Publications

Grant selection and decision-making generally take place in panels. Therefore, the main focus of the project is to measure the level of gender bias at the panel level, and to explain the differences in gender bias using characteristics of the panels and of the (organizational) context of the panels. A second source of gender bias addressed in the project is the application process. The project also investigates the factors influencing the decision to apply for research grants, and the possible gender differences emerging from that. Finally, the question is addressed whether possible bias in grant allocation translates into gender bias in the subsequent academic career.

The 17th Social Survey is part of the series of studies on the economic and social condition of student life in Germany, which exists since 1951. It is a cross-sectional survey that is usually conducted every three years. The core of the Social Survey includes questions on access to higher education, structural characteristics of studies and the course of studies, the social and economic situation (financing of studies, cost of living, gainful employment, housing situation), topics relating to the fields of activity of the Studentenwerke as well as socio-demographic characteristics. https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:ssy17:2.0.0

This Intelligence Brief takes a closer look at students’ health. Compared to the overall population of the same age, students less often perceive their health as good or very good. Logistic regression analyses with German student data show strong and negative relations between financial difficulties and students’ health perception. Additionally, a cross-country comparison with EUROSTUDENT data consistently shows comparatively large shares of impaired students among those with financial difficulties. The findings indicate that policy makers should pay special attention to both impaired and financially challenged students in order to ensure their successful higher education participation and prevent negative societal effects of poor health.

We conduct an independent cluster validation study on published clustering solutions of a research testbed corpus, the Astro dataset of publication records from astronomy and astrophysics. We extend the dataset by collecting external validation data serving as proxies for the latent structure of the corpus. Specifically, we collect (1) grant funding information related to the publications, (2) data on topical special issues, (3) on specific journals’ internal topic classifications and (4) usage data from the main online bibliographic database of the discipline. The latter three types of data are newly introduced for the purpose of clustering validation and the rationale for using them for this task is set out.