(Avogadro take my number t-shirt on sale at the NeatoShop)
Aside from ordinary compensation issues, such as paying rent and eating occasionally, scholars prioritize getting published and getting their published works cited by other scholars. Therefore any means to increase citation rates should be considered.
Scholars Stephen B. Heard, Chloe A. Cull, and Easton R. White report in bioRxiv the results of their recent study in the correlation between the humorous nature of titles among ecology and evolutionary biology papers and the citation rate of those articles.
The authors conclude that, at first glance, having a humorous title tends to correlate with lower citation rates. But this is only because scholars tend to give less important papers humorous titles. When the importance of an article is corrected statistically, it would appear that humorous titles correlate with higher citation rates.
So try cracking some jokes and maybe you’ll get a full-time appointment.
-via Marginal Revolution