Opening our door to welcome Spring: Happy Lunar New Year 2023

Quan-Hoang Vuong, AISDL

January 21, 2023

Dear all,

Although we live in different time zones, the Lunar New Year 2023 is approaching. This Spring Festival has always been a special event for people living in the sphere of influence exerted by the Three Teachings.

This year Vietnamese and the Chinese call it by different names; for Vietnamese, the Year of the Cat, and for Chinese, the Year of the Rabbit. The meaning of a Lunar New Year festival can be learned from [1].

Our community-coaching initiative has existed for almost half a year, marked by the first announcement on July 31, 2022 [2]. The community has gradually grown up to become a “happy home” for the first squad of researchers based in several countries: Australia, China, Ethiopia, India, the Netherlands, the USA, and Vietnam.

For its very short existence, I trust that community members have somehow felt the warmth their colleagues gave, very much similar to the values that a Spring Festival is supposed to bring to people living in our socio-cultural sphere.

Furthermore, we have been on track for such a challenging task as conducting and publishing research studies. About a dozen manuscripts have been completed, and all have been submitted or are under review. Not a small feat!

High-quality manuscripts are the first destination that all scholars will need to reach. But things appear to have looked a little more favorable for our community. The first article was published exactly two months ago in JRFM [3], a good outlet I used to guess-edit a special issue some time ago. Another article has been accepted for publication in World (ISSN 2673-4060), first-authored by Ruining Jin [4], one of our first members. It will likely be published in a day or two. Also, another submission [5] has received its first post-review decision, which is very positive and will soon become an official publication in Elsevier’s MethodsX (ISSN 2215-0161).

Pas mal, pas mal du tout !

But more exciting and meaningful research projects are underway and showing bright prospects. We won’t have to wait for long to know about their outcomes. This year will unveil the myth if any.

But as we all know, a researcher’s life should never be obsessed with mandates, deadlines, the number of manuscripts, counts of publications, impact factors, or citations received. Our success will be based on more morally and socially-inclined factors: the happiness we give to our colleagues, the kindheartedness we show to the world, soul-touching research that transcends generations and leaves the mark of our hard work for good, and the like. Perhaps, for these exact reasons, today I received a photo sent from an alien living somewhere in our Universe, or next, and now share it with us all.


Figure: AISDL (Source: some unknown alien)

It’s time to enjoy the great Vietnamese poem—The Master [6]—when we are waiting for the Year of Cat/Rabbit to knock on our door.

I wish you and your beloved ones a prosperous and healthy year full of joy and happiness.

References

[1] Le PT(2018). The meaning of Tet in Vietnam. The Firmament Literacy Journal, 10(4), 8-18.

[2] AISDL Team. (2022). How will our collaborative projects work? https://mindsponge.info/posts/39

[3] Nguyen MH, et al. (2022). Mindsponge-Based Reasoning of Households’ Financial Resilience during the COVID-19 Crisis. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 15(11), 542.

[4] Jin R, et al. (2023). A gender study of food stress and implications for international students acculturation. World, 4, forthcoming.

[5] Jin R, et al. (2023). An analytical framework-based pedagogical method for scholarly community coaching: A proof of concept. https://osf.io/qabhj

[6] Vuong TT. (2011). The Master. https://philarchive.org/archive/VUOTMK