Commentary & Humour
This section is not research. Everything here is commentary, satire or amusement. It is not peer reviewed, it is not indexed as scholarly literature, and it must never be cited as evidence or as a scientific claim.
If you need research, go to the research sections. If you want to laugh about how research actually gets done, stay here.
Science is a serious business conducted by people who spend four years on a result that turns out to be an off-by-one error, who write grant proposals about proposals, and who have all watched a reviewer ask for a citation to the reviewer's own paper. Pretending otherwise does not make us more rigorous. It only makes us duller.
There is a long tradition here. The Journal of Irreproducible Results has published scientific satire since 1955. Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes have spent decades honouring research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”. The BMJ's Christmas issue is among its most cited issues each year.
What we want
- Satire of the process — peer review, impact factors, citation cartels, the fourth revision of a figure legend.
- Absurd but accurate observations — a p-value that describes the author's mood; the exact number of coffees in a proof.
- Parody papers in flawless journal style about something trivial, unmistakably marked as parody.
- Short comics and one-panel jokes about research life.
- “Overheard in the lab” — sentences that made no sense outside the room.
What we will not run
- Anything that could be mistaken for a real result. Parody must be unmistakable, in the title and in the PDF.
- Mockery of named individuals, or of anyone's competence, appearance or identity.
- Jokes that punch down — at students, early-career researchers, or people working with fewer resources than you.
- Anything that promotes an unfounded claim under cover of humour. “It was a joke” is not a defence for spreading misinformation.
- Content that is discriminatory, sexual or harassing.
The rule, in one line
Laugh at the institution, never at the person; and never let a joke be mistaken for a finding.
How to submit
Email editor@aoops.org
with the subject AOOPS humour. Include the piece, your name (or a
pseudonym) and one sentence describing what it is.
No fee, obviously. There is no fee for anything here.
Published in this section
Nothing yet — this section opens with the first issue. If you have something that makes a researcher laugh and then wince, send it.