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.

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

Halloween 2019. A team of seven at CWTS is hectically working on the launch of the institute’s new science blog. Getting the last settings in WordPress right, preparing a quick announcement, entering the first posts (so that things don’t look too empty) – we (the editorial team) were rather excited. 53 blog posts later, it is time to reflect a bit. Admittedly, we started out rather open-mindedly.

Why should you care? How do you evaluate a university? This question does not have an easy answer. However, there is an attribute that is typically considered relevant: the production of scientific papers. However, papers are not created by the university per se , they are created by individuals who are affiliated to a university. Currently, how individuals contribute to the scientific output of a university (e.

Over the past two decades, the open access movement has made significant progress in promoting the free accessibility and reusability of scholarly publications. About half of the publications from recent years are free to access and reuse. However, are accessibility and reusability sufficient for a well-functioning system of scholarly publishing?

Why is it so difficult to think of new possible worlds? This is a question Marta Hejer and Wytske Versteeg ask in a recent paper for Territory, Politics, Governance . It is a question I ask myself almost every day.

Barry Bozeman’s new article on ‘Public Value Science’ raises one of the most fundamental questions in science policy: Who benefits from science? His answer is clear: right now the benefits tend to go to the rich while the ­negative impacts, such as unemployment or pollution, differentially affect the poor.