If you need a little laugh today, i spotted this and thought you'd all like this...
Yesterday, a neuroscience postdoc by the name of Leigh started a hashtag on twitter called #overlyhonestmethods. Then came the confessions.
Have you ever conducted scientific research? Are you familiar with the less-than-glamorous (and sometimes surprisingly slipshod) ways of the world's overworked, underpaid, and severely caffeinated scientists? Then #overlyhonestmethods is probably the funniest thing you'll read today.
so, actual tweets from the strict and always by the book, scientific community :-X
Miriam Goldstein
"We sampled opportunistically"=leaned over the side of the ship with a dipnet, pausing to curse my short arms & barf.
dr leigh
we did experiment 2 because we didn't know what the fuck to make of experiment 1
Atif Kukaswadia
@MrEpid
We don't know how the results were obtained. The postdoc who did all the work has since left to start a bakery.
banmans
@banmans
Oh, you want an actual method you can follow? Pffft. Check the cover son, you're reading Nature.
Karen James
@kejames
Taq was incubated o/n at 20ºC because there were donuts in the break room & I forgot to put it back in the freezer.
Drug Monkey
@drugmonkeyblog
Two days to isolate the protein, five weeks to generate the hilarious double-entendre name for the gene.
Kane_WMC_Lab
@Kane_WMC_Lab
All experimenters -- and authors -- were blind to the study's hypotheses.
Rebecca Weinberg
@sciliz
rat sacrifices were performed to Tom Petty, because that's how we roll in this lab
Tal Yarkoni
@talyarkoni
we discovered the anxiogenic properties of our new drug accidentally, while trying to fuck with labmate Steve's coffee
George Burgess
@Ixcila
@MadukaOgba This experiment only works if you use the TBAF that's been sitting in our cabinet for eight years
NatC
@SciTriGrrl
This project was started to prove someone wrong. They were not. Dammit
Nancy Parmalee
@nparmalee
@SciTriGrrl @Geeka "We did it this way out of adherence to folklore and superstition."
Doctor_Strange
@StrangeSource
We repeated the experiment 5 times but never saw results this good before or since so we made a figure.
Neuroskeptic
@Neuro_Skeptic
The first author didn't write this Methods section and doesn't understand half of it
Proflikesubstance
@ProfLikeSubst
Though it all sounds tight now, we had no sweet fucking clue what we were doing when this started
Alex Wild
@Myrmecos
Our sampling locations happen to match tropical resort towns because field work doesn't have to be mud and agony.
Emma
@atomselectrons
This dye was selected because the bottle was within reach
Bora Zivkovic
@BoraZ
We wanted to see what would happen if we did X, just for fun. Great explosion! We came up with the hypothesis later.
Sylvain Deville
@devillesylvain
we didn't read half of the papers we cite because they are behind a paywall