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Getting jobs these days is a real bitch. But you can up your personal
ante in the hothouse of academic competition by a little judicious cheating,
as I have suggested before. This time it’s not how to cheat your way into
the literature by duping editors. This time it’s simpler. You lie about
the publications on your CV.

Here’s how I got the idea. I went to a very boring conference recently.
Didn’t know anybody, the entertainments were lousy, the science was banal.
But I did get chatting with a couple of nice guys, one of whom, it seemed
to me, was in a field not unlike one I had recently become interested in.
Indeed, I’d actually done some research in the field and had been trying,
for some time, to publish the fruits of that research. As it happens the
referees (as is their wont) wrote back with such illuminating statements
as ‘S. Wolff doesn’t do his controls’, ‘S. Wolff doesn’t know the literature’,
or, ‘Sure we all know about that but it’s so intuitively obvious nobody
ever thought of checking it out.’

The paper was rejected by everybody. So I walked around nursing my little
discovery (and my wounded pride) until I met this guy, Jim, at the conference.
I liked him. He liked me. We talked science. And when I got back I sent
him my dusty and much rejected paper. He wrote back saying he liked it,
what was the problem, why was it rejected and here’s a bunch of his own
papers. I liked the papers but they were too clever and technical so I put
them at the bottom of the big thick stack of papers I have for things ‘I
have to do, urgently’.

A month later I got them out in case there were any ideas I could steal
without due acknowledgment. It was a hot day so I sat on the veranda. I
was bored so I read them cover to cover. And that’s when I read in the acknowledgment
section of a paper written by the guy – a full two years before I had met
him the statement: ‘I acknowledge S. Wolff, with grateful thanks, for critical
reading of the manuscript.’ I hadn’t known him, I didn’t know the subject,
I didn’t know the manuscript, but he was thanking me!

So, I thought, perhaps he’s just using the trick of acknowledging potentially
hostile referees so the manuscript doesn’t get sent out to them. But no;
I didn’t know the subject (still don’t) so it was impossible anybody would
have thought of me as a referee. Perhaps, I worried, I blacked out for few
years back there and did leading research in the field without knowing it.

And then it came to me in a flash of blinding revelation: there is more
than one S. Wolff. So I hyperventilated for five minutes and then tried
to think. Yes, I had known another S. Wolff at school but he played the
horn, was sensitive, studied languages and, in any case he was spelt with
an E. I also recalled a correspondence with a retired schoolteacher who
wrote to me assuming I was the same S. Wolff he’d once taught. But now I
knew there was another S. Wolff in science. Worse still, this S. Wolff works
in a related field.

So I went to that unimpeachable source of scientific literary reference,
the Science Citation Index, and looked myself up. Now, this is a dangerous,
solitary exercise I normally avoid. I remember being warned years ago that
I would go blind, get hairy palms and so on. But ‘desperation is the mother
of necessity’ as they don’t say. I reeled with the shock. There, before
my eyes, was certain evidence of another seven S. Wolffs. I felt like the
Catholic Church must have felt when Galileo told them the Earth went round
the Sun, and not vice versa. Why hadn’t my mother told me? ‘Darling, I love
you, but I have to tell you you’re not unique.’ I felt totally gutted, but
then something crept into my unpleasant and feverish little mind: ‘What
do my namesakes study?’

And so I come back to lying on your CV. Nip into the library, check
out the Science Citation Source Index, flip through to your name. If your
name is A. Smith you’re in clover. If your name is X. Gytraspoi you’re in
trouble. But S. Wolff has published over 300 papers since 1985 and, believe
me, they’re all on my CV. Some look a little esoteric in the general context
of my field, I admit, like ‘Kinetics of hydrogen absorption onto doped platinum
alloy surfaces at 15 K’ but some are likely to make any selection committee
look closely. For example, most of you won’t know that, (as, indeed, I didn’t)
that I have recently written a paper on ‘Female sexual offenders’. Now here
is a subject which, with a judiciously directed CV, could no doubt become
the subject of my future, fascinating and undoubtedly rewarding research
career.

Simon Wolff lectures in toxicology at University College and Middlesex
School of Medicine, London.