need a better understanding of predatory publishing without overstating its size and danger.
Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals
Science’s Big Scandal
Science and medicine have a 'publication pollution' problem
Academic journals in glass houses... 

Comments for second half of March 2015

Lenny Teytelman has been blogging about his crowdfunding experience.

Tuesday Crustie: Made in Taiwan

Even though I’m nominally an expert in crustaceans, I’m embarrassed by how little I know about them. If I was walking down a beach and saw this little guy, I would recognize it as Emerita – which I should, since they were one of the species in my doctoral thesis! – but I would be completely oblivious to this being a new species.

I might, and I stress might, clue into to the colour. The blue patch at the front around the eyes is something that is different than in other mole crabs, but it’s still quite subtle.

Of course, I’m unlikely to spot this walking down a beach, since its name, Emerita taiwanensis, indicates where it’s from: Taiwan. They’ve been found only at two locations, and only once from one of those two.

Reference

Hsueh P-W. 2015. A new species of Emerita (Decapoda, Anomura, Hippidae) from Taiwan, with a key to species of the genus. Crustaceana 88(3): 247-258. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685403-00003413

Tuesday Crustie: Pinch me, I’m Irish

Something for St. Patrick’s Day! (I get to celebrate, because my grandmother’s original name was Murphy, which is about as Irish as you get.)

This green crab (Carcinas maenas) can be found in the waters around Ireland. Unfortunately,it’s been distributed around the world, and is no one of the world’s worst invasive species.

However, Ireland also has its own problems with unwelcome visitors. My most recent paper looks at this.

If St. Patrick were alive today, his job should be casting out alien crayfish, not snakes.

Comments for first half of March 2015

Scientist on Fire has a two-body problem. Anyone else have advice?

Jobs at UTRGV

The Department of Biology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has put out the call for two tenure-track assistant professor positions!

• Anatomy and physiology (no reason it can’t be a neuroanatomist, by the way)
• Environment toxicology

Applications close 23 March 2015.

If you have questions about the institution, department, and so on, you can find all my pertinent contact information on my home page.

Come work with me!

The Zen of Presentations, Part 68: Literally too literal

I’ve been trying to teach my biology students about the importance of narrative in presentations. As part of their task, I’ve been using two parts of the techniques elaborated in the book Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking (reviewed here).

Summarize your talk in a single thematic word.

Summarize your talk in a single, “And... but... therefore” sentence.

Students are finding this a much harder task than I expected. I was particularly surprised by how many of them stumbled over drilling down their talk to just one word.

Over and over again, students are submitting just be something that is in the paper. If I give them a paper on coral reef ecosystems, their word is, “coral.”

It would be like someone asked to write a single word for last year’s movie Guardians of the Galaxy, and saying, “spaceships.” Or worse, “galaxies.” Sure, there are spaceships in the movie, but that isn’t the theme of the story.

Basically the movie is about characters with a traumatic family history getting over their trauma to forge a new family. Sure, the movie uses the word “friend” but the point is still clear. Drax lost his whole family; Gamora’s family was abusive; Peter Quill’s dad abandoned him, his mom died, and he was adopted; and Rocket and Groot are orphans who’ve never really had parents. The movie is all about these characters learning to surmount their history, communicate, and forge a new family. (From here.)

“Teamwork” or “family” or “trauma” might be better.

This literal take on their topics carries through the main presentation. Over and over again, students get focused on the minutia. They spend an enormous amount of time on minor points. When presenting a singe scientific paper, a large number of students spend a lot of time on methods, up to and including which institutional board did the ethics review for the experiments.

It may be that the sort of education that science majors get tends to be way focused on details, and seemingly irrelevant details are often exactly the sort of knowledge students are tested on. I don’t know how to get them out of their heads and stepping back to see more “forest” and less on “every leaf on every tree.”

Related posts

Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking review

“What’s our Nature paper?”

