Social, Behavioral Scientists Eligible to Apply for NSF S-STEM Grants
Solicitations are now being sought for the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, and in an unheralded […]
We need more research that analyzes the relationship between university rankings, citation indexes, and academic publishers, argues Michelle L. Stack.
The reference section of an academic work is more complex than you might think. The references not only provide validity to one’s […]
The eternal conflict between the abstract and the applicable haunts the halls of many business schools. One way to help close the gap between research and practice is to re-examine how ‘impact’ is measured in the field.
Routledge’s Terry Clague sheds reasonable doubt on the assertion that contributing to edited book chapters is”akin to burying your research.”
There has been much discussion over how useful citation metrics, like Google Scholar’s H-index, really are and to what extent they can be gamed. Specifically there appears to be concern over the practice of self-citation as it varies widely between disciplines. So what should academics make of self-citations? Referring back to our Handbook on Maximising the Impact of Your Research, the Public Policy Group assess the key issues and advise that self-citations by researchers and teams are a perfectly legitimate and relevant aspect of disciplinary practice. But individuals should take care to ensure their own self-citation rate is not above the average for their particular discipline.
This Monday marks the end of the open consultation for HEFCE’s Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment. Steve Fuller argues that academics, especially interdisciplinary scholars, should welcome the opportunity to approach the task of citation differently.
Every now and again a paper is published on the number of errors made in academic articles. These papers document the frequency of conceptual errors, factual errors, errors in abstracts, errors in quotations, and errors in reference lists. James Hartley reports that the data are alarming, but suggests a possible way of reducing them. Perhaps in future there might be a single computer program that matches references in the text with correct (pre-stored) references as one writes the text.
Reports of their death have been exaggerated: a look at the literature finds academic papers are not as uncited as recent reports would have you believe, but don’t start celebrating over the genuine figures.