Every now and again, twitter can be the source of pure comedy gold. This happens to be precisely what happened yesterday with the #overlyhonestmethods hashtag. I have no idea who initiated this trend, or why, but it’s seen the a huge number of the (frankly rather sizeable) community of scientists on twitter sharing hilarious gems of what actually goes on behind the scenes in academia.

I’m not sure how many of these tweets are actual anecdotes and how many are pure sarcasm, but they’ve provided endless entertainment! At least one nice little collection of said tweets exists already, but here are some of my own favourites…

The enzyme digest was performed overnight as I was NOT going to hang around for another 5 hours at 7pm. #overlyhonestmethods

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sci curious (@scicurious) January 08, 2013

The solar cell results made us want to cry a little, so please be distracted by all our X-ray data #overlyhonestmethods

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jes (@CBC_psi) January 08, 2013

DNA was synthesized on this synthesizer, because our other synthesizer caught on fire. #truestory #overlyhonestmethods

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Kristen Maynard (@kmsmphd) January 08, 2013

We used a fancy statistical calculation because reviewers are a sucker for that and we want to get published #overlyhonestmethods

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Pamela Cameron (@cam_pam) January 08, 2013

We did a lot of post-hoc tests, which is fancy latin speak for "we didn't plan very well" #overlyhonestmethods

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Dr. Alistair Dove (@para_sight) January 08, 2013

These papers were referenced in the revised manuscript because one of the reviewers wrote them. #overlyhonestmethods

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David Mittelman (@evolvability) January 08, 2013

Most of samples died when they overheated on the deck of a modified tuna boat being driven by a drunk captain #overlyhonestmethods #tooreal

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Proflikesubstance (@ProfLikeSubst) January 08, 2013

The artifacts in the confocal microscope image in Fig3 are due to sample noise and definitely not a thumbprint #overlyhonestmethods

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Paul Coxon (@paulcoxon) January 08, 2013

Our methods extend the techniques used by Smith et al., who stole the original idea from us at a conference. #overlyhonestmethods

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Peter Edmonds (@peterdedmonds) January 08, 2013

My best crystal structure was gained by leaving my sample in a vial in my fume hood for over a month #overlyhonestmethods

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Dr Jess (@JessTheChemist) January 08, 2013

It only crystallized because I picked up the wrong solvent bottle to make up my NMR sample #overlyhonestmethods #truestory

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Stuart Cantrill (@stuartcantrill) January 08, 2013

By “representative,” we mean “best.” #overlyhonestmethods

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Dr Becca, PhD (@doc_becca) January 08, 2013

We are including Figure 5 because it took so much SAS code to create that we won't remove it even if it's superfluous. #overlyhonestmethods

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Geeky Girl Engineer (@gkygirlengineer) January 08, 2013

Samples were centrifuged at 5000rpm for 10 min; if we do it longer a funny smell comes out the back of the centrifuge #OverlyHonestMethods

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Gavin Hubbard (@GavinHub) January 08, 2013

We repeated the experiment because the first time I forgot to use an ethanol resistant pen to label the tubes. #overlyhonestmethods

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Karen James (@kejames) January 08, 2013

Samples were not taken contiguously because we didn't think of doing this until some years later #overlyhonestmethods

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Christine Knights (@CSKnights) January 08, 2013

"It's a solid state effect." Which means we see something but don't really know what it is #overlyhonestmethods

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Snow Balaz (@SnowieMartha) January 08, 2013

I didn't read anything citations published before 1996 b/c it would have required walking across campus to the library #overlyhonestmethods

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Justin Kiggins (@neuromusic) January 08, 2013

Finally a power calculation is included using some random values because no reviewer wll actually attempt to check this #overlyhonestmethods

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Nikki Botting (@NicolaBotting) January 08, 2013

This seemingly out of place experiment/analysis/caveat was required by a reviewer. @cfchabris @Kane_WMC_Lab #overlyhonestmethods

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Leonid Kruglyak (@leonidkruglyak) January 08, 2013

We offer limited preliminary data because I could only carve so much money out of my other grants to do unrelated work #overlyhonestmethods

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Proflikesubstance (@ProfLikeSubst) January 08, 2013

The first author didn't write this Methods section and doesn't understand half of it. #overlyhonestmethods

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Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) January 08, 2013

@InvaderXan the following analysis was utterly pointless,but reviewer 2 was determined to waste our time & your energy #overlyhonestmethods

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Phonological_Goblin (@Apopheniotic) January 08, 2013

#overlyhonestmethods "a bin time of XXs was used to speed up computational time as I really wanted to go to the pub."

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Liz Bartlett (@astro_Liz) January 08, 2013

We chose these instrument settings because the display froze in the 1980s and no-one knows how to reset it #overlyhonestmethods

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Cristy Gelling (@CristyGelling) January 08, 2013

As may be fairly obvious here, we all love our peer reviewers.

Given the somewhat ephemeral nature of twitter, tweets will be probably only be directly searchable under #overlyhonestmethods for a few days. Though if you find any which stood out for you, please feel free to link to them in the comments here – or even share your own, if you aren’t on twitter yourself!