Author: Taster

What are social structural explanations?

Social structures are often invoked as the cause of various problems in society. In this post, Lauren N. Ross discusses how social structural causes can be understood as constraints and why clarity on this point is not just a problem of definition, but…

What 40,000 job adverts say about academic career progression

Discussing the findings of a study of over 40,000 academic job ads, Lilia Mantai and Mauricio Marrone, highlight how the skills required for academic progression differ over career stage and geography. The skills required to progress from PhD to profes…

The Possibilities of Nostalgia for Academic Freedom

The word nostalgia connects a sense return and homecoming with sadness, and was originally used in a medical sense to describe the melancholy felt by soldiers fighting away from home. In this post Mary Evans considers how nostalgia for a past academy p…

Beyond Web of Science and Scopus there is already an open bibliodiverse world of research – We ignore it at our peril

Discussing their analysis of a new dataset of journals published via the Open Journals Systems publishing platform, Saurabh Khanna, Jon Ball, Juan Pablo Alperin and John Willinsky  argue that rather than being an aspiration an open, regional and biblio…

University rankings and their critics – a symbiotic relationship?

Despite being the focus of sustained critique university rankings have proven a resilient feature of academic life. Considering the recent moves by U.S. institutions to remove themselves from rankings, Julian Hamann and Leopold Ringel explore this rela…

Who should take responsibility for integrity in research?

Reflecting on comparisons with the US and the results of the recent International Research Integrity Survey (IRIS), George Gaskell, Nick Allum, Miriam Bidoglia and Abigail-Kate Reid argue that robust research integrity cultures depend on support from d…

Transformation by design or by disaster – Why we need more transformative research now

Global society is beset with many ‘wicked problems’ that are unlikely to be resolved by traditional disciplinary research methods. In this post, Kristina Bogner, Michael P. Schlaile and Sophie Urmetzer discuss the concept of transformative research and…

ChatGPT will not replace Google Search

As speculation mounts that ChatGPT might replace Google Search, Tristan Greene cuts through the hype, arguing ChatGPT at present cannot replicate Google’s search function – “Saying ChatGPT will replace search is like saying podcasts w…