Essential 'how-to' Guides, Featured, free, Impact, impact guidelines, International School on Research Impact Assessment, ISIRA, measuring impact, REF, research impact assessment, Research policy, RIA

Developing international guidelines for an effective process of research impact assessment

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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 […]

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Altmetrics, Citations, Evidence-based Research, Featured, free, h-index, Impact, impact factor, metrics, Rankings, research impact, research quality, significant research

The academic papers researchers regard as significant are not those that are highly cited

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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’ […]

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Book Reviews, free, gender in academia, gender reckoning, gender studies, Patricia Fara, suffrage, Women in Academia, women in research, women researcher

Book Review: A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War by Patricia Fara

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In A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War, Patricia Fara follows the trajectories of women scientists during World War One, describing their struggles in academia and laboratories in tandem with the battle for the vote and the war unfolding across various fronts. Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche praises the book for its complex and nuanced account of the changing status of […]

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academic, academic communicatino, Academic communication, comms, conference, Early career researchers, ECRchat, Featured, free, PhD advice, PhDchat, poster, research communication, Resources, sci comms, science communications

How to design an award-winning conference poster

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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 […]

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Academic Publishing, author rights, CC-BY, Copyright, copyright literacy, copyright policy, Creative Commons, Featured, free, gold OA, green OA, open access, open science, Research policy, scholarly publishing

Conflicting academic attitudes to copyright are slowing the move to open access

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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 […]

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China, China research, China STEM, China's economic transition, Chinese research, Featured, free, Government, knowledge economy, R&D, R&I, research and development, research and innovation, research evaluation, Research policy, S&T, science and technology

For China to realise its research and innovation potential the government may have to place greater trust in the academic community

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After three decades of being the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, China is now looking to science and technology to drive its economic future. However, a recent study suggests that China’s higher education research environment faces numerous challenges that may hinder the country from realising its research and innovation potential; from the promotion of short-term thinking, to an excessive level of bureaucratic […]

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