2019 has seen an increased focus on the ways in which different national and international research systems function and how they can be improved. This post brings together some of the top posts on the theme of research on research that have featured on the LSE Impact Blog during 2019. Pushing research to the limit – Who innovates in social […]
Category: peer review
Old-fashioned peer review is still seen as the best way to allocate grants, but reviewers deserve greater recognition
The allocation of research funding on the basis of peer review has recently come under scrutiny, due to the difficulty of assessing the difference between growing numbers of high quality applications. Presenting evidence from a large-scale survey of academics involved in the peer review of grant applications, James Hardcastle argues that academics largely see peer review as the best mechanism […]
Is our current research culture on the brink of major change?
The culture of research often appears timeless and self-evident. Despite the current system of research being critiqued for its lack of openness, diversity and at times quality, it has remained largely unchanged for at least a generation. In this post, Liz Allen, highlights how contrary to this view, a growing number of developments are currently taking place across different countries […]
Academic review promotion and tenure documents promote a view of open access that is at odds with the wider academic community
A critical issue for advocates of Open Access (OA) has been the persistent lack of institutional incentives for academics to engage with Open Access publishing. Drawing on their research into Review, Promotion and Tenure documents, a team at the Scholarly Communications Lab, including Juan Pablo Alperin, Esteban Morales and Erin McKiernan argue that when these key documents for research assessment […]
Peer review is not just quality control, it is part of the social infrastructure of research
The purpose of peer review is often portrayed as being a simple ‘objective’ test of the soundness or quality of a research paper. However, it also performs other functions primarily through linking and developing relationships between networks of researchers. In this post, Flaminio Squazzoni explores these interconnections and argues that to understand peer review as simply an exercise in quality […]
Self-organising peer review for preprints – A future paradigm for scholarly publishing
Preprints – rapidly published non peer reviewed research articles – are becoming an increasingly common fixture in scholarly communication. However, without being peer reviewed they serve a limited function, as they are often not recognised as high quality research publications. In this post Wang LingFeng discusses how the development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of […]
The careers of carers – A numerical adjustment cannot level the playing field for researchers who take time off to care for children
Quantitative measures of the effect of caring for children on research outputs (published papers and citations) have been used by some universities as a tool to address gender bias in academic grant and job applications. In this post Adrian Barnett argues that these adjustments fail to capture the real impacts of caring for children and should be replaced with contextual […]
Dealing with Rejection in Academia
In this repost, Staci Zavattaro, reflects on rejection in academia and gives 6 tips on how to manage the inevitable rejections that are part of academic life. This post originally appeared on Regions eZine. I just graduated from my doctoral program and was attending my discipline’s annual conference. That week, I had gotten several papers rejected in a row. Back […]
Are altmetrics able to measure societal impact in a similar way to peer review?
Altmetrics have become an increasingly ubiquitous part of scholarly communication, although the value they indicate is contested. In this post, Lutz Bornmann and Robin Haunschild present evidence from their recent study examining the relationship of peer review, altmetrics, and bibliometric analyses with societal and academic impact. Drawing on evidence from REF2014 submissions, they argue altmetrics may provide evidence for wider […]
Gender bias in peer review – Opening up the black box II
In their previous post, Alex Holmes and Sally Hardy examined the results of research undertaken by the Regional Studies Association on the relationship between author gender and peer review outcomes in their flagship journal Regional Studies. Digging deeper into these findings, in this post, they assess the effect of gender on naming order in journals, peer reviewing and editorial processes. […]