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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?
Behind the fall of David Sabatini, 'one of the greatest scientists' of his generation.
The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined the importance of scientific advice to modern policymaking. But how can the use of expertise in politics be aligned with the needs and values of the public?
In After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, Bruno Latour explores how the experience of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic has led us to better understand our connections with other living beings, in ways that might be conducive to confronting our climate crisis. This book will be of interest to anyone wanting to explore the philosophical meanings of lockdowns, Gaia theories and climate politics.
There was a collective sigh of relief when it was announced that the UK would commit to Association for Horizon Europe. We knew the details had to be worked out
How can libraries help to prevent tracking in science, thereby protecting the data of the researchers and, in an idealistic sense, scientific freedom?
Social mobility champions are accused of having ‘lost focus on the role that a socially mobile society should have in matching all members of society into occupations and roles which they are suited for and enjoy, and at which they excel.’ Indeed, they give little attention to ‘the actual aspirations and ambitions of real people’.
This post argues that for academic books to be genuinely open, an emphasis should be placed on collective funding models that limit the prospect of new barriers to access being erected through the imposition of expensive book processing charges (BPCs).
Australia’s ERA and EIA research assessment exercises lack a clearly defined purpose, or return on investment for Australian universities. In a climate of declining trust in the Australian Research Council, together with a confused idea about how research should be funded, the assessment regime itself is at a critical point of juncture.
It is good that the authors of HEPI’s report ‘Regional Policy and R&D’ note that the UK, by most agreed measures, is significantly unbalanced economically (in terms of income, productivity and economic growth).
Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives.
This is the midweek edition of Culture Study - the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Subscribers: If you haven't activated your invitation to Sidechannel, email me for a new one! Along with
Design your hiring process to find the right people to strengthen your teams' weaknesses, rather than trying to find the best people. Instead of "how can we find the smartest people?" think about "how can we find the people who will make our team stronger?"
Correcting mistakes and updating findings is often considered to be a key characteristic of scientific research. In practice, self-correction of published research is infrequent, difficult to achieve, and perceived to come with reputational costs.
Quickly sharing the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus in early 2020 made all the difference in the response to the pandemic.
Rankings are artificial zero-sum games. Artificial because they force a strict hierarchy upon universities. Artificial also because it is not realistic that a university can only improve its reputation for performance exclusively at the expense of other universities’ reputations.
Looking for a research paper but can't find a copy in your library's catalog or popular search engines? Give Internet Archive Scholar a try! We might have a PDF from a "vanished" Open Access publisher in our web archive, an author's pre-publication manuscript from their archived faculty webpage.
The UK Publisher's Association has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to the publishing sector.
