Lack of rigour is often blamed on pressure to publish. But ethnographers can find out what truly keeps science from upping its game.

The articles presented here range from broad views on climate change governance in agroforestry systems and insights from climate-funded food system projects, to the nationally specific, exploring regulatory contexts in the UK, China, and Mexico. 

On 25 November 2021, Science Europe releases a vision for Research Culture in the European Research Area (ERA) and commits to collective actions that enable a thriving research system. 

A 2018 study suggested the ocean surrounding Antarctica might be taking up less CO₂ than thought, but new data suggest it is still a carbon sink.

This Handbook aims to provide a practical resource for funders looking to move further or faster down the experimental path.

By design, our results are very likely to be under-estimates as they reflect only a portion of the total number of journals worldwide. The numbers highlight the enormous amount of work and time that researchers provide to the publication system, and the importance of considering alternative ways of …

This is the first scientometric study of the performance of social science research on COVID-19. It provides insight into the landscape, the research fields, and international collaboration in this domain. The results are useful for finding potential collaborators and for identifying the frontier and gaps in social science research on COVID-19 to shape future studies.

The emergence of the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 led to explosive growth in scientific research. Given the high stakes of the situation, it is essential that scientific findings, on which good policy depends, are as robust as possible; as the empirical example shows, reproducibility is one of the keys to ensure this.

Transdisciplinary research is increasingly seen as critical for advancing climate change adaptation. Operationalizing transdisciplinary research in the global South, however, confronts ingrained cultural and systemic barriers to participatory research.

A new book recasts human social evolution as multiple experiments with freedom and domination that started in the Stone Age.

New computer simulations predict deep changes in growing conditions affecting the productivity of major crops already within the next 10 years if current global warming trends continue. 

Academic CVs are ubiquitous and play an integral role in the assessment of researchers. They define and portray what activities and achievements are considered important in the scientific system. 

Birdsong has long connected humans to nature. Historical reconstructions using bird monitoring and song recordings collected by citizen scientists reveal that the soundscape of birdsong in North America and Europe is both quieter and less varied, mirroring declines in bird diversity and abundance.

Universities and graduate institutions must adapt to meet the increasing demand for STEM laborers in non-academic sectors and provide relevant and robust training to their students.

Article: Towards Globally Unique Identification of Physical Samples: Governance and Technical Implementation of the IGSN Global Sample Number

Problems with effective research data sharing persist and these problems have been quantified by previous research as a lack of time, resources, incentives, and/or skills to share data.

Global travelers, whether tourists or secret agents, are exposed to infectious agents. We hypothesized that agents pre-occupied with espionage and counterterrorism may, at their peril, fail to correctly prioritize travel medicine.

The pandemic has caused disruption to many aspects of scientific research. In this Comment the authors describe the findings from surveys of scientists between April 2020 and January 2021, which suggests there was a decline in new projects started in that time.

This paper presents the application profile for machine-actionable data management plans that allows information from traditional data management plans to be expressed in a machine-actionable way.

Results suggest that boosting vaccinated individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines will increase plasma neutralizing activity but may not produce antibodies with equivalent breadth to those obtained by vaccinating convalescent individuals.

Research and development are central to economic growth, and a key challenge for countries of the global South is that their research performance lags behind that of the global North. Yet, among Southern researchers, a few significantly outperform their peers and can be styled research "positive deviants" (PDs). This paper asks: who are those PDs, what are their characteristics and how are they able to overcome some of the challenges facing researchers in the global South? 

One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. This study's findings show that neither the impact factor of citing journals nor the size of cited journals is a good predictor of the number of citations to the questionable journals.

The question of whether and to what extent research funding enables researchers to be more productive is a crucial one. In their recent work, Mariethoz et al. (Scientometrics, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03.855-1 ) claim that there is no significant relationship between project-based research funding and bibliometric productivity measures and conclude that this is the result of inappropriate allocation mechanisms. In this rejoinder, we argue that such claims are not supported by the data and analyses reported in the article.

Summary of a talk at the 2021 OASPA Conference, with the title OpenCitations - what does the future hold.

FULL TEXT.  Requiring undergraduate students to perform what is termed original research for their thesis, an investigation that cannot constitute a replication of an existing study, is a failed opportunity for science and education, argues Daniel Quintana.

Requiring undergraduate students to perform what is termed original research for their thesis, an investigation that cannot constitute a replication of an existing study, is a failed opportunity for science and education.

The detection and removal of poor-quality data in a training set is crucial to achieve high-performing AI models. In healthcare, data can be inherently poor-quality due to uncertainty or subjectivity, but as is often the case, the requirement for data privacy restricts AI practitioners from accessing raw training data, meaning manual visual verification of private patient data is not possible. Here we describe a novel method for automated identification of poor-quality data, called Untrainable Data Cleansing. This method is shown to have numerous benefits including protection of private patient data; improvement in AI generalizability; reduction in time, cost, and data needed for training; all while offering a truer reporting of AI performance itself. Additionally, results show that Untrainable Data Cleansing could be useful as a triage tool to identify difficult clinical cases that may warrant in-depth evaluation or additional testing to support a diagnosis.

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. This article looks at a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration.