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The link between trust and relatability is important to good science communication.
Last year saw significant changes in data protections laws across Europe, the UK and the USA, which have created a more complex, but GDPR aligned regulatory environment for researchers.
Strong evidence suggests that women are not cited less per article than men, but that they accumulate fewer citations over time and at the career level. Cary Wu argues that a focus on research productivity is key to understanding and closing the gender citation gap.
Open peer review is often discussed more in theory than practice. Drawing on evidence from a recent systematic review of open peer review studies, Tony Ross-Hellauer and Serge P.J.M. Horbach find many persistent questions around open peer review remain poorly examined and call for a more experimental approach to open peer review practices.
What are the conditions under which a policymaker is justified in claiming that a given policy is evidence-based?
Drawing on insights from a recent international survey on research integrity and a recent high-profile case, Nick Allum and Robin Brooker find previous work on scientific plagiarism may have underestimated its prevalence.
Research data repositories play a vital role in ensuring research is reproducible, replicable and reusable. Yet, the infrastructure supporting them can be impermanent.
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.
