AI is forecast to become increasingly central to many aspects of life and work. The same trends can also be detected in research. Drawing on a recent study of expert perceptions of AI uses in research and taking the recently launched tl;dr tool as a sa…
Category: research communication
Wikipedia is open to all, the research underpinning it should be too.
Often thought of as ‘the last good place on the internet’, Wikipedia plays a key role in the online information ecosystem by linking its entries to current and historic research papers. But, after following these links, how much of this res…
2021 In Review: Evidence for Policy
The need to link research based evidence to policy has arguably been more urgent and important in the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic than it has ever been before. In the first of a series of review posts, we have brought together a selection o…
An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously
A significant impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on academic life has been the way in which it has necessitated almost all traditional features of academic work to be mediated via screens. What is less frequently remarked on is how this ‘pivot to digital’ ma…
Mobilising Historical Knowledge without Master Narratives: How historians are correcting the record in a complicated political moment
Across the world and particularly in the USA, historical evidence has become increasingly central to certain contemporary political and policy debates. Drawing on a survey of US media sources, Dustin Hornbeck and Joel Malin, discuss this trend and desc…
Multilingualism is integral to accessibility and should be part of European research assessment reform
Developing research systems that promote diverse, multilingual and relevant research for different audiences is a key and often overlooked element in making research accessible. However, biases in traditional research assessment often place researchers…
Book Review: Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent by Juan Meneses
In Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent, Juan Meneses questions the assumption that dialogue is an inherent good, exploring how it can be deliberately used as a depoliticising force to eliminate dissent. Weaving together politic…
Book Review: Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough by Holly Jean Buck
In Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough, Holly Jean Buck argues that the framework of net zero and its concentration on emissions diverts public and policy attention from the fundamental task of ending the use of fossil fuels to ensure effec…
Time, Finances, Confidence, Knowledge – Research communicators should be attentive to the resource inequalities inherent to academia
Funding for research communication is a growing feature of grant applications and whilst digital scholarship may have started as an individual undertaking, it is now a mainstream and, in some instances, commercial activity. Commenting on how research c…
A step-by-step guide for using Wikipedia for research communication
The Wikipedia community has become a source of information for a broad and global public. Paul Börsting and Maximilian Heimstädt argue that contributing to the encyclopedia as a scholar can be a powerful way of achieving a strong societal impact of the…