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// I used to tell this story to my PhD students but I no longer do.
Long ago, a mediocre researcher began his academic career as an assistant professor in the crop science (CS) department at a university.
Like most untenured professors, he was under pressure to publish research papers. Unfortunately, he had no deep ideas. He felt stressed and decided to take a walk in the small forest behind the CS building.
As he walked, he still struggled to come up with ideas. “I don't have insights.” he muttered. Feeling frustrated, he kicked a small stone hard into the bushes. A wild boar was sleeping in the bush and got hit. Startled, the animal leaped out of the bushes and disappeared into the forest.
Watching the boar leap, the researcher had a flash of inspiration.
Pigs can fly!
He ran back to his office and wrote a paper titled “Pigs Can Fly: A Field Study.”
Certainly, he knew that his empirical evidence was fabricated. So he dared not submit the paper to a top CS conference. Instead, he sent it to a workshop, as many workshops are desperate for attendees.
The paper was accepted.
He felt nervous about the paper and found an excuse not to attend in person.
Unexpectedly, a month later, he was notified by Google Scholar that someone had cited his paper. The citing paper, titled “Rethinking and Redesigning Pig Farms in the Era of Flying Pigs”, was built atop his workshop paper that challenged the fundamental assumption that pigs must stay on the ground. “What a joke!” he thought.
Over the next three months, his workshop paper was cited 100 times. The citations grew exponentially. In less than a year, it had been cited more than 1,000 times.
The reason may be obvious. There were many researchers just like him, struggling to find deep research ideas while facing the relentless pressure to publish. Unlike established research areas, flying pig research had few foundational results, no entrenched experts, and an almost unlimited supply of open problems.
This emerging research area soon became known as “Flying Pig Problems.”
The following year, researchers organized the inaugural Workshop on Flying Pig Problems.
The year after that, the first International Conference on Flying Pig Problems was held. Another year later, the Journal of Flying Pig Research issued its first call for papers.
Within a few years, through the collective efforts of the flying pig research community, these conferences and journals had become prestigious venues, receiving A* in CS rankings.
The trend continued.
Universities began admitting brilliant graduate students to work on flying pig problems. Governments awarded research grants. Companies recruited research scientists specializing in flying pig technologies.
The CS department established a large interdisciplinary research center, bringing together researchers from across campus. After all, realizing the flying pig vision was not a problem that CS alone could solve.
Social scientists began studying the societal implications of a future in which the sky was full of pigs; urban planners explored new transportation systems after a paper demonstrated that pigs could follow instructions and might one day carry passengers through the air; economists investigated the potential disruption to traditional markets. The list goes on and on.
The breakthrough finally came from the biology department.
After countless sleepless nights, a group of brilliant PhD students successfully bred pigs that could fly, drawing on principles of aerodynamics, biomechanics, and evolutionary biology.
What had begun as a fabricated scientific claim eventually became reality.
The once-imaginary flying pig could now fly. Decades of research had produced something genuinely useful. The original paper was still fraudulent, but nobody seemed particularly interested in that distinction anymore.
The researcher who had started it all was now celebrated as the father of flying pig research and widely regarded as a visionary.
So, is your research problem a flying pig problem (and how can you tell)?
Sometimes, the answer may not be important.