A few years ago, a candidate interviewing for a gig in our department said that he routinely asked people in the lab, “What’s our Nature paper?”

I have severe concerns about chasing after glamour magazine publications. But that question stuck with me. I may hate the way the question is phrased, but I understand what the question is asking at a deeper level. It’s asking, “What research will do you do that would be important, not just to your narrow field, but to science generally? What research would you do that would change the world?”

And when I thought about my own work, I didn’t have an answer.

It’s a well known thing in psychology that when things go wrong, we blame external influences. (But when things go right, we credit ourselves.) And it’s increasingly easy to say, “I can’t have a manuscript worth sending to Nature because grants are hard to get these days, my teaching load is too heavy, the best students won’t apply to my program, we don’t have a doctoral program...” and on and on and on.

And then I asked, “What if none of those were problems? What if I had no other commitments, and all the supplies and cash and colleagues I needed? What would be my Nature paper?”

And I still don’t have an answer.

Maybe as you go on in your career, you get complacent. You have a line of research, and you know what the next experiment is for the next few papers. And you don’t stop to ask yourself, “Forget about external limitations, do I have an question or an idea that – if I could answer it well and before anyone else – would shake things up?”

Ambition has a bad rap in science. There are a lot of people with massive egos who are very ambitious. But ambition is not all bad. You can achieve a lot of positive things if you are ambitious. So maybe it’s worth asking yourself, “Am I being ambitious enough?”

Myself, I have the ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition.
Why will you not have ambition? Why?
Have the greatest ambition possible.
You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it.
You want to make the most fantastic art of movie? Try.
If you fail, it’s not important. We need to try.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jodorowksy’s Dune (2014)

Tuesday Crustie: Young but old

This is a baby crab, therefore young.

This is also a reconstruction of a 150 million year old fossil, therefore old. Huag and colleagues show this is the oldest baby crab in the fossil record (150 million years!). That it’s the oldest may not be as impressive when you consider that it’s only the second baby crab in the fossil record ever found. So it had a fifty-fifty chance to be oldest!

What a spectacular find.

For more on this discovery, read here. I’d like to direct you to the original paper, but despite Nature Communications being an “open access journal now,” not all of its papers are open access - including this one. Sigh.

Reference

Haug JT, Martin JW, Haug C. 2015. A 150-million-year-old crab larva and its implications for the early rise of brachyuran crabs. Nature Communications 6: 6417. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7417

Can civil servants defuse a bomb? An Irish crayfish problem

There are papers you write for your self.

There are papers you write for your colleagues.

I wrote my latest paper for civil servants.

My newest paper on the sale of marbled crayfish is short. I bet that some people reading it might wonder why it’s not just a blog post. I debated with myself a lot whether I should try to get it in a journal. (I assure you, it would have been much easier to blog about it that publish it in a journal.)

It started when I was checking my email, and saw one of my regular alerts for “marbled crayfish.” I don’t think I can recreate the sound I made when I read one of my alerts and saw the link was from Ireland. It was a sort of sharp, squeeky inhaling – probably close to an “Eeep!”

I panicked.

When I describe the situation native European crayfish, the phrase I almost always use is, “horror show.” It was just so obvious to me after I went to the International Association for Astacology conference in 2010 (blogged here). Between introduced crayfish species and crayfish plague, things for native European crayfish species are bad.

Ireland has been an exception. There’s only one native species, the white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes, pictured above). And those Irish crayfish populations are in pretty good shape, relatively speaking, mainly because there aren’t any exotic invasive crayfish species in Ireland.

Ireland and Marmorkrebs – a cloning species that needs only one to start a population, and carries crayfish plague – would be a spectacularly bad combination.

I wanted to get this into a journal because documenting occurrences like this is important for policy and enforcement purposes. Ireland is ostensibly doing everything right. Importing crayfish into Ireland is already illegal. Ireland has public awareness campaigns about crayfish. And yet people are still selling Marmorkrebs publicly.

