Bold ideas and critical thoughts on science.

Martin Schmidt

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Physics and Astronomy

is 1268 on average with a maximum of 5154 authors in one paper (ATLAS Collaboration et al., 2015). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 58 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (

 n

= 2135) were cited 27 times on average.

Et alia mille

Retraction Watch was launched to provide insights into cases of scientific fraud and grant a window on the retraction process. How does the scientific community react when you publicly report on retractions of scientific papers?

What is the impact of retractions in science?

Elias Koch

Many German scientists are under pressure due to the restriction of the 12-year scientific period (Lang et al., 2020). One has 6 years to submit the doctoral thesis and another 6 years in the postdoctoral phase to apply for a professorial position. Similar to the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, the path of a researcher is adventurous and arduous. Unfortunately, it does not always end happily.

Snails on the chase: How to cope with anxiety in an academic career

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Multidisciplinary

is 3.3 on average with a maximum of 58 authors. The mean number of coauthors is decreasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (

 n

= 1111) were cited 14.5 times on average with a maximum of 348 citations.

Multidisciplinary science – multiple authors?

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Immunology and Microbiology

is 9.7 on average with a maximum of 83 authors.

Small organisms, high citation rates

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Earth and Planetary Sciences

is 8.7 on average with a maximum of 468 authors, which is the fourth highest number across all subject areas in our methodology (see below). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.3 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (

 n

= 2818) were cited 23.4 times on average with

Earth, Environment, and authors

Introduction   In this blog post I dive into the integration of TikTok as a methodological tool for doing ethnographic research on social media influencers.

A Journey from researcher to influencer: TikTok as a methodological tool

Nataliia sokolovska

Can ethics in science be global and why is this topic relevant currently?

One of the main recurrent debates in the Global Ethics research team (GEST) has been whether ethics can be at all “global”. My opinion is that not only it could but it should. Notwithstanding the significant differences that we easily witness in cultural, social norms and behaviour, we are faced with a strongly interconnected and interdependent world.

Responsible research is a matter of education

What is the difference between bibliometric impact and societal impact?

There is a tremendous difference between bibliometric and societal impact. I devoted a blog post to this when I had the honour of reaching 100 publications in the peer-reviewed literature. I didn’t feel the sense of accomplishment that I imagined I might have—and should have—felt.

The balance between bibliometric and societal impact

Mafalda Sandrini  Some days ago, a friend of mine told me that while she was grocery shopping, a 60 to 70 years old man shouted at her because she was wearing a mask. She was shocked: how could the man not understand she wanted to protect him? “I could be a weapon to him”, she told me. My friend, as far as she knows, did not have the COVID-19 disease, but she claimed she could not know for sure.


Communicating COVID-19: Prospects for a bolder Science?

Agata Komendant-Brodowska  Since covid-19 started to spread, I’ve reacted twofold. Of course, this is a huge crisis, so, on the one hand I’ve been worried, sad and scared. On the other hand, there are a lot of massive social processes happening right now in front of our eyes, almost in ‘fast forward’ mode, so I’ve also been observing what is happening as a researcher interested in social dynamics.


Social control systems and Covid-19

The infrastructures that natural sciences run on are many and varied. A mixed garden of tailormade instruments and laboratories designed to handle highly specific tasks.


Ideas as Infrastructure

Vannevar Bush gave us the most consequential, imaginary conceptualization of a machine for research infrastructure for the 20th century (Memex) and was one of the prime movers in the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) – a superb, if flawed, administrative research infrastructure.  Superb: blue sky research; flawed: in some areas it’s been invaded by people representing particular schools of research and excluding others.


Towards a Global Research Infrastructure

Philip Nebe

Why should prevention of power abuse and supervision conflicts be considered as a matter of good scientific practice?

The application of good scientific practice aims to ensure that science is, without exception pursued in accordance with the highest standards of the respective scientific field.  Thereby a sustainable evolution of the science ecosystem should be achieved and its credibility and reputation in society maintained.

Who is in the position to proclaim a supervision conflict?

