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The article discusses scholarly interest in zombies. Professor Kyle Bishop of Southern Utah University wrote his doctoral thesis on zombie movies. Book distributor Baker & Taylor says that over a five-year period there have been 20 new scholarly books with the word "zombie" in the title or as a topic category. English professor Mark Bauerlein questions whether topics such as zombies are fit for academic inquiry.

The article discusses a rising incidence of scientific and medical journals having to retract previously-published research, for reasons ranging from incompetence to fraud. The publication states that over a ten-year period the number of retractions has increased by more than 1400%. Special attention is paid to a paper by Naoyuki Nakao on the effectiveness of blood-pressure drugs, which the medical journal the "Lancet" published and later retracted.

The article discusses the Eurovision Song Contest. First televised in 1956, the contest attracts entrants from some 40 countries, as well as 125 million television viewers. Although some critics assail what they claim is the contest's campy nature, dozens of academics have studied the event, written scholarly articles, and held symposia about it. The Swedish band ABBA won the 1974 contest with its song "Waterloo."

Focuses on scholarly journals and the debate regarding the price to read the information published in them. Comments from Michael Eisen, the founder of a nonprofit startup called Public Library of Science, which produces its own scholarly journals, in competition with established publishers, distributed free online; Impact of the Internet on the availability of scholarly information once considered the exclusive province of the journals; Efforts of faculty members in the University of California state school system to compete with publishers by supplying free or inexpensive literature in direct competition with the publishers; Efforts of the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide research funded by NIH grants free, which was met with protests from publishers like Reed Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons; Response of traditional publishers to the greater call for free information; Discussion of several startup companies offering free research information online.

The article reviews the web site Einstein Papers Project by a consortium of Princeton University Press, Hebrew University and Caltech, available at einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu.

The article discusses efforts by some scholarly journals to raise their impact factor, and thus increase their influence in the research community, by engaging in such practices as publishing papers that excessively cite other papers previously published in the same journal.

The article presents a list of the 20 most influential business thinkers in the U.S., as measured by a combination of Google searches, media mentions, and citations in scholarly publishing. Author Gary Hamel is rated the leading authority. No women are on the list.