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Some journals put author pictures and short bios at the end of the articles. Do you know of published examples in which the authors used humorous pictures of themselves, for instance with funny poses or unusual hats?

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    Next paper I'll have to try with my profile picture ;-)
    – Massimo Ortolano ♦
    Nov 14, 2016 at 7:57
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    @FedericoPoloni You can use an Oxford comma in these cases. So, funny poses, or hats is very different from funny poses or hats.
    – 101010111100
    Nov 14, 2016 at 8:38
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    And, technically, I am also curious to see if someone managed to get a picture with a colander published. It is a complicated subject to argue whether this should be considered a laughing matter or not.
    – Federico Poloni
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:23
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    In geosciences (particularly field geology or sedimentology) the practice of taking pictures of an outcrop or a fossil with someone standing next to it for scale is quite widespread and it is not uncommon for authors to use such pictures to illustrate their bios (I can't seem to find an example right now however because to be honest fewer and fewer journals have short bios at the end of the article in this field; so this observation is at this point just based on vague memories).
    – plannapus
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:49
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    Do the Nobel prize pictures count? nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2016/…
    – Gallifreyan
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:54

4 Answers 4

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Yes, a group of authors (Đurić, Delibašić, Radišić, or Đuirić, Delilbašić and Radisic, as they signed themselves in the paper) trying to debunk the Metalurgia International journal provided outrageous pictures in their paper entitled: Evaluation of Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data.

The, up to that point "respected", journal published the paper without any comments about the photos.

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  • Could you post a link to either the article or the photo used?
    – DrakaSAN
    Nov 14, 2016 at 14:01
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    Note for whoever does not get it: They look like the Marx Brothers
    – Ander Biguri
    Nov 14, 2016 at 14:02
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    Link to the paper: scribd.com/doc/167706815/…
    – Federico Poloni
    Nov 14, 2016 at 14:22
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    I didn't get the Marks Brothers link, and wondered why they were "outrageous." It would be good to edit this in to the answer.
    – Daniel Griscom
    Nov 14, 2016 at 14:23
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Richard Baraniuk at Rice University has co-authored several papers that I've come across in my research that qualify, to some degree:

  1. J. Laska and R. Baraniuk, “Regime change: Bit-depth versus measurement- rate in compressive sensing,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 60, no. 7, pp. 3496–3505, 2012.

The author photos in this paper seem to be a play on "regime change" mentioned in the title: one author's photo appears to be that of a political candidate after hearing that they've lost an election, while the other author photo is presumably of the "victorious" candidate.

  1. M. Davenport, J. Laska, J. Treichler, and R. Baraniuk, “The pros and cons of compressive sensing for wideband signal acquisition: Noise folding versus dynamic range,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 60, no. 9, pp. 4628–4642, Sep. 2012.

There are four author photos: two authors have "sad" faces, two "happy."

  1. M. A. Davenport, R. G. Baraniuk, and C. D. Scott, “Tuning support vector machines for minimax and Neyman-Pearson classification,” IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 32, no. 10, pp. 1888–1898, Oct. 2010.

In this paper two of the authors have the word "minimax" (from the paper title) in the background of their photos, which appear to be on signs of some sort (the third author has a street sign in the photo background; what it says, I'm not sure).

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So far, I haven't come across any pictures in the short bio section which I could call 'funny'. However, I have seen quite an odd picture of a co-author which seems like a infrared imaging of the author.

That paper is quite popular in its field. It is called "The HumanID Gait Challenge Problem: Data Sets, Performance, and Analysis." It contained a photo of Prof. Kevin W. Bowyer; this was his short bio picture in the paper. I'll also like to add that this paper is published in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis.

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    The cited photo is not a negative (try inverting its colors); it's an image from a thermal imaging camera. Note the poor resolution, along with the scattered bad pixels; that's due to the (as yet) high cost of the PIR sensors used.
    – Daniel Griscom
    Nov 14, 2016 at 12:32
  • @DanielGriscom Thanks for pointing it out. I've made the edit.
    – Ébe Isaac
    Nov 14, 2016 at 13:44
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You might want to look at Poizat's "Groupes stable", although a reviewer of the English translation wrote

As the author is no doubt aware, his tasteless joke in the French edition of this book crossed the line between offensive and insulting.

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    ... but crossed it in which direction?
    – Daniel Griscom
    Nov 14, 2016 at 14:24
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    Is a picture available on the internet?
    – Federico Poloni
    Nov 14, 2016 at 14:25
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    Poizat was told that writing in French was bad for sales, so as a parody to market adaptation he included pictures which he described as "gentilement porno".
    – Jan-Christoph Schlage-Puchta
    Nov 14, 2016 at 17:29

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