Seven of the greatest academic works of satire of all time

1) What do you do when a predatory journal keeps spam emailing you to get you to make a submission?

Submit this paper to their journal: 

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2) To succeed in academia, you need lots of publications. But the order of authors’ names on a paper impacts who gets the credit.

Thankfully, there’s a technological solution to make every author the first author:

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3) As much an insightful look at academic practice as it is a work of satire, this paper provides groundbreaking evidence that “people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to When I’m Sixty-Four”:

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4) A taste of an alternate reality where academic papers are written to be consumed by normal humans and are fun to read:

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5) Some researchers put a subject in an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine and showed it a series of photos of people in social situations. They found statistically significant evidence of brain activity in some parts of the brain during photo-viewing compared to rest. The only problem was that the “subject” in the machine was a dead Atlantic salmon. A reminder of the importance of being mindful when you’re testing many hypotheses at once.

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6) Fed up with what he perceived as B.S. in academia, physicist Alan Sokal purposely wrote a piece of technical-sounding nonsense. He managed to get it published in “Social Text,” a journal of cultural studies:

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7) A massive expansion of Sokal’s hoax, the creators of the Grievance Studies Affair (a.k.a., “Sokal Squared”) wrote 20 nonsense papers and submitted them to journals related to cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies. Of those submitted, seven were accepted for publication.

Note that means that 13 were not accepted, so that’s at least a somewhat positive sign for academia. On the other hand, if the 7 that were accepted truly were nonsense, that suggests a lack of sufficient quality control for some of these journals when a paper uses the right sounding buzz words or style of argument.

One of those papers from the hoax that was accepted was “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism”.

The paper was supposedly based on part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf (by Adolf Hitler). According to the hoaxers:

“[We] wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The answer to that question also turns out to be ‘yes,’ given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it… Purpose: To see if we could find ‘theory’ to make anything grievance-related (in this case, part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf with fashionable buzzwords switched in) acceptable to journals if we mixed and matched fashionable arguments.”

On the other hand, as Michael Keenan pointed out to me after I published the initial version of this post, their paper doesn’t much resemble the Mein Kampf chapter at all. See Michael’s Tumblr post, which outlines ways in which this hoax may have been misrepresented by some people.

The editor of Affilia wrote regarding this paper:

“The reviewer(s) have been very favorable, although there are a few minor outstanding issues to address. Therefore, I invite you to respond to the editorial and reviewer(s)’ comments included at the bottom of this letter and revise your manuscript quickly so that we can move toward publication.” – Co-Editor in Chief, Affilia, second review

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This list was first written on May 26, 2023, and first appeared on this site on June 11, 2023.