Recognizing and Responding to Legitimate and Illegitimate Researchers

[neededalj]

On the heels of my two posts on neuroscience, I'm going to try one that's straight-up about research.

Over the course of SurveyFail, I have seen two different attitudes towards researchers that bother me. I am *not* singling anyone out individually over this; I do not think anyone in fandom deserves blame for any of the shit that went down.

Comments

[jonquil]

One of my favorite Feynman stories is that a colleague asked him to explain his current topic of research. He said, "At the level I'd teach a graduate student who wasn't one of mine?" The other professor agreed that would be exactly right. Feynman came back a day or two later and said "I can't do it, which means I don't understand it as well as I thought."

[jonquil]

Totally agreed with your last sentence.

By profession, I'm a technical writer, which makes me impatient on this topic, inappropriately so. I've known a lot of brilliant people -- much smarter than me -- who needed help taking the clear crystalline structures in their heads and getting them into a form other people could understand.

[melannen]

Thank you for this post; I saw your first problematic attitude among the early complaints, and was disappointed, but then I was myself trapped by your second one and needed the reminder. (They're qualified phds doing research with a respected university! Surely we can give them benefit of the doubt! ...but then it turned out that they were lying about both the "qualified" and the "affiliated with BU" parts, and I realized I let myself be taken in

[neededalj]

You're right; I don't have very much experience with my independents but they aren't bad by default. I have added an ETA on the post directing people to read through the comments for points people are raising about various fields.

[neededalj]

typo correction: *with independents. I do not have independents, although that sounds vaguely fun.

[jonquil]

Possibly they bring you rum punch while you lie on your divan next to the fMRI?

[cnoocy]

Here from linkspam, just wanted to point out that Google Scholar is more comprehensive in some fields than others.

[neededalj]

Duly noted; I should have remembered that myself. I used it all the time for cognitive neuroscience references because most of that literature is so recent that google scholar can almost always turn up what you're looking for, but that changes as you move out towards the social sciences and the humanities. I have added an ETA on the original post noting that there are many useful additional points in the comments.

[neededalj]

You mean you write...with things...that aren't a keyboard? You go looking for things that are only written on...paper?

Heh. I once took a class for which I needed to go locate some older linguistics articles that weren't online (this in and of itself was an oddity) and then imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the linguistic literature was split between TWO libraries (some in the humanities/social science library and some in the straight-up science library) because linguistics has/had split personality disorder when it comes to it's designation. I actually had to *walk* (twice!) to get my references! ;)

[neededalj]

Thanks for the input; I have virtually no experience in the humanities, so additional commentary is definitely appreciated! I have added an ETA directing people to look through the comments for more useful info.

[slashpine]

Hey, thank you for this post! This is liek, a huge chunk of what I was talking about with fandom deserving an FAQ somewhere of "what research is/can be/should be" and "things to ask researchers when they come knocking at the door."

And since I am nowhere able to contribute substantially to such a post at this time, thanks for hosting the discussion!

If it seems helpful, whenever it is I get done with the stuff that's gonna be eating me alive the rest of this month, I will volunteer to help roll it up/organize it/fill in some more details. Or not, as you prefer!

[neededalj]

Thanks! I may indeed attempt a more substantive version at some point in the future...I definitely wrote it from a combined perspective of my own experience and the blazing red flags in OgiSai's conduct and the following discussion has reminded me of how very different things can be elsewhere (have I mentioned that I am Not A Humanities Person? *g*)

But that's what fandom is for! Collectively, fandom knows all! Woe betide any 'researchers' who do not realize this ahead of time...