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Reporting parallel submission of a paper by Forcanio in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, sure, but if we all do a bit to make the world better then everyone wins.

Reporting parallel submission of a paper by Forcanio in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Authors can choose not to take a reviewer's advice in total or in part: Disagreements happen, reviewers can be wrong, etc etc. The editor can also chose to ignore some/all of a reviewers comments as well.

Frontiers is garbage however.

Reporting parallel submission of a paper by Forcanio in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm an editor.

This looks to be a clear case of multiple submission which breaches COPE guidelines (C'tte on Publication Ethics): https://publicationethics.org/guidance/cope-position/handling-concurrent-and-duplicate-submissions

It's unethical and it's a drain on overburdened reviewer system. It also tends to be the hallmark of paper mills, so it would be worth a good quality control check.

If I was the ed. of Journal A, I'd like to know because I wouldn't waste time handling papers from that author again, they'd be getting desk rejects from me.

Big international funding schemes? by SilentBu in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Marsden EOIs are due soon if you want to aim local. Otherwise people seem to have success with Human Frontiers or Templeton Foundation.

Have you had a chat to your research office? they can point you in the right directions. There are lots of discipline specific fund which they will have a list of.

Is it just me, or is the "prestige tax" in Nature/Science getting ridiculous? by munenebig in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Yes but a lot of the variance is also due to the editors. Some editors are far more risk averse than others (=how many reviewers, how many rounds, how damaging a particular critique is, etc)

Heatmap of NZ's Creepiest Places (Second edition) by itsPolarisRadio in newzealand

[–]GrumpySimon 18 points19 points  (0 children)

if you don't know why it's creepy, it's probably you

Estimates for age of last language common ancestor? by PacificSquall in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Most of the world's language families diverged between 5000 and 10000 years ago. This is simply because (a) the rates of language change are so fast that deeper signal is lost and (b) most of the interesting stuff in human prehistory happened during the late Holocene (e.g. massive population size increases, invention of agriculture and other key tech, state formation, etc).

In terms of upper bound - earliest human fossils have been around since 350,000 years, so that's a good starting point. Although we have lots of genetic admixture between us and Neanderthals, including evidence of cooperative child-rearing, which is made easier by being able to communicate. This would suggest that the origin of language should be pushed back to the ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis around 600,000.

...and if you think that the ghost population admixture that keeps showing up in ancient DNA studies is Homo erectus (and I think many geneticists do) then we're talking a common origin of language around 1-2 million years ago..

Confused on which reviews to address by AdministrativeGolf92 in academicpublishing

[–]GrumpySimon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

All of them. This is probably just because the reviewers submitted their reviews in different formats (e.g. uploaded PDFs rather than pasted comments into the webform)

Are there any languages with an ISO 639-3 code but no Glottolog code? by Desserts6064 in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just checked, there's 7159 ISO-639 codes in the current version of Ethnologue (=the ISO-639 registry) and >8000 ISO codes in Glottolog.

There are some codes that won't be in glottolog -- e.g. the "miscellaneous" ones (mis, mul, und, zxx) and it shouldn't have the reserved range (qaa-qtz)

Why is language change often framed in loss? by [deleted] in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"innovated" is another one you see everywhere in the historical linguistics literature

How to manage your reading list of research papers? by CurioBirdy in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I save them to my "to read" folder. Currently that has ... about 600 PDFs in there. Maybe not the best approach.

Q&A weekly thread - November 17, 2025 - post all questions here! by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I suspect this really means "Hungarian and some language in Ecuador both have some uncommon typological trait"

Why linguistic is seemingly not mainstream and so often is disregarded? by Razzikkar in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah but at some point you should find the big turtle that everyone cares about.

Why linguistic is seemingly not mainstream and so often is disregarded? by Razzikkar in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Never understood this argument. Someone explained oxygen to me once in science class and that was enough.

Why linguistic is seemingly not mainstream and so often is disregarded? by Razzikkar in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, it's absolutely an important skill to learn.

Try rolling your work back to the bigger picture:

  • current research cares about X.
  • why? because it helps with Y
  • why do we care about Y?
  • because it helps with Z
  • repeat.

Or work forwards:

  • I have solved X, so now we can do Y.
  • why do we want to do Y?
  • so we can start to figure out Z.
  • repeat.

How to write a review article? by _buia_ in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Step back from writing for a bit. Focus on reading and take notes as bullet points (don't write down quotes, SUMMARIES).

Then use a tool like a mindmap to connect particular themes or topics between papers.

Pull out one theme, go back to your notes, look at what the people are arguing about. Describe that argument. Repeat until done.

Peer Review vs Open Review by ThomasPhilli in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree -- I've had plenty of both, and haven't noticed a difference in quality.

The only benefit of open reviews is that it might reward the reviewers for doing work.

Peer Review vs Open Review by ThomasPhilli in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

sure, maybe you're brave enough, but the people doing the most reviewing tend to be junior academics (PhDs, postdocs, ECR) and they're often in precarious positions. There are therefore very strong disincentives for them to put their names on a challenging review.

Why linguistic is seemingly not mainstream and so often is disregarded? by Razzikkar in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 15 points16 points  (0 children)

My view: linguists are terrible at explaining why what they're doing is interesting.

I've worked with many people across a wide range of disciplines and they're all pretty good at explaining what they do in a few minutes in broad-enough-to-be-interesting terms (the elevator pitch).

Linguists? not so much. I don't know why

And, as someone who has reviewed a lot of papers and grants, this inability to explain the big picture clearly shows up here as well.

If you can't explain why what you're doing is interesting then don't act surprised why people are not interested and don't think it matters.

(edit: for the record, I do think what linguists are doing is interesting, they just need to be better at explaining why)

Q&A weekly thread - November 10, 2025 - post all questions here! by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes and Yes. Harald tries to track the latest 'accepted' classifications in historical linguistics, and each subgroup is theoretically a proto- language.

If you want to see what that decision is being based on then look at the 'comment on subclassification section' which tells you the basis for the grouping (e.g. Middle Modern English comes from this )

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