I hoped that for anyone who had some power to do something about Ireland’s crayfish, a scientific article in a peer reviewed journal might have more clout than a blog post.

After I decided that I wanted to publish this in a journal, it was not smooth sailing. Finding a home for this article was not easy, because it’s not exactly a traditional biology article.

While my article was being reviewed, I panicked again. A scientific society newsletter article scooped mine: it also reported Marmorkrebs were for sale in Ireland. I thought, “There goes my paper’s reason for uniqueness.” But there were enough differences that I thought my paper would still have something new and important to report. More importantly, a couple of sentences in the middle of a society newsletter was still not part of the mainstream literature. Because one goal was to make sure that the sale of exotic crayfish in Ireland was not overlooked, I still believed a paper was necessary.

And I found a third case of Marmorkrebs for sale in Ireland at the page proofs stage. Adding things at this late stage is always tricky, but the editor was cooperative and it went in, so the article became at least a little more substantive than what I initially submitted.

The final challenge was institutional rather than editorial or scientific. I was hoping to have this paper out at the end of 2014, but the article processing fees did not get paid in time. Sigh. Paying a bill should be routine, not be something to celebrate. But I did celebrate when it was paid, so my article wasn’t pushed back a second time.

Now that the article is out, I hope that it will make a few people aware that Ireland has a great resource in its crayfish. And maybe it will act as a slight nudge to stop non-native crayfish, like Marmorkrebs, from getting loose in Ireland’s rivers and lakes and streams.

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2015. A bomb set to drop: parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs for sale in Ireland, a European location without non-indigenous crayfish. Management of Biological Invasions 6(1): 111-114. http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/mbi.2015.6.1.09

Top crayfish picture from here.

Tuesday Crustie: Crabz n the Hood

A new paper by Kim and Christy (2015) gets ace graphic treatment in a BBC summary.


Reference

Kim TW, Christy JH. 2015. A mechanism for visual orientation may facilitate courtship in a fiddler crab. Animal Behaviour 101: 61-66.

External links

Crabs build ‘temples of love’

The “Texas transcript” is a good idea, but won’t solve grade inflation

“Devastating crisis.”

“Scandal.”

“Ravaging.”

“Debasing.”

“Toxic.”

“Virulent.”

“Still worse is its effect on the souls.”

With language like that, you’d think the author was talking about a terrorist attack, Biblical plague,  or a new Twilight book.

Nope. This is about grade inflation in universities. A C used to be considered average, but now, the most common grade in American universities is an “A.”

The solution being proposed to this scourge? (Sorry, got carried in wanting to match the original article’s over the top descriptions.)

Texas House Bill 1196 [and] Senate Bill 499... would require schools to “place the average or median grade, as applicable, immediately to the right of the student’s individual grade” on official transcripts.

I like this idea. Letter grades alone are not all that informative. I am often asked to write recommendation letters for students, and one of the things I often try to do is to give the reviewer a sense of where that student stood relative to the rest of the class. A student might have an A but be in the bottom half of the class, or might have a B but be in the top ten percent of a class.

Author Tom Lindsay says we would need a “wait and see” if this approach curbs grade inflation. But he claims:

At the least, the larger culture would be alerted to those schools and majors that have maintained standards and those that have not.

The transcript described can’t inform “the larger culture” about universities and majors. All it does is provide information about the classes one student took. An employer, review committee, parent, or even the student still has no way of knowing how one major or one university stacks up to any other.

More seriously, the “larger culture” has deep, preconceived notions about “standards.” And people will tell their own narratives that fit their preconceived ideas.

Remember a couple of recent papers that showed that the graduates of “elite” universities locked up a disproportionate number of tenure-track academic positions? I saw a discussion of that paper on Facebook, and people immediately leaped to the hypothesis that the reason for this was that the graduates from those universities were better. People made arguments like:

Highly selective admission leads to better candidates.

