Category: 1.1 Research (General)

  • Only 15% plagiarism! How is this not funny (academic humor)

    Only 15% plagiarism! How is this not funny (academic humor)

    Just keep that plagiarism to a reasonable level. (OK, I may not be fair, and it may be an English language issue as reuse of materials is generally possible across multiple publications. Still…)

  • GenAI in urgent need of a DEI initiative

    GenAI in urgent need of a DEI initiative

    Apparently, we are all Linus Torvalds. Or more precisely, if your public profile is associated with open source, ChatGPT might think you should look like them. The following four prompts were entered in sequence (but output was cut short). I only prompted 2-4 after I thought this person from the first output looks vaguely familiar…

  • Charging money for an ethics review?

    Charging money for an ethics review?

    Together with a psychologist, I’m currently performing a comparatively simple interview study about the effectiveness of a software engineering method. Proper procedure is paramount in psychology, so we submitted an ethics review request to my employer’s institutional (ethics) review board. I didn’t think we’d need the ethics approval, and lo and behold the ethics board…

  • Some associated editors should grow a spine

    Some associated editors should grow a spine

    There, it happened again. An associate editor of a prestigious software engineering journal rejected our paper, because they wouldn’t overrule a single bogus review. In the current case, all reviewers were on plain accept, with one holdout, reviewer 2, who recommended a plain reject. (The paper was the first revised version of the original submission.)…

  • Editorial quality at Elsevier

    Editorial quality at Elsevier

    If you ever wondered about editorial quality at Elsevier, look no further. Original here and in case it gets fixed, on the Web Archive here, and finally the PDF.

  • How to extend the authorship list of a research article

    How to extend the authorship list of a research article

    Let’s assume you are a scientist, collaborating with another scientist on some research project that will lead to exactly one article (to keep things simple). How should you go about involving further scientists, perhaps to perform even stronger research? The answer is simple, if you work from first principles. Here there are the two key…