The Web was created as a coordination and cooperation tool for scientists. Subsequently, it had a revolutionary impact on almost all aspects of our life. The rise of a “network society”  did in the end, however, only had a minor effect on the forms of organising among the scientific community. Its paradigm of scientific communication and cooperation between a scholar and a publisher dates back to the early 17th century.


Distributed Organisations for Collaborative Research

Teresa Völker

Social media is increasingly seen as a valuable source of data for research – one which is highly current and immediately accessible. However recent news has focused on the ethics of using information posted for one reason for another purpose entirely. If you were to ask ten researchers if it is ok for them to use social media posts in their research you might well receive ten different answers.


Social media use in research

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Mathematics

is 2.9 on average with a maximum of 9 authors. The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (

 n

= 3657) were cited 8.2 times on average with a maximum of 357 citations.

Authorship in mathematics

This contribution is a crosspost from

 PLOS blogs

which was published in Part I and Part II. The article is a cooperation within N², a network of the Helmholtz Juniors, Leibniz PhD Network and Max Planck PhDnet. With more than 14.000 doctoral researchers, it is the biggest network of doctoral researchers in Germany.

Addressing the mental health crisis among doctoral researchers

As I’m writing this, on Easter 2020, the big wave of COVID-19 infections spreads as a slow-motion tsunami over our planet, wreaking havoc in many families, communities and businesses all over the world. Knowing a thing or two about contagion dynamics, I started following this pandemic when there were still just 881 confirmed cases in Wuhan, hoping, or actually expecting an adequate response.


Not back to normal

“Predatory publishing” describes the practice of pseudo scientific publishers that promise scientists the rapid publication of their studies. They purport to carry out a peer review but actually do not do such a thing and basically publish anything if the publication fee has been paid.


Storm in a teacup: predatory journals are irrelevant

Antonia Lingens

What is PeVO?

PeVO stands for “Publish and evaluate Onchain”. We are creating a decentralized publication platform which aims to change the way science is accessed, created, published and evaluated by using the blockchain technology. It helps us to create an immutable digital archive which is going to be free and unrestricted.

Revolution in science

The digital shock as a starting point for a collaborative autoethnography   The rapid and unavoidable shift towards emergency remote research, teaching and learning hit Germany at least as unexpectedly as it hit the vast majority of European Higher Education Institutions (HEI). While digitally based learning and teaching had continuously gained growing interest from policy-makers across Europe in the recent decade, the actual practical and

Opening up the black box of teaching in a digital era

Today is the day Julia has been dreaming about since the first day of her PhD program – it’s interview day at the American Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Conference. As her phone plays her familiar morning alarm, Julia jumps out of bed, bright-eyed and hopeful for the 10 interviews she has scheduled for the day. She irons her power skirt and navy blouse carefully, ensuring she leaves no creases uncreased.

Sexual harassment in Academia

It’s no secret that we have an inequality problem within the hallowed walls of the academy. Much focus has been dedicated to problems of inequality—of status, of wage, of job security, of resulting social mobility, and beyond—mainly between tenured faculty and the growing precariat of contract teaching labour.


Prestige and inequality in the ivory tower

**So, Niels Mede, tell us: who are you? And what do you do? **  I am a post-doctoral communication researcher in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, and until recently, I was a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. My research centers around science communication, with a focus on public attitudes toward science and communication about science on social media and beyond.

Populism, Science and Public Discourse: An Interview with Niels Mede

In light of the current war in the Ukraine we want to support Ukrainian researchers who have had to leave their homes and jobs. For this purpose, we have decided to open a telegram group and a telegram bot. We gathered all relevant information about Grants &amp;

Running from missiles: How Ukrainian researchers experience the war

Sascha Schönig

In academia, there is a clear understanding of how the quality of research work is assessed. This is done by academic peers in a peer review process. It is only then, through the discourse of expert opinion, that it is possible to determine whether the quality of a paper is good or poor. The peers themselves also determine when science is excellent without using formal criteria or even indicators. Science thus has a monopoly on quality;

Out of the Box: Extended Peer Review as Quality Assurance in Scientific Policy Advice

In April 1998, two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, flew across the world to deliver a paper on their nascent search engine, Google. Speaking at the Seventh International World Wide Web conference (WWW 98) in Brisbane, Australia, Brin and Page described how their approach—taking the web’s existing link “graph” as a proxy for quality and relevance—improved on the classified-by-hand indexes of Yahoo!, Lycos, and the like.

