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This study identifies unusual growth in scientific correspondence after the widespread adoption of generative AI and suggests that AI may be contributing to publication inflation in a format that is citable, lightly regulated and often not peer reviewed.
Current assessment systems rely heavily on bibliometric indicators such as publication counts, co-authorship, and citation metrics, which do not reliably reflect research quality or scientific rigor.
Background Peer review-based funding evaluation systems are under increasing pressure. To help alleviate this, innovative approaches like Distributed Peer Review (DPR) are being explored.
An open access book mandate is one Research Excellence Framework (REF) cycle away. If implemented, research funders should focus on enabling infrastructure rather than compliance.
Institutional definitions of research impact align poorly with the practices and values of staff. Could a focus on research value lead to better outcomes?
Artificial intelligence is helping to advance science, but it could also add to stress on the research system by generating ever more papers and grant applications, an AI expert at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has warned.
Generative AI is already being used by some universities to assess the quality of their research - and it could be scaled up to help all higher education institutions save huge amounts of time and money.
REF should be central to solving the collective action problems around openness, transparency, and accountability in research.
A new study explores how narrative CVs are reshaping research evaluation and academic representation.
One-size-fits-all approach gives fluent writing an outsize role in research success.
Measures intended to encourage openness are clashing with efforts to reform assessment
Reform efforts may need to reconsider the usefulness of value-led strategies.
Arguing about research assessment has been a central feature of seventy-five years of higher education policy.
In this small randomized trial, research funding did not have a clear impact on researcher productivity. However, the expanded use of modified lotteries in the allocation of grant funding has the potential to revolutionize the measurement of research productivity.
Embracing uncertainty could improve peer review processes.
Research assessments regularly focus on outstanding and unique achievements, rather than the everyday failures and disappointments associated with academic work. Discussing a recent self-assessment and annual research report at Maastricht University that took a more candid approach to failure, Sally Wyatt suggests that research culture can benefit from a more realistic appraisal of failure.
Fifteen national groups coordinating researcher assessment reform hold first meeting in Portugal
I wasn’t surprised to learn I hadn’t been selected for a prestigious postdoc fellowship. I had applied mostly hoping for feedback that would improve my application the following year. But comments from two reviewers made me rethink my plan to apply again—and even whether to continue in academia.
Gender differences in research funding exist but bias evidence is elusive and findings are contradictory. Contrary to some previous research, a new study found no evidence that male or female PIs received significantly different scores.
Peer review is, at heart, a process of validation - but how do you learn to peer review?
While some worry "wokeist" ideology could corrupt scientific merit, it could be our problematic understanding of the latter that poses an even greater threat to science, two philosophers argue.
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.
