I’d like to thank…
Some of you may be familiar with the work of William Gosset, though not his name. Gosset was working for the Guiness Brewery about 100 years ago when he came up with the t-distribution. However, he could not publish under his own name, so instead he used the name “A Student.” Unfortunately for Gosset, the name stuck, and we now know that result as Student’s t-distribution.
Ok, great. But are you familiar with the story of M. A. Poubelle? A Google Scholar search shows that Marie-Antoinette Poubelle is the first-listed author of a number of papers, with an especially prolific period in the mid 1980s. However, Mme. Poubelle does not exist.
It’s a story that seems to have been floating around grad student circles while remaining surprisingly absent from the web: the other authors of those papers were acknowledging the contribution of… their trash can. Yes, “ma poubelle” is French for “my trash can.”
I propose a challenge to you publish-or-perish types out there: do something equally clever in a paper that you write. Bonus points if it gets people to read your paper all the way through. Super mega bonus points if it gets people to at least glance at your dissertation!
Thanks for such a humorous look at the sometimes far-too-serious world of scholarly publishing. Having been in the world of higher education for twenty years, I’ve seen far too many people get caught up in the “publish or perish” mindset, often to the detriment of their personal lives.
At many institutions, one’s worth (at least one’s value to the institution) is determined by the number of one’s publications. So it’s not surprising that many people take publishing and getting credit for those publications really seriously. In fact, that’s one of the themes of my novel, Publish or Perish (http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/PublishOrPerish.html). It’s refreshing to think that we can also have a sense of humor about what we do.
That was 8 hours of my life how did you do it so quickly!
I made a search today about my esteemed colleague Marie-Antoinette Poubelle, who inspired much of my work and that of my colleague R.R. Bitmead on Riccati equations, and I was so pleased to discover this web page. Yes, we have had great fun in creating her, and made sure that her papers, co-authored with us, were full of anecdotes, innuendos and other jokes, even though her results are of course deep and useful. As a matter of fact, she has had several followers, who have published under the name “trash can” translated into different languages, and who have pretended to be her de-facto husband, lover, companion, and the like. Her affiliation in her first published paper, by the way, is DGST, which stands for the French secret service.