Guess what schools don’t have to admit “warm bodies?” The elite schools get plenty of top notch applicants.

Higher profile or elite schools have wealthier alumni, and more resources, so that may lead to slightly stronger portfolios, giving grads an advantage.

Top-tier schools have more resources for research support.

People jumped to a “fair world” argument even though the authors of one paper (Clauset and colleagues) explicitly wrote that this hypothesis was highly unlikely:

Under a meritocracy, the observed placement rates would imply that faculty with doctorates from the top 10 units are inherently two to six times more productive than faculty with doctorates from the third 10 units. The magnitude of these differences makes a pure meritocracy seem implausible, suggesting the influence of nonmeritocratic factors like social status.

People will certainly start applying the same sorts of “just so” stories to explain differences in grades across institutions. They will say, “Well, of course students from Elite University get lots of As, because that one only takes the smartest! That’s not grade inflation, that’s just proof they are the best, and provide the best training to students!”

On the other hand, if a student gets low grades from an Elite University, people will say, “Well, of course Elite University has the most rigorous academic standards! A C from Elite University is equivalent to an A from Run-of-the-Mill University!”

So showing people the averages on transcripts seems unlikely to inform the “larger culture” about grade inflation in any meaningful way. And students at less prestigious institutions will continue to be shortchanged.

(Aside: For a long time, I didn’t understand why university administrators cared so much so much about university rankings and spent huge amounts of effort gaming the system to get their universities to be seen as “top tier.” The longer I stay in academia, the more I understand it. A lot rides on public perception of academic prestige and rigor, far more than actual rigor. It’s disappointing, but that’s the reality of the situation.)

The only way that you can demonstrate rigor across majors and institutions is by taking a bunch of students, and giving them all the same, standardized assessments. Sound familiar? It’s an approach that is rampant in K-12. It’s also an approach that has been widely criticized for not taking into account external influences like poverty and other socioeconomic factors. Do you expect a university that enrolls lots of first generation minority students from an economically disadvantaged background to have the same outcomes as a university that mostly enrolls majority students raised by professional parents?

What do “standards” and “rigor” mean to those two populations? I’m not sure they will mean the same thing, or that they should.

Linday also claims:

(T)he bill avoids seeking to micromanage the state’s institutions of higher education. It does not require them to do anything differently(.)

That’s got to be a little simplistic. While institutions have all that data, computing it, and then putting it on transcripts is probably a trivial thing, because transcripts are still stuck in the ninetheeth century. You would have to add columns, explanations, change all the typesetting, and so on. That means every university in Texas would have to retool their transcripts from scratch.

Related posts

What grades should look like 
Their grades were too... high?
Remaking the transcript
Why grade inflation is good for the GRE 

External links

The Texas Legislature looks to lift college grading standards

Comments for second half of February 2015

The Molecular Ecologist has a some nifty survey results about how scientists pick which journal to publish in. Surprise! That intangible perfume of “prestige” and Impact Factor are two of the three biggest factors.

Bethany Brookshire introduces the lovely word parthenogenesis.

DrugMonkey asks readers in graduate programs about their entry requirements.

I make a cameo in an important post on scientists paying expenses out of pocket.

The Journal of Funding Agency

An argument in scientific publishing is, “Who pays?” For many journals run by traditional, for-profit publishers, usually the library pays. For many open access online journals, the author pays.

Scientists don’t want to pay out of pocket. This is a legitimate concern, because the article processing charges can be thousands of dollars (though not all are). Many have argued that funding agencies should ultimately be the ones who pay, because they are sponsoring the research, and they have a vested interest in seeing the research published as widely as possible.

Many agencies have taken up this cause, and have polices that require open access publication.

Still... this seems a long and needlessly complicated path for the money to take. Researchers have to write grants, budget for an unknown number of papers, which then have to go to the journal.

