It would be an understatement to say I am frequently frustrated at the quality of scientific articles in high impact journals. Take the example of the cover story for the December 22nd 2005 edition of Nature: “Dancing’s role in sexual selection.” Why is this leading edge research? This is the kind of thing a group of poor-dancing MIT students try to answer on your average Friday night.
Another article is the recent June 30th 2006 edition of Science, where researchers tried to find a correlation between income and happiness. Newsflash: there is none. Mind you, the researchers didn’t ask anyone living below the poverty line how their day is going.
It was articles like these, and an inspiring conversation with colleagues, that has evoked me to create the Journal of Experimental Cock and Bull: An international bimonthly journal of pseudoscience. After creating the cover, I realized the theme behind it was eerily similar to The Onion. Soon there were visions of a successful spin-off company from my MSc degree flying through my head. About five minutes later, I realized my writing skills lack the wit and effectiveness of Onion editors (part of the reason I started this blog). Although, I am currently accepting abstracts for the second issue.
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