I'll be doing it to protest the use of scare quotes around "contingent valuation":
Climate scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have withdrawn a study they wrote under eyebrow-raising pseudonyms.
The withdrawn paper, about predicting surface temperatures of planets, appeared in Advances in Space Research in August, 2015, and is authored by Den Volokin and Lark ReLlez.
Normally, a withdrawal wouldn’t raise our eyebrows, but climate scientist Gavin Schmidt pointed out on Twitter that the authors’ names are eerily similar to another pair who have published climate papers together: Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller. Yes, that’s correct — Den Volokin and Lark ReLlez are Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller spelled backwards. Nikolov and Zeller are currently listed as a physical scientist and a meteorologist, respectively, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. …
Volokin and ReLlez aren’t the first fake names to be used in the literature — in 1978, Polly Matzinger added the name of her dog (Galadriel Mirkwood) to a Journal of Experimental Medicine paper, protesting the use of passive voice in scientific papers. What’s not yet clear here, however, is whether or not the authors disclosed to the journal that they were publishing under assumed names.
Hmmm. I may be doing something wrong but I think that Karl spelled backwards is Lrak, not Lark. Burn!
*Roxie is not the smartest of our pets. I'm not sure if she could actually contribute to a refereed journal article, bless her heart. Patches, on the other hand, will likely contribute more than some of my co-authors. Burn!
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