Surveillance Publishing

Over the last years the number of open access publications has drastically increased. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown the rising role and relevance of bringing out and exchanging scientific results faster than ever. Tens of thousands scientific articles hosted on preprint servers were published only during the first ten months of the pandemic.

ploc – an app to discover and improve research

Description   It has been well recognized that power distribution plays an important role in economic development.

Power and Publications in Chinese Academia

Introduction

Today’s Academy is highly internationalized, and mobility is one of its key features. Although it is expected that academics from all disciplines frequently travel around the globe in order to exchange knowledge and build up networks, in reality, not all researchers are equally mobile.

Field research with a baby

Communicating Science in Covid Times



During the Corona crisis, the value of science and science communication has been clearly demonstrated.

Communicating Science in Covid Times

In the beginning, there was a question. This is how every science story seems to start. But what if it doesn’t? Does research always require a question, or even a hypothesis? Is it possible to conduct science without a question? Can you “answer” a question that you haven’t posed before? My story started when social life had come to a halt. In late March 2020, the Coronavirus had paused public life and forced society into a global lockdown.


Science Without a Question

The COVID 19 pandemic challenges society and its institutions. Science is particularly affected by the crisis, as it is expected to contribute with expertise to the solution of the problem. As serious as the crisis will be for the global community, it is an exciting time for science and a sociologist of science like me. Because while science is busy solving a problem, it inevitably changes.


The Great Update of Research

The impact of bioenergy research

Bioenergy production (liquid biofuels for long haul transportation, for instance) and use has come to be seen as an essential component of our energy matrix and it must be expanded if we are to avoid climate change [1]. It is the only available option for fossil fuels substitution for a large sector of our economies.

The impact of bioenergy research

Introduction

The current COVID-19 crisis has prompted hand-wringing and self-reflection among some museum professionals. What, they are asking, is the point of a museum that remains closed to the public? How can museums remain relevant if people can’t visit them? Can exhibitions, which take years to plan and execute, be transferred to the digital realm, in order to keep museums open virtually?

Corona as Curator: How museums are responding to the pandemic

What actually happens to science when it opens up? From your perspective as a science researcher, can you describe why this perspective is important?

I believe that science takes place in a social environment and certain images of science emerge or have emerged, which are questioned in many respects in a digital and now increasingly open context or are subject to tensions.

What happens to science when it communicates?

The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) was founded in 1969. How has the significance of DLR as a research infrastructure changed since then?



DLR and its research facilities are closely involved in collaborative projects within the national and international scientific communities. DLR has more than 100 large-scale research facilities, some of which are globally unique.

Why are infrastructures of infrastructure important for research?

The question of how researchers engage in public communication or political decision-making processes has gained unprecedented attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many scientists experienced hostile attitudes when going public. Threats and science hostility are no new phenomena, but gain more importance as science is increasingly embedded in public debates.

How good science communication can support researchers in cases of hostility

What’s the matter? Keeping track of the latest articles published in the leading journals in one’s field of expertise can be challenging. But even if it is impossible to know literally every newly published paper in a field, having an overview of its recent, most prominent research agendas might be both inspiring and helpful to contribute to discussions with fellow scholars or students.

Using RSS to keep track of the latest Journal Articles

***The COVID-19 pandemic experiences of many different countries have shown how an exceptional need for research evidence has led to rapid new deployments of scientists in advisory roles to aid policymakers in making evidence-informed decisions. (1) This has helped us learn how science advisors experience, and try to manage, the challenges of insufficient, evolving, and conflicting evidence as they work to inform public health decision-making.

