I've also seen emojis popping up in official meeting minutes which is fine too. Why not spice it up with some whimsy.
These leaked documents (pastebin below) might present evidence for a different view.
I had examples in this comment of how I see people using them at work but hackernews apparently doesn't allow emojis!
That's not what "novelty" means in that context. If your review included "these emoji's really bring some novelty to this cholesterol survey" I'd look at you funny.
Did you mean "use emojis"?
Is this satire? I hope it is. Otherwise it seems like a sorry state that science currently is if it needs emojis to bring some novelty into it.
I generally don't use them in routine practice but when I see some of my straight-laced coworkers strategically deploy them I don't hate it!
However, using the context clues, I surmised that the original poster, that is the one who enjoys seeing emojis being used as bullet points in literature produced by his colleague, finds this to be "fun".
Is that pedantic enough? AM I GOOD ENOUGH???? WILL YOU LOVE ME NOW DADDY?
Consider this: You're a grad student who's been reading page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page of lack and white text.
How is marking a particularly explosive comment with a graphic representation of an explosion any different from highlighting it? Or from Davinci's marginal scribbles? or from Feynman's wave diagrams?
Or, for that matter, simply bolding, italicizing, or underlining it?
Shit, why even format it at all? Who needs page breaks and indented paragraphs in something as serious as a scientific paper?
God forbid we ever go so far as to implement more than one font.
Changes to the methods by which we communicate are made on a regular basis. If people find them useful enough to put them in their own communications, and they do not harm the clarity of the transmission, who are we (or you in particular) to cry about it on the sidelines?
You remind me of the person in the back of the room trying to invalidate a proof based on a misspelling that in no way impacts the validity of the proof.
As if adding an emoji somehow invalidates the months or years of work that went in to producing the content that you are consuming at no cost and will likely benefit from without having contributed to the project in any meaningful way.
I mean, seriously. Imagine someone's finally created a genuine cure for all cancers. They've spent the entire lives of hundreds of people and billions of dollars, and oh no! What's this? Aww, damn there's an emoji in one of the graphs. Damn. Too bad, I guess it's not going to be good enough for freehorse. Better go ahead and send it back for revisions. Can't publish it like that. Not now, not ever. Curing cancer's going to have to wait until we can force the author of this paper to conform to our arbitrary preferences.
What an interesting way to describe reading a book. It's amazing that anyone can read an entire book, composed of hundreds of pages, without getting bored of the black text.
Looking at the examples in the comment above, I really hope it's not that bad.
It's like the stupid "ROFL"/CLOWN by political fighters, and the (handclap) 500 times in a row, like. Or the ROFL by people who are trying to make their shit seem "funnier" than it every could be and only makes it more obnoxious.
There's a difference between "making a powerpoint at a conference and using emojis as bullet points" and throwing emojis every other word to be cute and getting papers published, or medical records with that.
The science you're writing about is hopefully extremely novel of course.
In general I've found "innovating on the wrong thing" is surprisingly common, especially from people who are bored and/or hungry for promotions, etc.
Believe it or not researchers enjoy humor around sometimes. There's a global shortage of a specific DAKO antibody we need for biopsy analysis right now and on a call with 50 people one of our chief scientists deadpans, "it's because I stopped making it in my basement."