You might remember the couple of days a few years ago in which the overlyhonestmethods hashtag went viral on Twitter: for those of you who don’t, it was a little joke in which academics – mainly, I think, natural scientists – made not-entirely-serious “confessions” about how they do their work and the corners they might sometimes be tempted to cut. (Everyone knows that those of us in the humanities don’t really have methods, natch.) Then someone wrote a blog post, since taken down, on plos blogs that complained that the hashtag was dangerous because of the damage that it might do to science in the public mind. Similar concerns were aired elsewhere; this is an example, though much less po-faced than the former. And it was the former that sprang to mind when I read Jessica Hamzelou’s editorial piece in last week’s New Scientist.
Her target is the seasonal edition of the BMJ and its traditionally lighter tone. Part of her complaint is that some of the jokes aren’t… well, aren’t all that funny. She notes the paper about man-flu, which got a fair amount of media traction, as an example, asserting that “[i]f this is meant to be a joke, it’s not a very good one”. Now: maybe papers like this are basically fluff; and maybe that even as jeux d’esprit, they sometimes don’t hit all the high comic notes. But so it goes: I don’t think that there’s all that much to worry about here, and I’m not going to get into a discussion about humour, beyond pointing out that there’s a difference between papers that are meant to be taken lightly and those that are meant to be funny, and that I suspect the BMJ selections tend towards the former category. But there’s another side to her complaint:
[N]ot everyone is in on the joke – and in an era of fake news, maybe it is time for a rethink. The BMJ tells journalists reporting its papers, including these daft ones, to “please remember to credit the BMJ – this assures your audience it is from a reputable source”. And indeed, this silly science often receives straight-faced coverage from influential media outlets. What’s more, once it is archived in scientific databases, these papers get cited like any other. They are even used as the basis for future studies. After all, why wouldn’t you take the BMJ seriously? […]Well: yeah, but no. One of the points I keep making to my students is that they shouldn’t treat rhetorical questions as if they are, or are capable of doing the work of, arguments. After all, there’s a danger someone might answer them, and not in the way they expected. And with that in mind…
And how might it be read in the future? Months or years down the line, devoid of the context of Christmas, who is to say this paper won’t be cited seriously? Could it influence the study of flu?