What the Covid-19 experience has taught us about the limits of evidence-informed policy making

The COVID 19 pandemic exposed the precarious positioning of two groups within the academic STEM system.

A call for an alliance between female academic leaders and early career researchers to improve the academic STEM system

Abstract   Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly contributing to scientific breakthroughs in many fields. It is also clear that openness and cross-disciplinary collaboration are becoming key features of the process of modern science. Yet, we know little about the intersection of these two developments – whether and how AI may shape openness and collaboration in research.

How will Artificial Intelligence (AI) influence openness and collaboration in science?

Introduction   The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global and accelerated digitalisation of all education systems. This quickly revealed many inequalities in access to digital resources and lack of digital skills. What concrete impact has this had on learners and teachers worldwide? How can we address these inequalities in education?

Sharing knowledge: Impact of Covid-19 on digital teaching

“Researchers say that their working culture is best when it is collaborative, inclusive, supportive and creative, when researchers are given time to focus on their research priorities, when leadership is transparent and open, and when individuals have a sense of safety and security.

On creating a good research environment

Description   What does social impact mean for the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH)? How can it be measured and evaluated? This was the topic of two workshop discussions between science studies scholars and representatives of SSH disciplines. This article summarizes the workshop results. Science is increasingly expected to address and help solve societal challenges.

Impact of social sciences – (How) Can it be measured?

Instagram, TikTok, Clubhouse: Today, researchers who want to share their work with non-academic audiences can choose between a vast array of digital platforms. Some of them vanish as quickly as they appear. Others attract an audience that is looking  for something other than scientific content.

Wikipedia as Science Communication: A Step-by-Step Guide

Where to start from…   Being embedded in an environment as well as in a system and understanding its influences and logic have always fascinated me. During my exchange year in Ireland, at Trinity College Dublin, I had a very important insight: a professor in organizational studies was discussing case studies and then turned to the students and asked: “What would you do in this situation?” After several rounds of guessing, I promptly realized

Breaking the status quo – The role of a small funding organization in gender mainstreaming

Benedikt Fecher

In the last 10 years, we have spent a lot of time thinking about the impact of research, both from a research and science management perspective. A few years ago, we also started giving trainings for other researchers on how to approach the blackbox “societal impact”. Our experience is that few researchers really know whether and how their research can have a societal impact.


Meet the Research Impact Canvas

Letters of reference (LORs) from early career researchers (ECRs) laboratory leaders are an integral part in moving ECRs to their next position.

Reducing the power imbalances in academic letters of reference

This article results from a cooperation within N², a network of the Helmholtz Juniors, Leibniz PhD Network and Max Planck PhDnet. The International PhD Program Mainz (IPP) is an associated member of N². Representing more than 16.000 doctoral researchers, it is the biggest network of doctoral researchers in Germany.

Manifestations of power abuse in academia and how to prevent them

Introduction     Very early on in my PhD I decided that a life as researcher and university lecturer was not for me. I very much enjoyed talking and hearing about research, the constant “vibe of knowledge” buzzing in the air on a university campus, and, yes, I felt that research was important for understanding the world we live in, past and present. However, I did not want to spend more time in archives or secluded at my desk.

Power and Academia, an endless story

Introduction     Katrin Martens  As a young researcher, I have already worked in three large collaborative projects dealing with innovation governance in land use contexts. Transdisciplinarity was always a topic in my past work, but for me each of these projects had a different flavor of transdisciplinarity and brought me different insights.

Transdisciplinary research: Pain or Gain?

Katrin Frisch  In class we were reading John Milton’s ‘On Education’, a treatise in which the poet laid out his ideas on an ideal education. After many years of theoretical learning, the students – so Milton argued – should head into the world to learn about different cultures, but ultimately to realise the superiority of their own.

Tear down this invisible wall

An Appeal for a Culture of Failure in Academia

Mafalda Sandrini For some years now there has been a trend amongst entrepreneurs and artists to come together to exchange stories of failure by disclosing their mistakes on a big stage and acknowledging what they lacked in insight and wisdom. This is framed as a practice of openness for the good of the many, as well as for themselves.

