Science thrives on an open exchange of arguments and a plurality of perspectives. Scientific discussions should be open, frank and blind: only arguments should matter, not who presents them. Different viewpoints strengthen the scientific debate, and the inclusion of women and minorities in science will only contribute to this. Understanding the role of gender in science is crucial for improving the representation of women.
RRI & OS: two co-existing sets of ambitions Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science (OS) are two co-existing sets of ambitions concerning systemic change in the research and innovation (R&I) system. Initially, RRI and OS may appear to align well.
‘Convergence’ as knowledge integration for grappling with societal challenges Last October the US National Academies held a workshop (available here) to gather views on how to better measure and assess the implications of interdisciplinarity, or convergence, for research and innovation.
Interdisciplinary research for addressing societal problems In this blog I will share some thoughts developed for and during a fantastic workshop (available here) held last October by the US National Academies to help the National Science Foundation (NSF) set an agenda on how to better measure and assess the implications of interdisciplinarity (or convergence) for research and innovation.
When Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a researcher at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, stumbled upon the Twitter feed STS Title Bot, he was immediately struck by its creativity and effortless verisimilitude. Despite being generated by an automated algorithm that has apparently been fed with data obtained through text mining, many titles could easily pass for actual publications in major STS journals.
In this blog post we discuss recent findings on the relation between career trajectories and task specialization. Research careers are commonly envisioned in evaluation schemes as homogeneous pathways in which individuals have to take a series of steps to advance.
The use of metrics is a hot topic in science, and scholars have criticized metrics for being more driven by data than by judgements. Both the Leiden Manifesto and the DORA-declaration, signed by thousands of organizations and individuals, have expressed concerns about the use of metrics on individuals.
As my latest research reveals, the prestige of a book publisher yields points for getting government funding, not only in my home country Lithuania, but also in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and other countries.
Online or offline? Where to begin? In the spring of this year – right as Europe’s “first wave” hit – we started thinking about how to organise our second-ever research retreat. We considered several options. The preference was to once again organise the research retreat on the location of a beautiful repurposed monastery in the province of Noord-Brabant, like it was last year, this time keeping the 1.5 metres distance rule in mind.
*This is the last blog post on the Evaluative Inquiry, the new approach to research evaluation that CWTS has been developing since 2017, following one on broadening the concept of academic value ,**evaluating research in context * and mixing methods . In evaluations of any kind people often distinguish between summative and formative evaluations (see for example the classic Evaluator’s Handbook from