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 […]
Has COVID Created a ‘Lost Generation’ of Early Career Researchers?
A year ago the potential impact of COVID-19 on precarious early career researchers (ECRs) looked bleak. Reporting on findings from the longitudinal Harbingers 2 project, David Nicholas suggests the effects of COVID-19 on ECR researchers have been varied internationally. Where pressures from the pandemic have been felt most acutely, particularly in the UK, US and France, it has often aligned with perceptions of ongoing structural issues within academia.
In Praise of Those ‘Less Prestigious’ Journals
Shannon Mason and Margaret K. Merga argue that researchers should adopt more careful citation practices, as a means to broaden and contextualise what counts as ‘prestigious’ research and create a more equitable publishing environment for research outside of core anglophone countries.
Getting a Handle on Both Societal and Scientific Impact
In this post, Jorrit Smit and Laurens Hessels, draw on a recent analysis of different impact evaluation tools to explore how they constitute and direct conceptions of research impact. Finding a common separation between evaluation focused on scientific and societal impact, they suggest bridging this divide may prove beneficial to producing research that has public value, rather than research that achieves particular metrics.
Does Research Being in a Review Article Cannibalize Your Citations?
Review papers play a significant role in curating the scholarly record. Drawing on a study of close to six million research articles, Peter McMahan, shows how review papers not only focus and shift attention onto particular papers, but also serve to shape entire research domains by linking them together and outlining core concepts. As such, the constitutive role of review papers and those who write them warrant further attention.
Paths from a PhD to the Private Sector
The impact of the pandemic on all sectors is only beginning to emerge and given the need for greater flexibility, adaptability and […]
Impact Looks Different Across Disciplines So Let’s Acknowledge That
Drawing on a linguistic analysis of REF Impact statements from 2014, Andrea Bonaccorsi, highlights key differences between statements being made by scholars in STEM and SSH disciplines and suggests differences in the causality of impact between the disciplines warrant a reconsideration of how these statements are produced and judged.
Can We Encourage Public Self-Correction in the Scientific Record?
Correcting mistakes in light of new data and updating findings to reflect this is often considered to be a key characteristic of scientific research. Commenting on the ‘Loss-of-Confidence Project’, a study into self-correction amongst psychologists, Julia M. Rohrer, suggests that in practice self-correction of published research is, infrequent, difficult to achieve and perceived to come with reputational costs. However, by reframing and changing the static nature of academic publications, it may be possible to develop a research culture more conducive to self-correction.
We Know More Than What is Measured About Gender Inequality in Academia
In academia gender bias is often figured in terms of research productivity and differentials surrounding the academic work of men and women. Alesia Zuccala and Gemma Derrick posit that this outlook inherently ignores a wider set of variables impacting women, and that attempts to achieve cultural change in academia can only be realised, by acknowledging variables that are ultimately difficult to quantify.
