Weird and wonderful

You toil, you write, you rewrite, you submit and you rewrite again. Most of us are proud of the creations we call our publications. We regard them as being of significant import; we use them to impress our colleagues; we use them to impress dinner dates (well, probably not the last one). Most other centenary pieces in The Psychologist this year will glorify such ostensibly important, ground-breaking studies in psychology. But there are some publications that go beyond the merely important. They are the publications that most of us would hide in a box under the bed. They are publications that feature the most staggeringly outrageous, blindingly obvious or ingeniously obscure research in the discipline. This article celebrates these unsung wonders of the psychological world – the 100 most eccentric-sounding journal articles published in psychology and its related subjects in the last century. The papers in the box need a shop window and this is it. Track them down – no doubt hidden behind their puzzling titles are some true gems. Only one of the articles is a spoof; one is of ambiguous origin. If you can spot which two they are, you win an evening out with the Editor. If not, you win two. Be vigilant. And if you know of (or maybe even wrote) a glaring omission, send them in to the usual address.

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