11/16/09 PHD comic: 'Buzzwords'

Greg Bernhardt

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham

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Janus

jlcarneiro

Hi! PhD cartoons are very good!

Are the stats from this particular cartoon real? How do I get other graphs/comparisons?

Monique

I find it funny that journals are limiting the use of certain words. For instance, in the submission requirements it will say to avoid the use of the word "novel". They'll say that if the work wasn't novel, it wouldn't even be considered for publication

Moonbear

That makes sense. Makes you wonder about the people who would actually use "novel" as a keyword.

My former dept. chair had a great graph that he started some of his seminars with. It had two lines, showing for each of several years the number of review articles and original research articles on the topic we were researching. For a long time, the review articles were outpacing the original research articles by a huge margin. Only within the past year has the trend finally changed and there are now more original research articles than review articles. We both noticed it because it was something that would drive you bonkers to go looking for current literature and find another review article reviewing the same set of original papers.