Tez
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2001
- Messages
- 1,104
A few anecdotes about the not so serious side of scientific publishing:
A chinese friend of mine got sent his own paper to referee! (Guess the American Physical Society struggles with chinese names too). I begged and pleaded, whined and sulked, but I simply could not get him to send them the reply I coined:
Dear Dr. XXXX, Unfortunately I cannot, in good conscience, review this paper - for I am sleeping with the wife of one of the authors...
(He is married of course).
One of my papers "Quantum communication protocols using the vacuum" was so speculative that neither I nor my collaborator wanted to be the first author. So we put it on the preprint archive http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0302091 with a fictitous first author. Amazingly, the paper was accepted for publication, and we decided we'd better dispose of the non-existant "Xiatra Anderson". But then we hit an unrelated snag - the figure we had was upside down, and no amount of playing around with outdated latex style files would get the damn thing the right way up. How did we solve the problem? The figure caption in the final publsihed version reads "An upside-down spacetime diagram showing..."
A grad student friend was finishing up his thesis after many years of a severely strained relationship with his official supervisor. One night at the pub he was pondering out loud how to write the acknowledgements to his thesis. Since I knew he had a crappy father whom he hated, I facetiously suggested " My considered thanks to Prof. XXXX, who has been like my own father to me.". And in the end thats approximately what he put in!
Here is a paper I wrote http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0206066 solely for the bastardization of my co-authors name (and for the story in the intro too, which allowed me a dig or two at other colleagues...)
I've published a couple of papers making fun of co-authors' middle names, heres one: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0503151
While writing an anonymous referee report on a paper, I realized there was no way the authors could fail to realize it was me. So I prefaced the report with a sentence: "If I was as bereft of original thought, and devoid of ability, as Terry Rudolph, a person the authors of this paper waste several citations on, then this is how I would respond to the claims made in this paper:"
A chinese friend of mine got sent his own paper to referee! (Guess the American Physical Society struggles with chinese names too). I begged and pleaded, whined and sulked, but I simply could not get him to send them the reply I coined:
Dear Dr. XXXX, Unfortunately I cannot, in good conscience, review this paper - for I am sleeping with the wife of one of the authors...
(He is married of course).
One of my papers "Quantum communication protocols using the vacuum" was so speculative that neither I nor my collaborator wanted to be the first author. So we put it on the preprint archive http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0302091 with a fictitous first author. Amazingly, the paper was accepted for publication, and we decided we'd better dispose of the non-existant "Xiatra Anderson". But then we hit an unrelated snag - the figure we had was upside down, and no amount of playing around with outdated latex style files would get the damn thing the right way up. How did we solve the problem? The figure caption in the final publsihed version reads "An upside-down spacetime diagram showing..."
A grad student friend was finishing up his thesis after many years of a severely strained relationship with his official supervisor. One night at the pub he was pondering out loud how to write the acknowledgements to his thesis. Since I knew he had a crappy father whom he hated, I facetiously suggested " My considered thanks to Prof. XXXX, who has been like my own father to me.". And in the end thats approximately what he put in!
Here is a paper I wrote http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0206066 solely for the bastardization of my co-authors name (and for the story in the intro too, which allowed me a dig or two at other colleagues...)
I've published a couple of papers making fun of co-authors' middle names, heres one: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0503151
While writing an anonymous referee report on a paper, I realized there was no way the authors could fail to realize it was me. So I prefaced the report with a sentence: "If I was as bereft of original thought, and devoid of ability, as Terry Rudolph, a person the authors of this paper waste several citations on, then this is how I would respond to the claims made in this paper:"
