Related papers: Rethinking Resource Allocation in Science
In computer science, conferences and journals conduct peer review in order to decide what to publish. Many have pointed out the inherent weaknesses in peer review, including those of bias, quality, and accountability. Many have suggested…
We point out that the Nobel prize production of the USA, the UK, Germany and France has been in numbers that are large enough to allow for a reliable analysis or the long-term historical developments. Nobel prizes are often split, such that…
Peer review is a cornerstone of modern scientific endeavor. However, there is growing consensus that several limitations of the current peer review system, from lack of incentives to reviewers to lack of transparency, risks to undermine its…
Obtaining funding is an important part of becoming a successful scientist. Junior faculty spend a great deal of time finding the right agencies and programs that best match their research profile. But what are the factors that influence the…
We propose an academic publishing system where research papers are stored in a network of data centres owned by university libraries and research institutions, and are interfaced with the academic community through a website. In our system,…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
Peer review shapes which scientific claims enter the published record, but its internal dynamics are hard to measure at scale because reviewer criticism and author revision are usually embedded in long, unstructured correspondence. Here we…
Innovative ideas are often situated where disciplines meet, and socio-economic problems generally require contributions from several disciplines. Ways to stimulate interdisciplinary research collaborations are therefore an increasing point…
Academic research projects receive hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment each year. They complement business research projects by focusing on the generation of new foundational knowledge and addressing societal…
Does past performance influence success in grant applications? In this study we test whether the grant allocation decisions of the Netherlands Research Council for the Economic and Social Sciences correlate with the past performances of the…
Despite all its well-known flaws and calls for its dismissal, the notorious $h$-index is still used in many instances when awarding grants, or promoting and hiring scientists. To address this, I set out to devise a better index, with the…
In national research assessment exercises that take the peer review approach, research organizations are evaluated on the basis of a subset of their scientific production. The dimension of the subset varies from nation to nation but is…
Book reviews play important roles in scholarly communication especially in arts and humanities disciplines. By using Web of Science's Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index,…
The sharing and citation of research data is becoming increasingly recognized as an essential building block in scientific research across various fields and disciplines. Sharing research data allows other researchers to reproduce results,…
The American scientific community is reeling from funding cuts and policy directives that will debilitate scientific research and education. The underlying hostilities fueling these attacks have intensified in recent years as the COVID-19…
Interdisciplinary research is fundamental when it comes to tackling complex problems in our highly interlinked world, and is on the rise globally. Yet, it is unclear why--in an increasingly competitive academic environment--one should…
Competitive grant funding is associated with high costs and a potential bias to favor conservative research. This comment proposes integrating editorial preregistration, in the form of registered reports, into grant peer review processes as…
Scholars present their new research at seminars and conferences, and send drafts to peers, hoping to receive comments and suggestions that will improve the quality of their work. Using a dataset of papers published in economics journals,…
In the past decade, open science and science of science communities have initiated innovative efforts to address concerns about the reproducibility and replicability of published scientific research. In some respects, these efforts have…
We show that the greater the scientific wealth of a nation, the more likely that it will tend to concentrate this excellence in a few premier institutions. That is, great wealth implies great inequality of distribution. The scientific…