It promises all the thrills and nail-biting suspense of fantasy football - with added equations.
Inspired by the fantasy sports competitions played by millions - ranging from football to American football, from cricket to baseball - three American scientists are proposing the academic equivalent: fantasy journal.
The idea is to pick the scientific papers that are going to perform best over the coming year, just as football fans pick their defenders or potential goal scorers.
Instead of a team, you would have a fantasy learned journal containing your best picks, proposes Carl T Bergstrom, an associate biology professor at the University of Washington, in, of course a (fairly) learned paper (pdf).
OK, so it doesn't sound quite as glamorous as sending Beckham or Henry out to play for you, or having Flintoff in your fantasy cricket XI.
But for every fan who feels that football is not just a matter of life and death - it's more important - there is an academic who feels the same way about his or her research.
And just as football fans are prone to the fantasy that they could do better than the manager - what does that Alex Ferguson know? - there are researchers who are convinced that the editors of Nature and other journals are doing a lousy job (mainly by failing to publish the critics' research).
Instead of goals or runs, scoring would be based on which papers get the most citations from fellow researchers in the field - the most common method of measuring the impact of research. You're probably getting excited already, aren't you? What's it to be - that promising paper on Dark Energy or a description of the latest genetically engineered mouse?
Professor Bergstrom and his fellow authors, James Hendler and Dan Chudnov, argue that not only would the game be "great fun to play" but would also "potentially be a source of valuable bottom-up bibliometric tagging information". And that's something that not many fantasy football contests can claim.
"Our lab would have a blast playing - and if I challenged my graduate students to beat my picks, I can guarantee that they would read an increasing fraction of the literature in their efforts to put my in my place," says Prof Bergstrom.
He adds: "It's gossipy, it's self-referential, it's a sporting blend of skill, effort and fortune, it's competitive - all great features to have in a game. And it has the side effects of getting people to read the literature [and generating] an interesting ensemble of individual 'overlay journals' that reflect the interests of individual researchers."
While his research mainly revolves around immune systems and the dynamics of emerging infectious diseases, Prof Bergstrom and his father, University of California Santa Barbara economist Ted Bergstrom, have also studied the economics of scientific publishing.
Hailed by blogger Jake Young as an idea of "genius", fantasy journal has also been praised by Marginal Revolution. But others are less complimentary - "You really need to get a life!" and "Congratulations on finding something even dorkier than fantasy sports" snort two posters on the latter site.
What do you think?
