Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Universities Need to Escape the Trap of Competition
There is a modern-day notion that competition will solve all problems, says Rajani Naidoo, and higher education can get trapped in a kind of magical thinking that makes a fetish out of competition.
Major Study Asks, What Academic Subject Pays Best?
A new survey in England examines the career outcomes of recent university leavers. For maximum pay, it helps to be a student of economics — and to be male.
REF 2014: Discipline Mattered in How Impact Calculated
A new report produced by the Digital Science team explores the types of evidence used to demonstrate impact in REF2014 and pulls together guidance from leading professionals on good practice.
African Academics Prey to (Academic Journal) Predators
In the past few years there has been an insidious rise in predatory journals and publishers, notes Adele Thomas, and African academics have not been immune to their predation.
Manufactured Controversy: Adam Perkins, the Psychological Imagination and the Marketing of Scholarship
The content of scholarly debates is increasingly secondary to the instrumentalization of scholarship in the promotion of one’s brand,” says our Daniel Nehring. It may not matter much that this brand is built on — academically at least — somewhat dubious welfare bashing, as long as the right markers of scholarly status are attached to it.
#WomenAlsoKnowStuff (Even About Politics)
Our goal, say the supporters of the #WomenAlsoKnowStuff database of female political scientists, is to amplify the voices of women in the discipline and in the public eye.
Statistical Association Takes on Use, Abuse of P-values
Even as it insists it’s not really saying anything new, the American Statistical Association Board of Directors has laid down a marker in the debate over what constitutes “statistical significance.”
The North-South Divide Appears in Metrics, Too
Science and technology systems are routinely monitored and assessed with indicators created to measure the natural sciences in developed countries. Ismael Ràfols and Jordi Molas-Gallart urge the creation of indicators that better reflect research activities and contributions in ‘peripheral’ spaces.
