36 points
*

scholars R1 uni PR team: “become a scholar! it’ll give you more opportunities in the future!”

scholars: “there are too many scholars!”

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31 points

No scholar would ever tell anyone else to become a scholar. More like “Run! Run while you can! Get away from this cursed existence!”

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9 points

you’re right. fixed

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114 points
*

For what it is worth. I found out last week I was excluded as a credited inventor on a patent that I worked for 2.5 years on. Industry does this stuff too…

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35 points

Umm, that sounds very illegal?

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49 points

It sounds that way because it is.

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58 points

I know it may not be worth pursuing, but that specifically can invalidate a patent.

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52 points

Correct. I have already reached out to my former company and I have a stack of paperwork coming to “correct the oversight” it helps that the company didn’t know that the patent application had been filed by the client.

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106 points

This is why workers forced movies and shows to put everyone in the closing credits.

Y’all need to unionize.

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From what I can tell, et al. is not about socio-political power*. It’s just a necessity for ease and efficiency. In-text citations need to be short to limit wasted space. Otherwise, we’d have lots of text dedicated to unnecessary names. An in-text citation that reads (Perez et al., 2023) is much more efficient than (Perez, Washington, Smith, Iwukuni, Johnson, Patel, Boofy, Yamirez, Tate, Hendrix, Apple, Man, & Gargamel, 2023).

Using 7th ed. APA, the citation entries in the bibliography/references include upto the first 20 authors, so contributors are rarely omitted.

  • Perhaps being the first author is in many situations, but APA format can’t really address that.
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22 points

The idea being that when you go to view the citation, you see the details that were previously et al.

Whereas on movie credits, that’s your one chance to be seen credited on the work, outside of IMDB maybe.

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21 points

It’s not like these are written on literal paper. It’s the 21st century, There’s no reason to save space in digital documents when you can just format them differently.

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15 points

Yeah I imagine they could have some sort of click to expand functionality

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6 points
*

Screens still have real estate that you need to fit onto. You can do “click to expand” but frankly, who would look at that. You could have the full list in the bibliography section, but frankly, who reads all that: The stuff I look at is the citation abbreviation ([Miller et al 2003]), then the doi or journal/paper title to copy and paste. Everything in between gets ignored, if I read names then it’s on paper titles, not citations. I’ve also seen a tongue-in-cheek proposal to overlay all author names on top of another in citations, sadly can’t find the paper.

Typography isn’t the place where you want to attack this issue, at most you can get some token feel-good result that will be ineffective because it ignores the psychology of people looking up papers. Which is to say: You’ll do net damage to your cause because you’re spending goodwill capital on feel-good BS. If you want to have a systemic impact then attack the issue from the other end, such as cracking down on people which insert themselves as first author of every paper coming out of their department and stuff. Rule of thumb: If someone can’t do a thesis style oral defence of a paper, their name has no business being anywhere even close to the front. I don’t care when the administrative boss is listed at the end, though they should have the decency to put themselves after any assistant who did actual scientific work, even if it’s just pipette wrangling.

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1 point

And at the same time, you can still get credit for the paper in your resumee etc.

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8 points

“The movie star…and the rest!”

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-6 points

One tiny difference between the pain Israeli commercial pilots feel once they graduate

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8 points

What the fuck are you talking about?

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10 points

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