I think a lot of academic article titles are pretty bad. What do I mean by bad? The title doesn’t really tell you what the paper is actually is about. It could be buried in jargon, or overselling an idea, or focuses on details that most of the intended audience won’t care about.
Does the title of a paper affect how it gets read and cited? Probably. In what way? That’s not so simple, based on my short browse of some scientometric findings. Continue reading
We typically need manipulative experiments to truly know how a biological system works.
Nevertheless, on most days, I feel that the subculture of ecology suffers from a fetish for manipulative experiments. In some cases, people design experiments that don’t entirely make sense because they know that the reviewers and the community will value that experiment more than observational research. Even if the experiment isn’t really that informative. Continue reading