What about the Christmas turkey?

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software for curiosity searches

Anne-Wil Harzing - Fri 22 Dec 2023 07:59 (updated Mon 1 Jan 2024 16:22)

On the eve of Christmas and before a 2-week blogging holiday, I wondered what - if anything - the academic literature had published on Christmas turkeys. Hence, I did a quick search in the Publish or Perish software, this time using Scopus as a data source. The result didn't disappoint. Scopus reported no less than eleven hits that had Christmas Turkey in their abstracts.

None of these articles had set the world on fire in terms of academic impact. Only three had gathered any citations at all. Many were also unavailable online, a shame as I would have loved to learn how Brrrrrrrrrr and Christmas turkeys were connected. However, I did find three intriguing articles in three very different disciplines - world archaeology, labour history, and vetinary science - that I would like to share with you.

World Archaeology

I am a Business & Management professor, but I am very interested in archaeology. Hence, I was intrigued to find a very interesting paper in this area. It contained a fascinating analysis of how the Christmas Turkey and Easter Bunny have become associated with these Christian celebrations. I particularly liked this part of the paper as it reminded me of one of my own forensic examinations: Are referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility?

This preliminary investigation of British Christmas and Easter celebrations, and the ‘alien’ animals associated with them, has done little to establish definitively any of their origins. Instead, perhaps the most striking point that has emerged is in relation to human behaviour, notably our tendency to accept and actively perpetuate received wisdom and traditions.

Labour history

The older I get the more interested I become in history, especially social history in the UK. Hence, I found this article about the Black Country (an area of England's Midlands) fascinating too. Note that the abstract below is immediately followed by.

Such views are doubly unfortunate. For not only are they banal and condescending, but they tend to conceal the fact that the serious, academic study of the Black Country raises issues that are important, not just to antiquarians or local historians, but to all those struggling to understand the complex history of working-class life.

Are you planning to indulge?

Then you may find this comprehensive review of the best way to close a stuffed Christmas Turkey interesting. Channel your inner academic at Christmas lunch by academic-splaining to your host that they have used a sub-optimal way to close their turkey. You might want to plan for an early departure after that though :-).

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

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