“The meme hits the right nerve,” says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as “an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography-self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story.” We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes.
A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. Within a couple of days, the sociologist Kieran Healy had created a version of the grid for his field its entries included “This seems very weird and bad but it’s perfectly rational when you’re poor,” and “I take a SOCIOLOGICAL approach, unlike SOME people.” Epidemiologists got on board too-“We don’t really have a clue what we’re doing: but here are some models!” Statisticians, perhaps unsurprisingly, also geeked out: “A new robust variance estimator that nobody needs.” (I don’t get it either.) You couldn’t keep the biologists away from the fun (“New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete”), and-in their usual fashion-the science journalists soon followed (“Readers love animals”). The concept was intuitive-and infinitely remixable. The cartoon’s childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. “My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it,” declares another. “The immune system is at it again,” one paper’s title reads. It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 “Types of Scientific Paper,” presented in a grid. The cartoon is, like most XKCD comics, a simple back-and-white line drawing with a nerdy punch line. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices. So when Randall Munroe, the creator of the long-running webcomic XKCD, laid out this problem in a perfect cartoon last week, it captured the attention of scientists-and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Scientists joke (and complain) that this relentless pressure to pad their résumés often leads to flawed or unoriginal publications. Universities judge their research faculty not so much by the quality of their discoveries as by the number of papers they’ve placed in scholarly journals, and how prestigious those journals happen to be. But career scientists must continually create this kind of magic. As a tired, single medical student, I used to feel lucky when I managed two good dates in a row. A real scientific advance, like a successful date, needs both preparation and serendipity.
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