Academics are required to not only find effective ways to communicate their research, but also to increasingly measure and quantify its quality, impact and reach. In Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know, Rick Anderson puts us in the picture. And in Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know, Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Lariviere critically assess over 20 tools currently available for evaluating the quality […]
Category: research communication
Don’t be a giraffe – How to avoid trolls on academic social media
Social media has acquired a reputation for being a highly polarised and argumentative public sphere. Whereas, the vast majority of academic social media is generally good natured, it can also be plagued by bad actors. In this post, Andy Tattersall shares a number of simple measures and tips on how to deal with the dark side of social media. When […]
Negative Impact – Is it possible to manage potentially harmful research findings?
What do you do with research that produces potentially harmful results? In this post Andrew Crane, explores how research can produce negative as well as positive impacts on society and discusses how his own research group has approached dealing with the complex issue of ‘negative impact’. “If you put these things in your report it will kill our industry”. The […]
The value of a journal is the community it creates, not the papers it publishes
When we think about the value of journal publishing, we have a tendency to think in terms of costs per article and the potential for new technologies to reduce these costs. In this post, Lucy Montgomery and Cameron Neylon argue that we should instead focus on the social life of journals and the knowledge communities they sustain. Taking this as […]
How diverse is your reading list? (Probably not very…)
The dominance of scholars from the global North is widespread, and this extends to the student curriculum. Data on reading lists shows large authorial imbalances, which has consequences for the methodological tools available in research and allows dominant paradigms in disciplines to remain unchallenged. This post originally appeared on the Citing Africa Blog and is accompanied by a series of podcasts on […]
Beware the well-intentioned advice of unusually successful academics
There is a wealth of advice and ‘how to’ guides available to academics on the subject of how research can have an impact on policy and practice. In this post Kathryn Oliver and Paul Cairney assess the value of this literature, arguing that unless researchers seek to situate research impact within processes of policymaking and academic knowledge production, this advice […]
Plan S and the Global South – What do countries in the Global South stand to gain from signing up to Europe’s open access strategy?
Plan S raises challenging questions for the Global South. Even if Plan S fails to achieve its objectives the growing determination in Europe to trigger a “global flip” to open access suggests developing countries will have to develop an alternative strategy. In this post Richard Poynder asks: what might that strategy be? Announced last year, Plan S is an initiative […]
Plan S – Time to decide what we stand for
Reflecting on the recent consultation period for Plan S, a funder led proposal for achieving universal open access to research papers, Jon Tennant argues that whereas, the consultation has in many ways followed the contours of previous OA debates, OA has now become an unavoidable part of academic life and has moved into the mainstream. For this reason, he argues […]
Think. Check. Attend. Your guide to avoiding predatory conferences
Predatory conferences (conferences promoted to fraudulently make money from attendance fees) are becoming an increasingly common part of academic life. In this post, Mohamad Mostafa presents the Think. Check. Attend. initiative, which provides academics with an easy to use checklist to ascertain if a conference is legitimate or predatory. As an academic, you have probably received many invitation emails asking […]
Think. Check. Attend. Your guide to avoiding predatory conferences
Predatory conferences (conferences promoted to fraudulently make money from attendance fees) are becoming an increasingly common part of academic life. In this post, Mohamad Mostafa presents the Think. Check. Attend. initiative, which provides academics with an easy to use checklist to ascertain if a conference is legitimate or predatory. As an academic, you have probably received many invitation emails asking […]