How to empower a Culture of Failure in Science

Julia T Scho  The pandemic has been a challenge for almost everybody. Cancelled conferences, field trips, experiments, suspended research, travel and visa restrictions, bad job prospects and no childcare, are just some of the problems  academics have faced since March. While the virus highlighted

Academic voices during the pandemic

International mobility is key for a career in academia (Bauder 2020, 2015; Geuna 2015; González Ramos and Bosch 2013; Ivancheva and Gourova 2011; OECD 2008; Bos et al. 2019). Early career researchers who did not study abroad, do not attend international conferences or go on field trips outside of their countries often find it difficult to reach the next step in obtaining tenure (Toader et al. 2016; Ackers and Oliver 2007;


How current travel restrictions open up new possibilities for researcher mothers

Jayat Joshi  An old yet powerful principle has emerged from the COVID-19 crisis. It was introduced to the West in the writings of Carl G. Jung, and has its roots in the works of the pre-Socratic Greeks: enantiodromia (enantios – opposite and dromos – running course) (Jung 1968). Put simply, this means when something is pushed to the extreme, it tends to turn into its opposite.


The Return to Science at The Turn of Modernity

Q: Are there particular features to the Corona pandemic that makes it more attractive to conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists? Or are we just much more aware of these theories because everyone is living through this at the moment?

Mike S. Schäfer

 MS:

In general, conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon.

How science communication can challenge conspiracy theories in times of Covid-19

As the initiator of the movement “Scientists for future,” could you give us a “peek behind the scenes”: How did you come up with the idea and how did the concept evolve?

Like many others, I was concerned by the slow progress of the sustainability agenda. That is, not just climate change, but also, for example, biodiversity loss, loss of soils, food security, and questions of human rights and justice.

Active but not Activists: Research communication by Scientists for Future

The scientific community in some African countries is seeking for closer ties to the Western European and North American communities.

Increasing visibility of African research

Could this be the start of a new era in scholarly communication?



For all the devastating impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on us all, it has also shown how it is possible to swiftly change previously entrenched cultures and mindsets.

Could this be the start of a new era in scholarly communication?

Introduction

As the novel coronavirus continues to spread around the world in the spring of 2020, several European governments have started to implement severe measures such as physical distancing or the closure of local commerce in order to slow down the spread of the virus. But governments have also called on science and academia to join forces to bring together expertise, knowledge and technological resources.

The Science Must Go On

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 Science versus pseudoscience

Most conspiracy theorists make abstruse claims: The world is flat and run by an alien species of “reptiloids” covered in human skin (Ronson 2001). Governments use airplanes to diffuse chemicals into the atmosphere, known as “chemtrails”, in order to regulate the

How Conspiracy Theorists Get the Scientific Method Wrong

When your lab is the world but the world is closed down – Social Science Research in times of Covid-19

Stay at home. This sentence has become a common mantra for all of us during the last weeks. Most of my academic colleagues and friends are among the lucky ones who can actually stay at home and do not need to go to work.

When your lab is the world but the world is closed down

Together with your colleagues Ruth Mayer and Andrea Geier you initiated the petition “Nicht-Semester” (calling for a cancellation of the regular spring semester during the Corona crisis). What are the motivations behind your initiative?

Our main argument is that we should see the current situation in higher education in Germany from a realistic perspective –

Higher Education in Crisis Times

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 Tracking Open Access in times of COVID-19

Here, we measure in near time the number of publications on COVID-19 and Sars-CoV-2 and the share of Open Access publications.

Open Access in Near Time

Evgeny Bobrov, Open Data and Research Data Management Officer, at QUEST Center, Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), (© BIH/Thomas Rafalzyk)  The COVID-19 pandemic requires swift reactions, which in turn makes the sharing of all available knowledge on the virus as quickly and as freely as possible an imperative.


