Is research sexy?

By sexy I mean is it exciting, fulfilling, and just really hot? Hmmm, not sure. Many years ago when I was completing a PhD I went to a conference in Switzerland. It is one of my favourite countries: mountains, lakes, snow and trains. At the conference there was another PhD student who presented a paper. After, one of the keynote presenters asked him a question. "Are you excited by your your research"? The student said "yes, why?" "Well, why don't you show it in your voice", the keynote said, "you seem bored."

It amazes me sometimes what boring topics some people choose to research when they could study something leading edge.

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Switching off from research

One of the problems related to being involved in research is switching off from it. Because research is so open ended you can spend all your time thinking about it, looking for ways to get funding, thinking about how you can improve a paper. You can easily become a bore!

Yes, there is life outside of research, so I am told. How do up manage the life/research balance? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sex, statistics and presentations

I was gathering some articles for a research project the other day and came across an article in a highly ranked journal about women and sex tourism. It seems that some women, like some men have done for years, go on holiday primarilly for sex. They go to places such as the Carribean and Kenya where men, often young men, are poor and will do anything to earn a little money. The research, I must say a scholarly piece of work, was really quite informative, having interviewed some of the women and the men involved.

It made me think about research, well actually it made me think about sex first. But then it made me wonder how we determine what is valuable research? I think the article is valuable research; tourism is an important part of the global economy and especially to the poorer nations. In addition, there are many social and health issues related to this topic. Good on these researchers for taking this topic on. I wonder what their colleagues thought about it and whether it was easy to get funding?

Have you ever wanted to take on a topic but refrained because of what your colleagues might think?

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Should we reject everything?

In the top information systems journals it has been said that reviewers reject everything. Why is that? Well, I guess they have an idealized version of a top paper and nothing lives up to it. Or maybe, they think they will be judged as being a soft reviewer if they accept it. What it results in is virtually everything gets rejected and it might take a supportive associate editor in the end to overturn the reviewers. Hence, submitting papers to leading journals can hardly be a called a pleasurable experience because it invariably ends in rejection sometimes after several rounds of review.

It is easy to point the finger at reviewers but those reviewers are in fact us!