Do you want to get better at pretending to be doing work? Here is your chance.
The BMJ is a journal with impact factor of 23.562 in 2017. They do a pretty decent Christmas specials which contain funny journal articles. Here are some of the selections of their interesting research:
Non-Christmas entries:
These researches are from random places, they are serious research. Unfortunately some people find them funny, I decided to include them in the list anyway.
SIGBOVIK is a yearly conference celebrating the inestimable research work of Harry Quasi-bovik Bovik. Since his research has been so variegated, the conference is traditionally a forum for discussion on many subjects, including: Inept Expert Systems, Deep Space Navigation, Science, Perplexity Theory, Thaughmaturgic Circle, Self-Adjusting Computation, Denotational Semantics of Pidgin and Creole, History Independence, Spatio-Temporal Clusters, High-Content Screening, Integer-Based Vulnerabilities, Natural Intelligence, Artificial Stupidity, Elbow Macaroni, Rasterized Love Triangles, Synergistic Hyperparadigmatism, Computational Archaeolinguistics, AJAX and Modal Type Theory, Operational Semantics of Chevy Tahoes, Hyper Driven Devices, and any other topic approved by the conference organizers. The Program Committee seeks submissions on the entire range of topics.
http://sigbovik.org/
Sigbovik is a joke conference run by School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. They produce really funny and amazing research, for example:
This is not really a research paper, but I didn't want to create a new page just for this. This is a Master's thesis written by someone from Central China Normal University. You can download the PDF from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) or here. I am not a massive fan of the thesis, I think he could have explored the topic a bit further. He hasn't collected any data, it is more like a literature review / analysis for me. It is definitely not a MRes level work, in my opinion. I suppose there is this toilet etiquette thing. I find those people who tend to be more polite talk less about pooping and farting. I think it would have been great if he collected some data on how close you have to be before discussing bodily function, and perhaps look into if there is any age variation and regional variation.
In our daily life experience, fart is natural expression of the human body, belonging to the category of physiological phenomena. But at the same time, fart is supposed to be an uncivilized behavior and phenomena and fallen under the social taboo things. This thesis starts with the author’s related opinion that fart is not only a pure physiological phenomena but also a social phenomena, which gets some corresponding relationship with the social structure an social context that people are located. In other words, fart behavior and phenomena obviously embodies a kind of social existence, and then it gets its sociological meaning. Then, this thesis analyzes the social genetic process that how fart behavior and phenomena transfers from a kind of physiological phenomena to that of social taboo, and opens out the complicated mechanism among it, namely, from indistinctive human behavior to behavior more frequently happened among parts of the social members, then to the negative behavior in the moral judgment, and finally evolves a kind of social taboo. This thesis considers this genetic process comes from the erratic characteristics of the power exercise, i.e., duality, reliance and publicity. Then, it probes into the non- taboo fart behavior and phenomena, and considers that this phenomenon reflects the existence of the taboo, and it is also related with the erratic characteristics of the power exercise. The thesis finally analyzes the fart taboo’s future and fate, and points out that the fart taboo will probably returns to natural along with the new changes of the social structure and food no longer as the important character of the social difference.