Open Data can be advanced by the COVID-19 pandemic, but will still require a comprehensive approach

Computational models and huge amounts of available data allow us to predict the outbreak of COVID-19 globally and prepare respective measures to react to this crisis. Policy-makers, journalists and individuals refer to such calculations on a daily basis and they are prominently present in the public discourse.

Predictions on the spread of COVID-19 bear many uncertainties

What is the value of social science today?

Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan, Photo: Svetluša Surova For me, the value of social science is ultimately about the quality of life. What social science does is that it helps us to take observations of the world and put them into a form where we can understand more about how the world works. We can then use social science to anticipate likely consequences of our actions.

What’s the Value of Social Science?

Doing research and getting paid for it is fantastic, but how to do that sustainably and maintain the interest of research funders? Even funders themselves cannot give a definite answer, but some trends can be pointed out. Admittedly, there are still universities and academic systems where nepotism and feudal-like arrangements rule, and the points made here do not concern them.


How to ensure sustainable support for high-quality research?

In September you are organizing the conference “Divergent values in sustainability assessments: love them, leave them, or change them?”. A core theme of the conference is “ethics in scientific policy advice”. Why do you think the topic of ethics in scientific policy advice is important now?

Martin Kowarsch, expert on Scientific Assessments, Ethics and Public Policy Scientific expertise is important for informing politics about

Reconciling research for the common good

Over the past 10 years, my colleagues and I have been doing research on research, on how academic knowledge is created (i.e. scholarly communication) and disseminated (i.e. research communication). We have been looking at how researchers collaborate and share data (here, here and here), how they perform quality checks (here), where they publish and how they engage with the public (here and here). Perhaps the most important insight I have gained


Embracing complexity: COVID-19 is a case for academic collaboration and co-creation

Juggling software, materials, and people

In my third week of grad school, I found myself metaphorically elbows-deep in my human-robot interaction lab’s codebase. I was porting a robot teleportation interface from tablet to desktop. The goal: To run a psychology study exploring how young kids learned language skills with social robots. Jacqueline M. Kory-Westlund But comments were few and far between.

Improving software infrastructure in multidisciplinary research

Introduction

The way science is conducted is changing. The internet and other digital means alter the scale and pace of data-driven research and collaborative possibilities. Most modern scholarly research now relies to some extent on digital research infrastructures.

Challenges in Building Innovative, Sustainable and Open Research Infrastructures

In 1997, SciELO, the biggest Open Access database in Latin America got some initial funding from the S​ão Paulo Research Foundation FAPESP. What triggered the launch of such an infrastructure and what were the main goals back then?

Back then a few local scientists approached us with the idea to set up a repository for journals edited in Brazil.

An Accelerator for Science in Latin America: FAPESP

When I started the physics undergraduate program in Rwanda, I wanted to pursue experimental and applied sciences that would involve using research facilities to conduct top-level scientific research for tackling real-life problems. However, there were not always enough equipment and infrastructures available.


The Need for an African Lightsource

To what extent are research findings and theories transferable and generalizable beyond the contexts they were designed from and for? This is a main question that we, researchers, constantly think about and find it hard to answer.

Achieving (Partial) Generalizability

In an influential series of opinion pieces published in early 2014 (see introductory comment by Macleod et al., 2014), the medical journal The Lancet tackled the issue of “increasing value, reducing waste” in biomedical research. This series laid out in detail the issues that had led Chalmers &amp; Glasziou to conclude in 2009 that 85% of investment in biomedical research was wasted.


Increasing value in biomedical research

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 What are from a media ethics perspective the biggest challenges for science in the digital age?

One of the biggest challenges in science communication is to create trust.

Science communication in the digital age

How can crowdsourcing foster innovations in science?

In general, the crowd’s diversity and the sheer number of (potential) contributors have been found to increase the likelihood of finding a novel solution (e.g., Jeppesen &amp; Lakhani, 2010) and the chances of finding the best solution (e.g., Boudreau, Lacetera &amp; Lakhani, 2011) to an innovation-relevant problem.

How can we establish sustainable Open Innovation?

