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 […]
Introduction: Academic Freedom in Crisis
An introduction to a series of short essays exploring contemporary issues of academic freedom from a range of perspectives, focusing both on British and international trends.
Good Replication Standards Start With the Data
How can we create reliable and replicable political science data? A recent article in the ‘American Political Science Review’ focuses on text analysis and suggests ways to make these data sound and reproducible.
University Decolonization: More Than Mere Iconoclasm
The decolonization debate in African universities raises critical issues about the relationship between power, knowledge and learning, argues Ahmed Essop. It also provides an opportunity to rethink the role of universities in social and economic development and in fashioning a common nation.
Does Competition Make Peer Review More Unfair?
Researchers decided to conduct behavioral testing on competition and the process of peer review. What they learned offers some prescriptions for improving peer review going forward.
Two Decades After Sokal, Is Academic Writing Any Better?
Many academics still operate under the flawed logic that good writing must be complex writing (or vice versa).
Brexit: Well-Behaved Liberals Seldom Change History
As Ian McBride has commented in The Guardian, one of the strange features of Britain’s EU referendum is the resignation with which […]
Multiplying Social Divisions: The Psychology of Us, Them and Rivalrous Cohesion Following the EU Referendum
As well as beginning the long and painful divorce with the European Union, Dominic Abrams and Giovanni A. Travaglino say about Brexit, the United Kingdom is also entering a social space with very different, and very worrying, future dominated by what they term ‘rivalrous cohesion.’
The Challenge of Regulating Research to Avoid Fraud
The more brazen the willingness to commit academic fraud, the harder it becomes to prevent, suggests Ian Freckelton. So while there is a role for codes of conduct or even criminal courts, finding ways to push temptation to deceive even further out of mind will likeley prove even more successful.
