The Scholarly Letter

The Tyranny Of Written Knowledge With the ever-growing emphasis on communicating knowledge through written publications, we are increasingly experiencing a transactional relationship with knowledge: one that prioritises storage, circ...

How deeply has the primacy of the written form has shaped our knowledge-making activities? Writing’s dominance has reshaped what counts as knowledge, and how it circulates. A counter to the tyranny of writing is needed - and proposed - in this weeks essay.

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In Science We Trust. In Crypto... We’ll See Funding science with crypto? What could go wrong.

Is funding scientific research with cryptocurrency viable?

Decentralized Science says yes and it will make science better. The only problem is that DeSci has adopted the fatal flaw of traditional institutions it hopes to take down: an obsession with money.

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ChatGPT as a really big threat, because it always produces good text In this Interview Jörg Pohle talks about generative AI tools and how they affect his research activities as well as what possible misunderstandings and fallacies in regards of using LLM’s are.

If ChatGPT output is probabilistic then accuracy is irrelevant unless seeking "the truth". This interview with Dr Jörg Pohle (curated in a previous 🍎Digest) is a fascinating insight into responsible AI use. Guaranteed to challenge your perspective.

Science Has an Imagination Problem We continue to be haunted by the ghosts of scientific past.

Imagination is the foundation of good science, not objectivity. In this week's 🍏Sunday Read, The Critic explores why we see imagination as a danger in research and reminds us that good science must be true not only to its methods but also to its makers.

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Why science can never be objective Plus using the job market to let the field find you.

Societal politics shapes what we research, therefore science can never be objective. If that statement makes you shake your head, give this podcast, curated for a previous edition of 🍎The Digest, a listen (you can check out our archive for more like this).
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THAT article in which the authors called out being coerced to cite sources in the published manuscript (curated in a previous 🍎Scholarly Digest) has been retracted by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. The authors can resubmit and the reviewers won't be back.

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tinyurl.com/rcfxmvdy

🍎Screw you, reviewer 2 Plus a free webinar for acing a PhD interview

PhD done, top Postdoc secured—then your field moves on. and no university wants to hire you permanently. Now what?

We found a suggestion that you can “use the job market to let the field find you”.

Read more in the 🍎Scholarly Digest here:
tinyurl.com/42cx96w9

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🍏The Impact Factor is Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet) Losing an IF is not punishment if you never wanted one in the first place.

The Impact Factor isn’t for assessing journal quality—it was for librarians estimating journal popularity pre-Internet. Not only are we using it wrong, it’s technically obsolete.
If you didn’t know this, maybe check out this Sunday Read from our archive:
tinyurl.com/4ssx36ta #academicsky

This is a great opportunity for current PhD students across all disciplines that was featured in the opportunities section of The Digest this week.

Get more PhD, Postdoc, and Academic positions like these delivered every week to your inbox:

thescholarlyletter.scholar-square.com

It would be easy to dismiss research(ers) from these countries as low quality. It’s more interesting to ask why our system values a publications existence more than its content; the institutions at the center of retraction hotspots didn’t invent ‘publish or perish,’ did they? #academicsky

It’s both an inspiration and a reminder of the devotion scholarship demands.

“…Force myself to think for two pages per day… Don’t scatter myself… Don’t hurry, but work two hours per day, genius or not, even if I believe that it will come to nothing.”

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19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways…

If you’re pursuing a scholarly life in search of meaning, fulfillment, and intellectual challenge—but find yourself sometimes losing sight of these things—this curation of 19 year old Simone de Beauvoir’s diary by @themarginalian.org.web.brid.gy is for you www.themarginalian.org/2025/02/17/s...

The Scholarly Letter For the readers, the writers, the overthinkers (the caffeine drinkers). The Scholarly Letter is the world’s only newsletter serving up weekly infotainment for scholarly minds

Why: because we think better scholarship starts with more self-aware and well-informed scholars, and we’ve noticed scholars are rarely aware enough about the world they inhabit.

Sign up here to get our weekly newsletters (free to read, no ads: runs on love):
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Who we are: curious minds, lovers of knowledge, a current social sciences PhD student and a STEM PhD dropout.

What we do: publish The Scholarly Letter, a weekly newsletter with curated reads, handpicked resources and original think pieces about science, knowledge, research, and academia.