Open Science is becoming increasingly popular globally and provides unprecedented opportunities for scientists in Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America.


Open Science in Africa

The scientific community has been flooded with well-intended ideas and concrete attitudes to tackle the openness in science, or better its lack of openness. More specifically, attempts to guarantee access to otherwise ‘protected’ material have been the obsession of many (mostly early-career) researchers.


In future, papers will not be paywalled

How do you define “good scientific practices”?

ORI’s statute and regulations do not define “good scientific practices,” but ORI recognizes that every scientific discipline should have standards for how it defines good scientific practices.  We see many instances of poor record-keeping and documentation of experiments, as well as sloppy data handling.

Can digital technologies enable good scientific practices?

His dissertation is excellent. He is widely recognized as a talented lecturer. Then the news comes: he is a fraud. And almost no one had noticed anything.   In the summer semester of 2014, Dr. Christian M. held the introductory lecture course, History of Political Thought, every Monday from 2 to 4pm. Plato, Kant, Marx, the great thinkers;


The Rise and Fall of Dr. M.

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Computer Science

is 4 on average with a maximum of 21 authors. The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (

 n

= 1558) were cited 11.4 times on average with a maximum of 199 citations.

11000111 authors

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area

 Agricultural and Biological Sciences

is 5.2 on average with a maximum of 111 authors. The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.2 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (

 n

= 2710) were cited 8.9 times on average with a maximum of 479 citations.

Old MacDonald had coauthors

Methodology

We conducted an

 Advanced search

in Scopus – a bibliographic data base with more than 22.000 peer-reviewed journals (Scopus, 2017) – between 27th of February and 7th of March 2017.

How to analyse authorship

You are offering workshops where researchers can learn how to achieve more impact with their work outside of academia. Why is this important?

I have been providing training on knowledge translation, otherwise known as impact pathways, and research impact for the last five years to build the capacity of researchers and research support staff.

Helping Scientists: Increasing visibility and impact of research

Why do we need scientific advice for cities based on urban research? Why is it not only a local, but also a global matter?

Scientific advice for cities cannot be seen as a local issue, particularly because sustainable development is a global matter itself and needs a common approach.

Science for Cities: Overcoming Borders

Global rankings have decisively shifted the nature of the conversation around higher education to  emphasise universities’ performance in knowledge economies. How did that happen and why are rankings becoming increasingly important?

The emergence of global rankings coincided with the acceleration of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. This is because higher education is a global game.

The dubious practice of university rankings

Let’s start with the obvious. Evaluation and assessment are part and parcel of the scientific profession. Universities want to hire the best faculty, funding agencies want to support the best projects, and journals want to publish the best papers. To this end, scientists serve as members of hiring and promotion committees and on panels for funding agencies. We also write evaluation letters and reviews of manuscripts and proposals.


Counting is not enough

German universities and research institutions are playing a prominent role in the global trend of shifting academic publishing to open access. A nationwide consortium of scientific institutions, known as DEAL, aims to encourage academic publishers to adopt new licensing agreements for open access publication of scholarly content.

What’s the big DEAL and why is it so difficult to reach?

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Research Ethics: A European Mission

In a series of short analyses we took a closer look on the practice of (co-)authorship in various disciplines, using a Scopus database (see www.elephantinthelab.org). We found significant differences among the subject areas that we analyzed. While in nearly all disciplines the mere number of authors per article increased (2010-2016), the average number of authors per paper in these disciplines varies considerably.


Authorship revised

Description

The term “Smart Library” has recently been used more frequently, for labeling a vision of libraries of the future (examples see Fig. 1 and 2), in particular as part of the so called “Smart City” concept. This concept addresses the integration of digital processes and informational feedback loops in the public infrastructure and claims this integration to be a desirable state, in which cities become “smarter”, i.e.

Elephant in the Lab

AI, science (fiction) and the need for a human-centric approach in academia

What’s the Content of Fact-checks and Misinformation in Germany?

The (potential) impact of AI on the individual research process and science in general