I attended
another interesting event sponsored by the UiO Science library this morning, a
lecture about how to ‘pimp’ your research, followed by a really interesting
discussion about pimping of research in general—should it be pimped, how it
should be done, and who should be responsible for pimping. The scientist who
held the lecture and who guided the discussion afterwards was Gro Amdam, whom I’ve
mentioned before in a previous post. Professor Amdam is a Norwegian scientist
who runs two research labs, one at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in
Aas Norway, the other at Arizona State University in the USA. She is a honeybee
researcher and a top scientist, with many publications in top international
journals; you can read more about her labs, work, publications and view her
journal covers here: http://amdamlab.asu.edu/. Some of the scientists I talked to
about this event when I was promoting it a few weeks ago were a bit skeptical;
perhaps mostly skeptical to the terminology—pimping. They weren’t sure what was
meant by pimping research, and instead of being curious enough to find out more
about it, they didn’t attend. They should have, because they missed a really
good and professional presentation about the subject and an interesting
discussion afterwards. Pimping is defined as ‘giving something a smarter or
more interesting appearance’; some excellent examples in my opinion are Amdam's journal
covers—beautiful photos of bees and flowers that add an important visual aspect
to the research work that was published inside the specific issue. She emphasized
that it was pimping the (high-quality) work that was important; this was not a talk about how
to pimp the scientist. But the scientist can become well-known because of the quality
of the work via good pimping—and that’s a good thing. It helps get research
grants, funding, and international recognition.
There was a
good deal of discussion about the cultural differences and approaches to
pimping between the USA and Norway. In the USA, research pimping is an accepted
and encouraged activity at universities; the idea is relatively new in Norway. Most
of the Norwegian attendees were very positive to the idea, some were skeptical.
But that’s the point of a good discussion—to get the ideas out there and to get
people started talking about them.
What struck
me afterwards was that the Science library (Realfagsbiblioteket) has done a fair amount of pimping in
its own right. The beautiful and professionally-done trailers about the invited
scientists who come to the library to hold lectures and workshops are a good
example of the library (KBH and AC) pimping the work and careers of these
scientists; these trailers have been uploaded to SlideShare if you are
interested in seeing them: http://www.slideshare.net/Realfagsbiblioteket/presentations.
