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Attempts to quantify academic contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals might miss the mark.
The challenges facing social science research are numerous and wicked. Solutions could lie in demonstrating their ability to catalyse STEM research.
Based on a study of how research is cited in national and local media sources, Andy Tattersall shows how research is often poorly represented in the media and suggests better community standards around linking to original research could improve trust in mainstream media.
The rising cost of academic publishing is causing consternation across the research ecosystem and prompting calls in Europe for a transition to not-for-profit publishing models.
The trend for the politically motivated forensic scrutiny of the research records of academics has a chilling effect on academic freedom and distracts from efforts to address more important systemic issues in research integrity.
An analysis of EU funded research shows how inequalities continue to persist within the funding landscape and how attempts to create representative research projects can still reproduce research framed largely by the interests of elite countries and institutions.
When published, bad data can have long lasting negative impacts on research and the wider world. In this post, Rebecca Sear, traces the impact of the national IQ dataset and reflects how its continued use in research highlights the lack of priority given to research integrity.
Drawing on a natural experiment that occurred when German institutions lost access to journals published by Elsevier, W. Benedikt Schmal shows how female researchers made significantly different publication choices to their male counterparts during this period.
Many research projects draw on sources of funding from the corporate world. Fola Adeleke discusses the challenges inherent to this kind of research and outlines three key considerations for researchers engaging with corporate partners.
Is social media in a period of change? David Beer considers whether trends towards repetition and uniformity are prefiguring a new standard for the way in which social media intersects with academic life.
Open data practices are largely conceived and managed in ways that support quantitative, rather than qualitative data. Susie Weller outlines how an ethics of care is essential to making open qualitative data practical and ethical.
How much do the views of scientists and experts count when it comes to securing public support for traffic restrictions?
Peer review is, at heart, a process of validation - but how do you learn to peer review?
The Manhattan Project is often invoked as a model for mission-driven research projects, such as the search for a Covid-19 vaccine. Daniel P. Gross and Bhaven N. Sampat argue that the broader U.S. approach to mobilising science and technology in World War II, led by the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), provides a better analogy for some contemporary R&D problems.
Open science is increasingly becoming a policy focus and paradigm for all scientific research. Ismael Rafols, Ingeborg Meijer and Jordi Molas-Gallart argue that attempts to monitor the transition to open science should be informed by the values underpinning this change, rather than discrete indicators of open science practices.
Reflecting on his role as an academic and member of a research funding organisation, Duncan Green, considers how impact has in some ways still not become embedded in research culture and is often treated a bureaucratic hurdle to overcome.
Kaitlin Thaney argues the current momentum building for “no pays” academic publishing models and establishing the “reasonable costs” of publication, present opportunities to rebalance the inequities, costs, and power dynamics initially bred by the push towards Open Access “at any cost” over the past two decades.
Narrative academic CVs present a means to bypass aspects of a research evaluation culture that is focused on the volume and venue of publications. Drawing on work promoting this format, researchers show how these texts more often foreground the problems they are meant to address, than how the format works in practice.
A decade on since their inception, Andy Tattersall considers how academics can make use of altmetrics in ways that go beyond counts and metrics.
Hyberbolic adjectives have been on the rise in academic writing. A study explores how this persuasive language is deployed across different fields of research
Since its purchase by Elon Musk last year, Twitter has undergone a series of rapid changes, largely with an eye to making the platform profitable. Considering these developments and those on other platforms, Mark Carrigan, suggests that just as academic social media has become relatively mainstream the dynamics underpinning academic engagement on social media have fundamentally shifted towards a pay to play model.
What produces a happy society and a happy life? Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve suggest that through the new science of wellbeing, we can now answer this question empirically. Explaining ho…
This post highlights four different approaches to evidence in policymaking and suggest how researchers and policy organisations might use these findings to engage differently with policy
Reflecting on nearly twenty years of transdisciplinary practice and research and the recent publication of their new book, New Mediums, Better Messages? How Innovations in Translation, Engagement, and Advocacy are Changing International Development, this article considers how the role of popular and vernacular knowledge is essential to international development.
Reporting on their findings from qualitative research project focused PhD students across China, Hugo Horta and Huan Li explore how a culture of publication has become central to doctoral study and…
The authors critically discuss their experience as guest editors for a Frontiers journal. They aim to foster open scholarly debate about Frontiers publishing practices, triggered by Frontiers hindering such debate on their own pages.
It is often taken as a given that higher education shapes the politics of students. However, drawing on evidence from the British Election Study, Tom Fryer finds students' political attitudes do not change radically during their studies.
The role of bibliometrics, such as impact factors and h-indices, in shaping research has been well documented. However, what function do these measures have beyond the institutional contexts in which, for better or worse, they were designed?
The shift to 'open' working across the social sciences as a discipline group entails a welcome but demanding cultural change - but have there been false starts along the way?