Why don’t funding agencies start their own open access journals?

The rule would be simple: If you have research supported by the funding agency, it’s free to publish open access in that agency’s journal.

If your research is supported by other agencies, you’d pay an article fee.

I wonder if funding agencies might actually save money by having their own publishing arms. They wouldn’t have to worry about the budgeting for the publication fees. It would simplify both the writing and review of grant proposals.

Most funding agencies already have the infrastructure to publish stuff. After all, they publish reports and calls for proposal and so on all the time. They have connections to peer reviewers, because they use them to review grant proposals.

Some government agencies have had their own journals for a long time. Canada’s NRC Research Press is one example. I don’t know those journals payment system, although I think most are using the “library pays” subscription model. It might have the potential to be “house publisher” for scientists with Canadian federal funding.

HHMI, The Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Institute got into the publishing end of things with eLife. But they are just “supporting” the journal, rather than it being in house. There may be advantages to this, mainly editorial independence.

Update, 23 March 2017: The Gates Foundation is taking up this idea. They are creating something called Gates Open Research. The news article is interesting because it variously called this a publishing “venture” and “platform” rather than a journal.

External links

Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture

Photo by Steven Depolo on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The academic hierarchy has more snakes than ladders

It’s kind of been a disheartening week for data on faculty career hiring. In less than a week, a paper by Clauset and colleagues showed that in computer science, business, history, school prestige is a very good predictor of faculty hiring.

(O)nly 9 to 14% of faculty are placed at institutions more prestigious than their doctorate(.)

A few days later, similar data came out for the study of English.

Of the graduates who get tenure-track jobs, most end up at universities ranked lower than the ones they attended. Virtually no one moves up.

It’s not quite the Matthew effect, but it’s close.

Of course, when the school prestige carries so much clout, it is not surprising that the perceived “top” schools have a lot of their graduates take the few faculty jobs out there.

25% of institutions producing 71 to 86% of all tenure-track faculty(.)

Of course, I am sure that some will argue that this is fair, and that the most prestigious schools have that prestige way because they are the best. Maybe they are, but I am not convinced that they are that much better. Neither are Clauset and colleagues:

Under a meritocracy, the observed placement rates would imply that faculty with doctorates from the top 10 units are inherently two to six times more productive than faculty with doctorates from the third 10 units. The magnitude of these differences makes a pure meritocracy seem implausible, suggesting the influence of nonmeritocratic factors like social status.

It’s disheartening on so many levels. It means that programs in lower ranked schools, and students in them, are engaged in busy work, and not making meaningful contributions to academia.

It suggests that there are probably similar prestige effects happening at the lower levels of education: so they way you get into a top doctoral program, you might have to get into a top undergraduate program, and so on. So higher education, instead of being a leveler, is reinforcing hierarchies.

Update, 29 May 2018: New preprint on this here. Hat tip to Needhi Bhalla and Gaetan Burgio.

Update, 21 September 2022: Yet more evidence of the dominance of a few universities in producing faculty – at least in the United States. It’s in this new paper in Nature by Wapman and colleagues. The accompanying commentary has a blunt headline summary: “Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities.”

External links

Where Do English Ph.D.’s Get Jobs? It Depends on Where They Studied.

Clauset A, Arbesman S, Larremore DB. 2015. Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks. Science Advances 1(1): e1400005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400005

Some figures on prestige bias in academia

Photo by Travis on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Analyzing the UTRGV Vaqueros logo, or: Who was that tanned man?

The UTRGV mascot was unveiled... at 4:00 pm on Friday afternoon. I do not think the timing of this release was accidental. After the uproar that followed the announcement of the “Vaqueros” name, I think someone hoped that late Friday afternoon would provide a “soft launch” for the logo.

Pros.

I like the look of the logo overall. The horse and rider look dynamic and distinctive. It reads well from a distance.

