ScienceGeist

Reflecting on historical analyses of the developments in British science policy over the last 100 years to identify insights, trends, and implications for policymakers today.

One graduate student explains the importance of the global climate strike.

The publisher is scrutinizing researchers who might be inappropriately using the review process to promote their own work.

Respondents to a Nature poll want to make their own decisions about how to interpret citation metrics. That requires data to be freely accessible.

Citation metrics are widely used and misused. This Community Page article presents a publicly available database that provides standardized information on multiple citation indicators and a composite thereof, annotating each author according to his/her main scientific field(s).

Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf kick off the fifth annual Peer Review Week with their thoughts on defining quality in peer review principles and practices.

Machine-learning systems are black boxes even to the researchers that build them. That makes it hard for others to assess the results.

Researchers should learn to travel better to mitigate their climate impacts. Institutions can help by facilitating and rewarding sustainable travel behaviour, rather than fuelling the pressure to attend conferences, say Olivier Hamant, Timothy Saunders and Virgile Viasnoff.

Universities are increasingly evaluated, both internally and externally on the basis of their outputs. Often these are converted to simple, and frequently contested, rankings based on quantitative analysis of those outputs. These rankings can have substantial implications for student and staff recruitment, research income and perceived prestige of a university. Both internal and external analyses usually rely on a single data source to define the set of outputs assigned to a specific university.

Citation of Italian-authored papers by Italian researchers rose after the introduction of metrics-based thresholds for promotions.

EU-backed research projects were slashed after Switzerland voted to curb immigration. The UK should take note.

The Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Global Sprint was held online over the course of two-days (29-30 November 2018), where participants from around the world were invited to develop brief guides (stand alone, self paced training materials), called "Things", that can be used by the research community to understand FAIR in different contexts as well as some initial steps to consider.

There have been big declines in the proportion of humanities and social science papers published in Norwegian, conference told

The incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, nominated Bulgaria's Mariya Gabriel to take charge of research, innovation and education, but has scotched research from the name of the brief for the first time, relabelling it the 'Innovation and Youth' portfolio.

What happened when Jeffrey Epstein funded science and tech? Women were excluded.

Graphics are becoming increasingly important for scientists to effectively communicate their findings to broad audiences, but most researchers lack expertise in visual media.

"My family didn't understand the internship process or why I wasn’t getting paid yet. That causes some psychological distress."

For interdisciplinary projects to flourish, scientists must recognise the potential contribution of other disciplines in answering key research questions. Recent research suggested that social sciences may be appreciated less than hard sciences overall.

The financial strain of having a baby during her Ph.D. put this researcher's career in jeopardy.

SAGE Publishing is today retracting 22 articles by a materials science researcher who published in two of their journals - but the anonymous reader who brought the problems to their attention…

It's no secret that retractions have a stigma, which is very likely part of why authors often resist the move - even when honest error is involved.

Concerns include declining volume, slower publication, and softening citation measures.

The release in September 2018 of Plan S has led many small and society publishers to examine their business models, and in particular ways to transform their journals from hybrids into pure Open Access (OA) titles. This paper explores one means by which a society publisher might transform.

ETH rector says academia should focus on 'excellent performances', not quantity of research.

Presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged in separate announcements this week that their connections to financier Jeffrey Epstein went deeper than previously revealed, further entangling the elite institutions with a donor who was a convicted sex offender.

Reviewing and accepting study plans before results are known can counter perverse incentives. Chris Chambers sets out three ways to improve the approach.

Article proposes a new inwardness indicator able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country. A comparative analysis of the trends for the G10 countries in the years 2000-2016 reveals a net increase of the Italian inwardness.

The UK government’s announcement of its plans to offer extended post-study work visas for international graduates of UK universities has received an unusual response - unalloyed praise from the higher education sector.

Brian Schmidt says academia is losing brightest researchers because they cannot endure 'intolerable' precarity throughout their thirties

The acting chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) is investigating whether the agency's response to President Trump's claims about Hurricane Dorian constituted a violation of policies and ethics.