Publikationen

Hostility towards science has emerged as a significant challenge in contemporary science communication, particularly in increasingly politicised and digitally mediated public environments. Scholars across diverse disciplines are confronted with harassment, delegitimisation, political interference, disinformation, and personal attacks, especially when engaging in public communication. This editorial introduces the JCOM commentary set “Scholars Under Attack” and situates hostility towards science within broader transformations of media ecosystems, political polarisation, and contested epistemic authority.

In this commentary, we examine patterns of attacks against scholars focusing on the case of Germany. Drawing on the responses to open and closed questions in a recent survey of 2,600 German researchers, we identify context- and field-specific patterns of science hostility. While most responding researchers do not experience severe attacks, those engaged in specific fields may be at a higher risk of being threatened. We argue that attacks on researchers may not be perceived as acts of hostility against scientific institutions but rather emerge in the context of controversial topics.

Nacaps steht für „National Academics Panel Study“ („Nationales Akademikerpanel“) und ist eine Längsschnittstudie zu Promovierenden und Promovierten in Deutschland, die bis einschließlich 2024 vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) gefördert wurde. Ziel des Projekts ist es, sowohl deutschlandweit repräsentative Querschnittsdaten zu den Qualifizierungsbedingungen als auch Längsschnittdaten zu den individuellen Erwerbs- und Karriereverläufen Promovierender und Promovierter innerhalb und außerhalb der Wissenschaft zu erheben. Die Nacaps-Studienreihe ist dabei als Multi-Kohorten-Panel-Design konzipiert. [...] Vollständiger Abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:nac2020:1.0.0

This study investigates the diversity of national scholarly journal publishing ecosystems in seven countries across Europe and Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Mexico, Poland, and Türkiye. It challenges the common perception that global scholarly publishing is dominated by international commercial publishers by examining national publishing structures beyond English speaking contexts.

Global scholarly information systems provide poor coverage for social science and humanities research taking place outside of the anglophone world and in languages other than English. Paul Donner, Stephan Stahschmidt, Serhii Nazarovets, Igor Cojocaru, Irina Cojocaru, Marina Razmadze and Shushanik Sargsyan highlight a range of national initiatives taking place aimed at improving scholarly data for local and national research and argue for the value of their greater integration.

The citations to open access preprint and working paper versions of papers that are also formally published in journals are not regularly counted in global multidisciplinary proprietary citation index databases, nor are they considered in most bibliometric studies. They are, however, integrated into paper citation counts in other citation databases. It can be argued that open access preprint citations reflect a relevant part of scientific impact of a work as proxied by citation counts, particularly in scientific disciplines that make extensive use of preprints/working papers for rapid open communication. Here we present a large-scale study of these usually uncounted open access preprint citations for the Web of Science database [...]