There is one thing I absolutely love about this logo. It's a little Easter egg that shows a very sharp, professional graphic designer did this. There is a map of Texas hidden in the negative space of the horse’s front and back legs. That is just a detail that delights.

Cons.

In the full colour version of the logo, the rider looks like he’s had a spray on tanning mishap. Sort of like Ross in the Friends episode, “The One with Ross’s Tan.”

Our female athletes got ignored. We have dozens of alternate logos, and there are no Vaqueras. Not even a team name in any of the zillion logo variants.

Our friends at Brownsville got short changed. Again. Most seriously, several of the logo variants have the outline of the state of Texas, and a single star in the Valley... pretty much right on Edinburg, where UTPA is. Either there should be a star for each campus, or no stars.

On a minor note, the UTRGV colours are supposed to be orange, green (UTPA’s heritage colour) and blue (UTB’s heritage colour). But in the full colour logo, the navy blue it so dark that it doesn’t read as blue.

Some people have said there are some similarities with the Texas Tech Mascot, the Red Raiders. Both have a man on horseback.

I personally don’t see this as a big problem. The colours, poses, letters... There is no way the two would ever be confused.

The lettering looks very similar to the type used for the current UTPA athletics workdmark, and to other institutions. Both have big chunky slab type, with a spikey bit emerging from the top left.

Overall, the logo is sharp, but it’s a shame that it doesn’t show awareness of the criticisms of the Vaqueros name, and the regional tensions that have been brewing because of it.

The Zen of Presentations, part 67: Lessons from Left Shark

The real winner of the 49th Super Bowl was not a football team.

It was the left shark.

Katy Perry performed at halftime flanked by two dancers in shark outfits. The right shark’s moves were crisp, timed, and coordinated with the music.

The left shark’s moves were... hell, let’s just say it, left shark forgot the routine they all rehearsed. He just kind of waggled around and hoped.

But who did the people remember? Nay, who did the people embrace? The precise, professional right shark? No! The people fell for left shark.

In less than a week, left shark has entered the pop culture hall of fame.

Left shark is commemorated in t-shirts.

Left shark’s dance is made into a flipbook.

And “Dance like nobody’s watching” has been replaced in the vocabulary.

Even I, who did not watch the Super Bowl at all, found myself saying earlier this week, “I’m left shark today.” Meaning, “I just can’t get it together, and I don’t really care.”

People loved left shark because they related to left shark. Left shark wasn’t perfect, but the dance was genuine, and it was endearing. People responded to its humanity fishanity. Left shark was a trooper, and not about to let a little uncertainty with the dance routine stop it. The show must go on.

Pixar artist Emma Coates wrote that one of their first rules storytelling is:

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

We admire left shark for trying more we admire right shark for its success.

The lesson from left shark for presenters is that your presentation doesn’t have to be letter perfect. It doesn’t have to be polished. If you are willing to laugh at yourself a little, being the imperfect, authentic you will take you a long way.

Sorry, Garr Reynolds. Sorry, Nancy Duarte. But...

Comments for second half of January 2015

Small Pond Science has a look at science crowdfunding, which was partly informed by the PLOS ONE paper I contributed to on the subject.

The PLOS ONE paper also makes an appearance in a substantive article on science crowdfunding that appeared in several Australian newspapers, including The Age:

When crowdfunding sites first appeared about 2009, many scientists pooh-poohed the notion of raising research money through them, theorising that only those projects with gimmicky mass-market appeal – which they called “panda science” – would attract attention.

But that idea has been debunked.

In the first major study on crowdfunding in the sciences, which was published in December in PLoS One, the study's authors found that the online audience was willing to fund a wide variety of projects, even those in areas such as statistics or little-known invertebrates - which typically aren’t considered sexy.

What seemed to factor more in the success of a project was whether a researcher was able to develop a sufficient fan base. Being able to connect with a large audience through outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube appeared to correlate with increased levels of funding.