GoKawiilThe locations of Chinese noodle shops were assessed in one essay published in a ‘bottom’ journal.Credit: Zheng Changhao/Xinhua via Alamy
The image of a failed laboratory experiment posted on Chinese social media in February has sparked an academic trend in the country: junior researchers setting up and contributing to satirical journals. The photograph, posted by a biology master’s student on the networking and e-commerce site RedNote, showed the result of a blunder in a western blot (WB), an experiment used to detect and identify proteins.
The test went so wrong that instead of showing the standard few horizontal dashes, the image resembled a panda’s face: round blobs on blobs.
“A person left a comment under the photo, jokingly suggesting that the student should publish his result in Rubbish,” says Li, a first-year master’s student in biomedical engineering in Beijing who saw the photo online in early February and asked to be known only by his surname to protect his identity.
Rubbish is a concept familiar to postgraduate students and junior researchers in China. It refers to an imaginary journal that publishes research deemed to be a failure or useless by mainstream academic criteria.
“I thought, why don’t I start a Rubbish journal in real life,” says Li,. Hours after seeing the post, he set up Rubbish on RedNote.
The satirical journal would “welcome a wide range of submissions, which can be about unexplainable experiment results, anecdotes that happened during your research or gossip within your research group”, read Rubbish’s inaugural post on 12 February.
Submissions could take the form of photos or a few paragraphs about any academic topic, the post said. Once deemed rubbish, these would be published for free. The journal’s impact factor “is expected to be zero”, the post added. In terms of the impact Rubbish would have on researchers, Li was about to be proved wrong.
Going viral
Li says he set up Rubbish just for fun, but the account went viral immediately, attracting nearly 10,000 followers in 24 hours. The next day, he wrote Rubbish’s first article — ‘The result of my WB looks like a panda’ — and published it on RedNote, after securing permission to use the photo.
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