Attempts to quantify academic contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals might miss the mark.

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 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.

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 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. 

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.

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

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.