In little more than a year a number of peer reviewer training programmes have launched, promising to help early-career researchers learn how to do peer review, review more efficiently, and connect with editors at top journals. This follows an expressed need from graduate students and postdocs for precisely this sort of training. But can these new programmes deliver? And as many […]
Category: Featured
Gender and advancement in higher education’s prestige economy
What does it take to climb the career ladder in UK academia? And who gets to the top? Camille B. Kandiko Howson reports on research that highlights the role of prestige and “indicators of esteem” in hiring and promotion decisions. Prestige is found to be a gendered concept, with the indicators of esteem – publication rates, first author status, keynote […]
Writing a page-turner: how to tell a story in your scientific paper
People love stories. We watch, read, tell, and listen to stories every day. Despite this, most researchers don’t think in terms of story when they write a journal paper. To Anna Clemens, that’s a missed opportunity, because storytelling is easy to implement in your manuscript provided you know how. Think of the six plot elements – character, setting, tension, action, […]
How to keep up to date with the literature but avoid information overload
The sheer number of online services and social media platforms available to academics makes it possible to receive a constant stream of information about newly published research. However, much of this may serve only as a distraction from your research and staying on top of it all can even come to feel like a burden. Anne-Wil Harzing offers some simple advice […]
Research on gender bias receives less attention than research on other types of bias
Bias against women in academia is well-documented. Not only are female scientists underrepresented in academic institutions, particularly in higher ranks, but there are also certain studies that include only male participants, thereby producing biased knowledge. Magdalena Formanowicz, Aleksandra Cislak and Tamar Saguy have studied another form of gender bias among scientists: bias against research on gender bias. Research on gender […]
Announcing LSE Press – a new open access publishing platform for the social sciences
LSE Press launches today, the latest in a succession of new university press initiatives and one that will support the development of high-quality, academic-led, open access publications in the social sciences. Kieran Booluck provides details of the first LSE Press journal and outlines plans for the press to pursue more innovative publications and experiment with new types of content. Today […]
Developing international guidelines for an effective process of research impact assessment
Governments, funding agencies, and research organisations all over the world are now committed to measuring the impact of research beyond academic publications. Accordingly, a multidisciplinary practice called research impact assessment is rapidly developing. However, this practice remains in its formative stages and so no systematised recommendations or accepted standards to guide researchers and practitioners are currently available. Pavel Ovseiko, Paula […]
The academic papers researchers regard as significant are not those that are highly cited
For many years, academia has relied on citation count as the main way to measure the impact or importance of research, informing metrics such as the Impact Factor and the h-index. But how well do these metrics actually align with researchers’ subjective evaluation of impact and significance? Rachel Borchardt and Matthew R. Hartings report on a study that compares researchers’ […]
How to design an award-winning conference poster
A good academic conference poster serves a dual purpose: it is both an effective networking tool and a means by which to articulately communicate your research. But many academics fail to produce a truly visually arresting conference poster and so opportunities to garner interest and make connections are lost. Tullio Rossi offers guidance on how to produce an outstanding conference poster, considering […]
Conflicting academic attitudes to copyright are slowing the move to open access
Where previously authors would typically assign rights in a scholarly work to an academic publisher, the open access movement has prompted a shift towards retention of rights and the use of creative commons licenses to control how works are used by publishers. This shift has the support of research funders, whose policies seek to ensure the widest possible readership. Francis […]