When Funny Science Takes The Spotlight

It’s that time of year again! The British Medical Journal (BMJ) published its annual Christmas issue with a very quirky take on medical research. In this year’s issue, one of the articles describes the case of She-Hulk exhibiting unusual symptoms of transfusion-associated graft versus host disease (TaGVHD).

Like the annual Ig Nobel Prize, the science is real but the angle is amusing. And while such lighthearted talks and papers might seem just quirky entertainment for overworked researchers and clinicians, they do an amazing job at making science more accessible for everyone else.

The BMJ Christmas issue is an annual special edition of the medical journal that comes out in mid-December. The articles in this issue are either research articles or commentary pieces similar in style to what the journal usually publishes.

The article about She-Hulk’s blood transfusion includes real medical information about the risks of getting graft versus host disease after a blood transfusion, but it’s applied to the fictional blood transfusion that Jennifer Walters received from Bruce Banner in Marvel’s comic book universe. The article includes lines such as “While HLA disparities between Hulk blood and human recipients could reduce the risk of TaGVHD, transfusion of blood from Hulks remains highly inadvisable on safety grounds, even with leucodepletion and irradiation.” It’s all very medical, but also about Hulks.

Research articles in the BMJ Christmas issue are held to the same rigor as any other research papers, but the angle can be much more lighthearted. For example, this year’s issue also includes a study on whether editors of the BMJ could accurately predict how many citations a submitted research paper would receive. Article citations are often considered as a standard for academic success: a paper that is cited very often by other researchers is considered more valuable than one that isn’t. As it turns out, this study shows that editors weren’t very good at predicting how well the articles they read would be received!

There are other ways besides formal citations to measure how well research papers are received and one of them is by looking at how often people are talking about them. Altmetric is a software company that does just that. They can track whether a research article was mentioned on social media, covered in the news, or otherwise talked about. As you can imagine, some of the most groundbreaking research studies that make splashing headlines also have quite high Altmetric scores. But so do articles that are just fun to share with your friends.

In 2012, the article with the highest ranking in the Altmetric databases — the one that had the most media mentions and online conversation around it – was one from the annual holiday issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). Just like the BMJ, this journal used to publish lighthearted articles around the end of the year. In 2000, they published an article that included a neurodevelopmental analysis of the characters in Winnie The Pooh. (Their verdict: Pooh has ADHD and OCD, Eeyore has a depression of unknown origin and Piglet was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder). As expected, this article was widely shared because it was amusing, and that’s what took it to the top of the Altmetric database.

Medical journals aren’t the only ones to encourage a sillier side of science. I’ve written about the annual Dance Your PhD competition before, where researchers are encouraged to turn their research into a choreography. And the annual Ig Nobel Prize “For achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK” go to genuine research projects that seem amusing, but usually have a more serious underlying message. For example, one of this year’s winners showed that ice cream could reduce some of the toxic side effects of chemotherapy.

And to bring home that the Ig Nobels are won by genuinely competent researchers, 2000 winner Andre Geim later went on to receive a real Nobel Prize in 2010. Who’s laughing now?

The Ig Nobels also regularly receive media attention, which means that research that would otherwise have only been seen by other scientists in that field suddenly gets a much bigger platform. The same is true for the BMJ Christmas Issue. I had no reason to read about graft versus host disease this morning, but I knew the Christmas Issue would be fun, and now I know new things about blood transfusion risks.

And that’s the secret power of these quirky articles and awards. They draw you in. As a bonus, they also make researchers show their human side. Yes, they’re experts, but they’re also just people who make Marvel jokes.

Disclaimer: I have written for BMJ before, but not for the Christmas Issue. I’ve also previously worked for publishers that used Altmetric scores on their articles.