Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Preserving Academic Freedom When Tenure Is Tenuous
Cathy Sandeen, chancellor of University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension, argues that universities need to be more honest on how academic freedom applies to different teaching roles in an environment where tenure is no longer a given.
Close Encounters of the Dental Kind
After an unplanned visit to an American dentist, Robert Dingwall reflects on the power and the role of the case study
Lessons from the LaCour Retraction
We need honest researchers who monitor their own behavior; we need to have scrutiny by other researchers in the field; and we need an engaged public. But what do we have, asks Judith Stark.
The Tragedy of the (Over-Surveyed) Commons
If Garrett Hardin were with us today, argues Rob Brooks, he would have saved a special place on the degraded commons to relegate those who inflict upon us all the burden of collecting meaningless data and unheeded opinion.
The Cultural Roots of the Latest Big Retraction
Social psychology has seen more than its fair share of all of ethical lapses, argues Jonathan Borwein, who notes it’s been described as a ‘train wreck.’ What are the deeper causes and implications of this most recent case of fraud in the social sciences?
What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?
Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.
Giving Reviewers Some Credit: The R-index
Peer review is flawed, and a new index proposes a simple way to create transparency and quality control mechanisms. Shane Gero and Maurício Cantor believe that giving citable recognition to reviewers can improve the system by encouraging more participation but also higher quality, constructive input, without the need for a loss of anonymity.
What the H? Explaining That Citation Metric
The appointment of climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg has focused attention on a newish metric for assessing academic importance, the H-Index.
