Tag: academia

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Southern perspectives and our obsession with countries

Recent years have rightly seen efforts to bring together perspectives from the Global North and Global South, but our obsession with countries seems to distract us from the real objective. Often, engagement with the Global South has become a tick-box exercise: do we have a collaboration with someone in a country in the Global South? We proudly show our collaborations on world maps, as it that one person in that one country represented “the” alternative perspective.

What we really should be seeking is more difficult to measure, namely different perspectives. Sure, working with people who have grown up and educated in different places can be enlightening, but for the tick-box exercise, the same person having moved to a university in the Global North suddenly becomes less interesting. If we’re happy with a single representative of the Global South in an international research project, we effectively treat the Global South as a homogeneous Other, denying the diversity in perspectives and approaches that we aspire.

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Academic spam: the we-need-you edition

Fresh from the inbox:

Hope you are doing well!

I am [name], managing editor of [a journal I have never heard of and is totally unrelated to what research I do].

Normal stuff, as far as academic spam is concerned…

Well, we are in deadly need of one article to release on 5th of April 2024. Is it possible to support us with your 2-page Opinion or Mini review or Case Reports for this issue?

Nice one, time pressure. Yes, I’m definitely going to work over Easter to help out a commercial entity!⸮ I find this intriguing because I don’t recall the asking-for-a-favour ploy in academic spam. They are asking for help, and sure, who could not write 2 pages to help out?

Obviously, it’s the usual ‘anything’ is good enough, and in this case, 2 pages are really not that long — even at academic typing speed ;-)

However, there’s a bigger point, which should make anyone who hasn’t clicked the “spam” button yet run for cover: A journal lives by its ability to reach audiences, which it does through reputation. A journal with a high reputation is one that is overrun, where they reject many submissions. By contrast, a journal where they can’t even fill the opinion pages probably isn’t a journal with much of a readership.

Acknowledge this mail to submit your manuscript.

Nice and easy. We’ll most likely get told of the handling fee then, or whatever it is called in this case.

The journal claims an impact factor (though it doesn’t appear in the Clarivate’s list), and it’s also funny that you can sign up to become an editor!⸮ Enough time wasted…

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Narrative CV

So the ERC is moving to narrative CV to evaluate candidates. Am I the only one confused by this trend towards narrative CV?

Yes, I understand that there are very different careers and that we often get assessed in a way that only counts some parts of the quality, performance, and impact of research. I guess what I’m confused about is that we’re now changing the way information is presented (the CV) when there is probably more of an issue with how we are evaluating. Also, for all the talk of “publish or perish” I really don’t think that this is the only game in town (even the dominant one?).

In the case of the ERC, we now get 4 pages to outline career paths, research achievements, and examples of peer recognition. As this is a continuous text, there’s plenty of space to describe career breaks or explain why something is particularly noteworthy. I guess there’s little to complain about here, other than it takes more time to read continuous text and that it becomes more difficult to compare candidates.

However, a narrative CV as a continuous text means that we’re changing the selection criteria to some extent in that we are now rewarding eloquence. Indeed, as it says, “narrative CVs could inadvertently disadvantage individuals from cultures where self-promotion or certain forms of storytelling are not the norm”, or perhaps anyone who is not a native speaker?

Will we now start mentioning teaching load, (non-) access to research assistants, part-time or second jobs, a boss who insists on doing research in a certain way, etc.? There’s space for this in a narrative CV, but can we suddenly judge this fairly, and what do we do with information that isn’t there (thus not comparable)? Perhaps narrative CV are simply more honest in that they highlight how we cannot really compare, but then how do we ensure a fair selection?

I don’t understand how they can claim that a narrative CV “also takes the emphasis off the prestige of the institutions a researcher has worked in.” My guess would have been the opposite, that is more focus on the “reputation” of universities and publication outlets, because when there is too much information and difficult information (what does “excellence” really mean?), we humans cling to cognitive shortcuts — yes, the situations where stereotypes creep in, where we choose others who we perceive as similar to ourselves.

Funnily enough, I think there’s a bigger change, namely that ERC will no longer score candidates: Only the projects will be scored. This we could have done without narrative CV.

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Academic Spam: The book chapter edition

I love academic spam: it lightens the day! Here’s the book chapter edition, fresh from the inbox…

Topic: “[title of something I wrote 10 years ago]” Selected as a Potential Book Chapter

This is nice, it’s not the usual submit anything, but they have selected my work⸮ Silly enough to send me two e-mails within 10 minutes so that I’ll immediately see that this is not genuine.

Dear Dr. Didier Ruedin,

Congratulations, you’re scraping public information correctly!⸮ Seriously, this puts you in the upper half of spammer, an elite so to speak ;-)

We are glad that you are reading this email. We hereby heartily congratulate you on the publication of your following paper. We appreciate your hard work and sincerity behind the publication of this excellent paper.

Thanks, but why would a potential book editor appreciate my hard work? You’re selling books, supposedly, so maybe you care about the product, but the work behind the publication? The funny thing is that in this case, we’re looking at 4 pages of text including title and references, some cross-tables — but of course, the careful selection by the editor automatic scraping couldn’t see that.

in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Yes, that’s a highly specific title, I’m sure it’s going to be read by many people ⸮

Then they add two paragraphs on the importance of publishing for academic careers and how they are publishing a book a day, and have a high score on Trustpilot (!). A book chapter or a book by a spammer will not enhance anyone’s career, it’ll make them a little richer. If the authors are lucky, nobody will notice, if they are unlucky, they will ruin their career with this…

We are overwhelmed with pleasure for this tremendous response from researchers like you.

Great, though I haven’t seen that many blog posts about this “service”. I’m not exactly overwhelmed, but amused for a moment (although I could think of other amusements if pressed, so please don’t take this as an encouragement!).

Book: Recent Research Advances in Arts and Social Studies (Series)

Hang on, this is a different title… I’m getting confused!

We’re happy to inform you that your paper has been selected to be included as one of the potential book chapters of the above book. You’re also welcome to publish your other research papers, which have been published in other journals. If you have any fresh manuscripts, you can submit them for review and inclusion as book chapters. 

Nice, the usual spammy-thing: just send us anything, it’ll be fine! They even offer a discount and promise professional editing, fast turnaround, DOI, open access, whatever.

They even include a link to their price list; compared to other spammers, this one is actually cheap, my 4 pages would be less than $150, full-length chapters come in at under $200!

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Formatting a manuscript for a desk reject?

I didn’t realize that there are still journals out there who insist on formatting a manuscript using their template and check this to the letter before the editor even glances at the submission. It’s common enough that the journals ask us to format the manuscript (as much as possible), but fortunately journals are moving towards more leniency during the initial round of review, or explicitly accept “any reasonable style” originally. In this case, I wasted maybe two hours of mine and the poor assistant’s time (who had to check the submission to the letter), for the editor to find out that they consider the submission out of scope…. at least we can move on quickly.